The Amateur

are you paying attention?

I am about half way through Einstein, by Walter Isaacson.

It is a wonderful book.

What’s Your Trip?

We are sitting out here assembling the first three shows for What’s Your Trip – our user generated series for The Travel Channel.

We have screened literally thousands of videos, some crap, some great, but all done by ‘non professionals’ with small digital video cameras and laptop edits.

The results are pretty impressive – this is little different from when we started Current.tv, but a few years in, the overall quality is improving rapidly.

Here’s a video we received from Mike Murphy.

We got a lot of videos from him. He’s a carpenter who saved his money, took his camera and set off around the world. He created his own series – “Destination Unknown”, and submitted it to us.

Take a look. In this episode, Murphy goes to South Georgia Island, off Antarctica. It’s as good as much that you’ll see on TV – except he does it himself.

Where We Ever Here?

two potsherds join…. from Tel Anafa

The other day I was cleaning out a storeroom and I came across videotapes of my wedding (or should I call it my ex-wedding) in 1993.

Barbarians At The Gate

The world at your feet…

In 1162, a child named Temujin was born in a small village in the depths of the Mongolian grasslands.

The DNA of Technology

it’s in the genes…..

We have a tendency to believe that technology is a tool.

CTZN.TV

www.ctzn.tv

Suppose…..

You created a platform for video that was online that anyone could upload to?

Ernest Bujok

While everyone else is at the pool….

Ernest Bujok is one of our houseguests this week.

The Four Cs

Brandon Follett prepares to ‘Bourdain’ a roach in Thailand….

I spent most of yesterday screening submissions for “What’s Your Trip”, a new series we are producing for The Travel Channel.

Grameen Video?

Brother can you spare a dime?

In 2006, Mohammed Yunis received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mohammed Yunis was and is a banker, and we generally don’t think of giving the Nobel Peace Prize to bankers. But Yunis was different, and so was his idea.

He was the founder of the Grameen Bank.

Grameen Bank (or Bank of Villages) was founded by Yunis in 1974 following the Bangla Desh famine. He made a loan of $27 to a group of 42 families so that they could get their lives back in order. They repaid, and an idea was born – microlending.

Today the Bank has 2247 branches, covering more than 72,000 villages. 97% of the borrowers are women, and the loan recovery rate is 98.85%, putting it far ahead of many currently failing mortgage lending institutions in this country. It is estimated that Grameen has lifted more than 50 million people out of poverty.

The Bank and its constituents are now worth over $7 billion.

All of this brings me to video.

I started to think of this after a board meeting last week of Videovolunteers.

Video is an exploding industry in places like India – far moreso than in the US.

The radical drop in the cost of cameras and edits, the explosion in platforms in satellite, cable and web… They all open the door for a different kind of structure in countries where all the cameras were owned by the state broadcaster.

Maybe, as with Grameen, the place for us to start is on the village level.

When I was last in India (or indeed in any part of the 3rd World), the profusion of television is astounding. I have been to the tiniest village in Laos where there is one TV set for the village, powered by a generator. Once, in Namche Bazaar, the last village in the Himalayas before the Khumba ice falls, I came upon the entire village gathered around a TV set and satellite watching Married, With Children, even though no one spoke a word of English.

But I am not talking so much about empowering locals with video cameras to report for CNN or webnews. That is still pretty far away.

But I think the infrastructure and costs are right to look at video as a cottage industry now.

I think we could equip and empower a whole generation of ‘local’ videographers who could earn an income by shooting and producing ‘village’ videos – weddings, local events, births, and so on. I have seen countless local photographers in villages across South Asia who make a living with gear that 47th Street Photo had in the throw away bin, even when they were still in business.

We could empower a kind of ‘Grameen’ Video, a very grass roots, yet self-sustaining local video infrastructure.

In time, these people, while earning a living, would also become increasingly sophisticated in terms of video production – and would, over time, seed whole parts of the planet with video literacy – something that is sorely lacking.

In time, they would become not only the ‘eyes and ears’ of events happening on the ground – they would become the ‘voice’ of the people that could speak to the world in a language we all understand…. and watch.

One day, perhaps, the notion of sending a ‘reporter and crew’ to Bangla Desh to cover a story will seem as quaint as the idea of sending a ‘regional governor’ to rule the place.

An Ode to Sailing

The Swan under full sail….

This has, at long last, nothing to do with videojournalism, television news or the video revolution.

This is August and this is about boats.