Podcast: Political Video (runs: 23:48)

I recently interviewed Michael Kolowich of Diginovations for my April 18 column Presidential candidates see political video differently for Mass High Tech. Kolowich was the architect and producer of Mitt TV, the Internet TV Channel of former Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. Here is a podcast in which we discuss political video and advice for the Presidential candidates:

The Internet TV Channel Design Challenge

When you create an Internet TV Channel one of the decisions you have to make is how to organize your video clips. If you need to accommodate a growing collection of videos, you might choose the tab structure which lets users browse your collection horizontally by category as well as vertically, where every new clip added to a lineup pushes the older clips down the list. For example, the dLife Internet TV Channel uses the tab player format:

But the dLife channel has a scaling problem. As new categories are added to the top-level navigation, others fall from view. In this case the publisher felt the need to add an arrow pointing to the navigation, hoping that visitors will realize there are hidden tabs to explore.

Also notice that both the title and description of the featured video are truncated.

The dLife channel design illustrates a common problem with video websites: There simply isn't enough room to put more than a modest collection of videos and their metadata in front of your visitors at any given time, especially if you want to add thumbnail images to identify them as videos and give users a clue about their contents.

After reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, you will realize that you are dealing with an age-old problem for which luckily the social Web provides a solution. Here's the situation:

Trying to determine the best organization for videos on your site is like deciding how to organize books in a library or display products on the shelves of a physical store. These items are generally limited to one location, one category, and there are only so many of them that you can present at eye level or arm's length. That is soooo old order. The "new order of order" has no such restrictions. The social Web where content flows freely into multiple categories and locations is teaching us that content means different things to different people in different situations on different occasions, so the best thing to do is set it free and let the audience organize it.

Sure, the appeal and structure of the originating site matter, but business success may rest mostly with the extent to which your site's social features and additional distribution release your videos "into the miscellaneous." Weinberger's theory on the new order of information and knowledge applies to all content. Read the book!

Internet TV and Corporate Communications

Have you experienced the power of video lately? As media professionals we used to say video is the next best thing to being there. Now we could argue it's better than being there simply because you can't be everywhere but your video can. You can offer more ways to consume corporate video than Dr. Seuss found ways to serve green eggs and ham, through such media dishes as:

TV & Cable
Internet TV
Websites
Webcasts
Online ads
Blogs
Search engine links
Video portals
Email campaigns
Mobil devices
Trade show displays
Direct mail DVDs
Press releases

Video has long been a key ingredient in corporate communications, helping to make a message clear, engaging, convincing, and memorable. These benefits of effective business video haven't changed. But today video is also immediately accessible, interactive, searchable, easy to organize, annotate, distribute, share, measure, and manage - and you can do it all with Internet TV technology.

Download this High 5 Video PDF to read our white paper on Internet TV. Or read my article on Mass High Tech.