iPhone 3GS – Flip HD – All of Us as Documentarians
Apple’s annoucement of their new iPhone 3GS includes the news that the phone will shoot video. The Flip video camera has already turned HD video into a 3.5 oz proposition — with one click to YouTube. What does this mean for our organization knowledge gathering and consumption?
In prior posts I’ve talked about the value of video: Ease of use and the value of the content are critical. Ease of use refers to both gathering and consuming the video. Gathering is helped by these new lightweight easy-to-use cameras. Consumption — finding what you need to know — is more difficult but where there is pain it is likely someone will try and reduce it. Autotranscription, tagging, and video search are some avenues. (Thanks in advance for comments providing links to good tools.)
The value of personal video is an open question. Do we as individuals know what will be valuable? Do our organizations understand the kind of video it is important to support? Just as we are given the opportunity to be “accidental systems designers” by the possibilities of our technologies, now we are being given the opportunity to be “accidental” producers, directors, talent, and videographers.
Research focused on more formal multimedia content may be applicable. Kai H. Lim and Izak Benbasat have the following result:
Multimedia facilitates the retention and subsequent recall of explanative information but not of descriptive information. Explanative information is organized facts connected by their underlying functional relationships. Descriptive information consists of isolated facts without an explanation of the relationships between these facts. The ability to retain and recall explanative information, in turn, leads to a greater ability to make correct inferences about new organizational situations.
(Interesting eyetracking study on text versus multimedia.)
What about videochat? Seesmic, for example, provides a Twitter-like stream of video communication. How might that provide knowledge management value in organizations? What does video add? What do we add when we communicate via video? My brother just looks and sounds like my brother when we video chat. His daughters grab their latest stuffed animal, piece of art, sing….
The Flip camera is out now. The new iPhone arrives June 19th. How will you contribute to your organization’s knowledge base given these new tools?
TweetTags: Flip, HD, iPhone, knowledge management, Seesmic, video
2 Responses
June 9th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
There is no question that video has become far more accessible in the past few years (I have had a lot of fun with the Flip Mino HD, perhaps too much fun…). YouTube is perhaps most emblematic of the democratization of video, similar in a way to how the Web has democratized content.
I also used the Flip to document the impact of Information Overload (you can see the movie at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuwUeVFJF20 and a write-up at http://www.basexblog.com/2009/05/21/information-overload-the-movie/)
But not everyone wants to be always on, all the time (about 10 years ago, as desktop video started to appear, I envisioned a business selling cardboard avatars one could hold up in front of the camera, thereby disguising a possibly unkempt appearance).
June 11th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Given that a teammate of mine is working on the IT portion of the Pure Digital acquisition integration, it’s been interesting to learn more about the Flip and how it impacts people. In our last all-hands meeting, John Chambers made it very clear that his two “go to” devices are his PDA and his Flip. It definitely be interesting to see how organizations will embrace and leverage the use of video.