It was pretty hot the past few days, and my apartment was something of a sauna, but the heat has largely broken now, and it’s down to a far more comfortable 70 degrees. Definitely digging it. Today has been something of a late start, you might say, since I didn’t really wake up until 1 (I went to bed at 4, woke up at 5:30 long enough to hear the KEXP pledge drive, and then went back to sleep). What, pray tell, was I doing up so late? Excellent question! Mostly I just couldn’t sleep, and even ended up going out and walking around (it was 60 degrees still at 1:30am), and decided it was high time i started exploring this whole “video blogging”/”vlogging” thing. By which I mean making them, as I’ve already been quite familiar with the media from a user perspective for a fair bit of time.

The short of it: I could do a Ze Frank-esque show relatively easily with the tools I have now, though I’m not entirely happy with the audio at the moment: the video from the built in iSight on the iMac is quite excellent, however, using Quicktime Broadcaster to record directly to a 640×480 H.264 MP4. The audio was simply a little “fuzzy”, and could be markedly improved using an external microphone, I’m quite sure. I could clean it up and edit it using iMovie, and publish it either hosting on my own site (not feasible for a long project or if it became popular), or find one of the numerous places out there are are hosting user videoblogs (not the least of which being YouTube). A minute of footage is running around 1.2MB… reducing the resolution to 320×240 cuts it down decently (not in half, of course: the audio is still what it is), if space became an issue, and as long as it’s in that proportion, it’ll scale on iPods easily.

So, the technicals are largely out of the way: just keep an eye out for an in-expensive Mic on Craigslist (don’t need something insane, just decent, and less than the Mic they had at the Apple Store for $50) for the audio portion, and otherwise i’m good for some basic stuff. The question, then, is what the hell do I want to be recording? I’d like to put myself out there, but for what? What’s the project I should be doing with myself? I’ve thought about talking about and reviewing music and games and movies and books. I’ve thought about doing brief readings of poems and stories. The “witty newsshow” has sort of been done, and isn’t really my thing anyway. I have several ideas I’d LOVE to do, but they involve an actual video camera — until my financial situation significantly changes, it has to be something I can do from a stationary location. One idea is to write something every day, and then do a reading of what I wrote each day. Thoughts?