On December 22nd 2004, I became obsessed over vlogging. So obsessed that I devoted myself fully to this. Well. I felt like I only did 60%, but in hindsight, I realize that I really did a lot of effort.
Why did I obsess over vlogging from late 2004 until 2009?
I think it was linked to my mantra of “showing your world to the world”. And I also liked Jay Dedman’s “momentshowing” term. Showing your moments. So that others, who have their Own contexts, can see your moments, your context, and perhaps connect with you, over small things or big things. And thus we could hopefully make the world a smaller place.
Here is my first video, from December 22nd 2004:
In January 2005, I joined VloggerCon in NYC as one of very few people from Europe. And I signed up for Vimeo early on, and I have video #126 on the entire site. Here it is: https://vimeo.com/126
I entered a community. A community of technologists and artists. And I loved loved loved that interplay. The exploration of technical feasibility mixed with the artistic view of the world. I did not consider myself an artist, but in hindsight I guess I very much did so; I created what later became known as the Raymonde persona. And there was even a series of videos created in 2005? 2006? Which was called The Head of Raymond K; in short THORK. It was madness. Very artistic. And I loved the interplay across timezones; one of my projects later on was SpeedVlogging – creating a video and uploading it for viewing within 5 minutes. (I at one point had www.speedvlogging.com but I forget what content I once had then)
Anyway. My ideals are pretty precisely expressed in this video from January 2005 during the vloggercon05 event. Here is a clip taken from the full video.
To quote my 2005 me:
“My manifesto now, my manifesto and goal now is: Real political dialogue between individuals from anywhere in the world. The digital divide today is enormous, but I think by using new tools, and using videoblogging I think we can actually make any individual be able to express his world, even in the park, and I think that’s a great ideal.”
Quote, from Source
In September 2005, I co-organized VlogEurope in Amsterdam (referred to in this BBC article), and we had a total of 5 VlogEurope events: 2005 (Amsterdam), 2006 (Milan), 2007 (Heidelberg), 2008 (Budapest), 2009 (Amsterdam).
Why the obsession? The quote from VloggerCon 2005 says it all, really. Real (political) dialogue between individuals from anywhere in the world. My motivation for vlogging actually became much less when Google bought Youtube in 2006 – I was like “Ok, it’s mainstream now, I don’t need to push this further”.
Within my life, the videoblogging years is actually a good example of what kind of thing that really – Really – excites me. Back in 2004, when there was no Youtube or Blip.tv or real Vimeo (there was something but it was very different from the 2005 version that launched) – back when having 100 or 1000 viewers of your video was a pain $$$-wise (because bandwidth wasn’t free) – it was a worthy goal for me to get involved. To invest my time and energy. I even became a volunteer at Ourmedia.org in spring of 2005 (wikipedia article), to let anyone upload media to the Internet Archive for free. It was before youtube launched, and it filled a dire need back then: Free hosting for videos.
I moved on in my life, later on, and in 2009 I was effectively busy with building a nest, building a family, building a stable job situation.
In 2023, I am elsewhere in my own history. We will see where this takes me!
(Btw, I just found this video from 2017 where Anthony D’angelo does some digging into the past, and he also had some very good points. Recommended!)
[Video of process; 44m07s / 336MB]