It seems like every year we try to capture the skateboard skills we’ve learned over the year into a single annual skate video. This year we thought it would be fun to show two videos created nearly 3 years apart. The first video shows Alejandro skating in late December 2006 at the Greenwood Village Skate Park.
For this year’s annual 2009 video we decided to mix it up a bit and have some skateboard video footage from Greenwood Village, Redstone in Highlands Ranch and Castle Rock, Colorado. Enjoy and please let us know what you think. Happy New Year!
The first time I read about the underlying concept of web 2.0 was a little over a decade ago in the ending chapters of “Weaving the Web” by Tim Bernes Lee. This is a fascinating book on the history of the web and is highly recommended for anyone interested in the original vision of the web.
The final chapters of the book are about bringing semantics to otherwise disparate content. Over the years, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has made progress with formalizing interoperable standards, but we still have a long way to go before we realize the vision of the Semantic Web.
However, it’s interesting how we are now starting to adapt these principles in are our daily lives. An example might be our use of YouTube to broadcast our skate videos through RSS. Now our SK8NE1 subscribers can be notified and review our latest materials in their RSS readers without even coming to our web site. Here’s an example of a video you would see in an RSS reader:
Another interesting trend has been an increasing number of blogs. It seems like it was only a few years ago that Google bought Blogger and applications like MovableType and WordPress were just starting to get momentum. Today, blogging is part of the mainstream and an intregal part of the way we get our information.
In many ways, blogging and RSS are synonymous since most people syndicate their blog’s content using RSS. Embedding the display of your YouTube videos in your feeds is a powerful way to add rich media to an otherwise text only post. We now live in an on-demand world. Social networking and personalized web spaces allow people to receive information based on their preferences and most people subscribing to our blog seem to be primarily interested in our videos.
To that end, we plan to add more and more videos to our blog posts and are now embedding the entire posts in our feeds. This means that if you subscribe to our blog we’ll automatically send our latest posts directly to your designated location and you don’t even have to come to our site.
In an earlier posting, I discussed how YouTube could be used to do the “heavy lifting” for the bandwidth associated to online skateboard videos. I started with a short clip from the Denver skatepark recorded quite some time ago. Well here’s an example of a video we produced last year during the holidays at the Greenwood Village skate park:
Interestingly, we removed the in-home “fair use” soundtrack from the original video for the potential copyright infringement implications of placing the video on YouTube. Now here’s what is really cool. Google and YouTube have authorized the distribution of music tracks from a variety of bands looking for visibility, so you can now replace your existing audio track with something that can be legally used with your video on the web.
Watching Alejandro skate the Greenwood Village Skatepark is always fun; afterall, we’ve been going there for almost 8 years now. We took our old Canon VH1 over to Mckinley a couple of weeks ago, but it took my dad a little time to encode the footage, edit it and place it on the web. He said it is actually easier to compress digital video using the Adobe Flash (flv) format and let Wordpress do the rest. I think he uses the Anarchy Media Player plugin. I guess we’ll start placing our videos on the blog in the future, but please let us know what you think about that.
Anyway, enough of the techno-mumbo-jumbo. What do you think of the video and what about Alejandro’s skating? There are a couple of new tricks in the video. The kiwi slide is a lot of fun and he’s definately getting more grind time on the rails. Also, I noticed he landed a blunt, a 360 out and a judo kick. I’d enjoy hearing from you, especially if you’re a corporate sponsor and you think there is a place on your team for us, but regardless…enjoy!
