(Explanation: If Jeff or Danah happen to browse here,  what follows comes out of a frustration with how organizations seem to ignore basic web housekeeping on Social Media items. I was frustrated,  first off,  because I wanted to find the damn video. Second,  after I found it,  it is so damned dark.  Thank goodness the audio is good,  so I can least hear the two of you.   Really enjoyed the conversation.  Just wish they’d make it easier to find,  and realize that,  if they had looked at the Twittersphere over the past 3 days,  they would have seen that tons of people were commenting on how good this conversation was.  So they need to get it up front and show it off. )

I just spent the past couple of hours looking for some video from the live stream that happened Friday from “SuperNova 2010” .   “The Supernova Hub” site was my first roadblock.  My previous blog post about an hour ago lamented the problem of making recordings of streams available.  The only clips linked from the Supernova site were from 2009,  under a section in the sidebar,  down “below the fold” on the right (right away,  bad placement).  Then,  the links under “Upcoming events”,  starting with Supernova Forum 2010 takes one to a page with an embedded link from uStream, which displays the default “Off Air” list of “Related Videos”.  The uStream Site interface here is HORRIBLE.   The “VideoClips at uStream” link underneath the embedded player is not related to the channel the user is visiting (in this case,  the videos related to Supernova),  and unless you are at least somewhat familiar with the uStream interface,  it is an exercise in experimentation to try to navigate to the video you seek (in this case,  I am looking for the video from the conversation between Danah Boyd and Jeff Jarvis on Friday at 11 PDT).

Here’s how I found it.  I full-screened the embedded player,  which gave me a list.  I later determined that in order to traverse that list without full screening,  I need to use the up and down arrows next to where it says “1-1 of 20” .  Clicking the down arrow changes that label to “2-2 of 20”  (After staring at that for a few seconds,  and noticing that the video below also changed – which is real difficult to tell since the fonts are so freakin’ small—I “translated” that to mean that 1-1 of 20” means “Page 1: Video 1 of 20 videos”.  That’s just plain bad navigation labeling.

Next,  the names of the videos,  which is NOT uStream’s fault but Supernova’s.  Bad titling.   The 5 videos actually coming from this week’s Supernova are titled by date,  but showing wrong times (or some other time zone).  The point here,  is that Supernova is not paying attention to its users.  I should know ,  from the pages of their website,  just where this video is,  and more importantly,  that it’s out there at all.  I had to conduct my own mid-level geek search.

There is,  folks,  a uStream API.  This should (haven’t looked at at in much detail)  allow a website to dynamically know what videos belong to a particular “widget” area on a web page.   Amazing how these “Social Media basics” slip right by the designers/UI-developers of the site.

The video itself,  is HORRIBLE QUALITY.  Here is another example of what seems to be “we LIVESTREAMED it”,  akin to the “we have a Facebook page” or “we have a Twitter account”, and then dumping stuff into it.  Wouldn’t it have been nice to display a nice embedded player with a good quality thumbnail of Jarvis and Boyd,  prominently displayed in a significant place on the site,  not to mention the specific page for the 2010 Supernova event.  And wouldn’t this have been a good thing to tweet?  Supernovahub.com tells us to follow @kwerb  for updates about the conference,  but all he says about the video is that it’s live streamed.  I would have put up a link ASAP to the video (not just the one I was looking for,  but for all 5 – and what happened to all the rest of them) ? And why do the videos begin somewhere AFTER the actual start of the segment?  Were they not paying attention?  And what’s with the awful light,  or the inability of the camera ,  in the dark video?  I see this ,  and once again,  my impression is “after thought”.  It’s like they hired someone’s friend who had a video camera.  The one thing they got right was the sound.  So why so little attention to the video? I know all of this stuff CAN be hard,  and things happen, but I am amazed at how many sites who surely have some resources to do things better just don’t do them well at all.

BTW,  here’s the link to the Boyd/Jarvis talk.  Haven’t watched it yet,  just checked quickly to see if they got some of Boyd and some of Jarvis on the video.   Danah Boyd and Jeff Jarvis at Supernova 2010

I’ll likely have more thoughts about this video after I watch it (on it’s production and utilization,  as well as its content,  since I also have a great deal of interest in WHAT they are saying – and I can say that my sampling of the video tells me the audio is good—they’re mic’ed-up and I don’t have to deal with echo from a far off cam-mic)