kerimsatirli.com

When I first pitched the idea of me doing my internship at xolo.tv, I was offered a chance that few interns get: I could pick my own project. Now, you have to understand that my college has some guidelines as to what an intern should do, but technically speaking, everything that xolo.tv had available, fell within those guidelines and I had carte blanche.

In the past years, I have learned that having cojones is one of the main ingredients that you need if you plan on making a difference and that, dear reader, is something I want(ed) to do at xolo.tv, to make a difference.

At a highly dynamic company like this, with a high output of deliverables, finding something that actually makes a difference can be rather difficult, unless you are foolish enough to propose to deliver a solution that works faster (in terms of time), costs less (in terms of usage) and offers a more customized feature package; the fact that this solution is one of the core components of the xolo.tv platform is just additional icing on the cake.

What it is exactly that I am doing is something I cannot tell you, due to an NDA I signed, suffice to say that it is important, interesting and even innovative.

While we gear up for the release, you might want to check out a few of the pictures we took ‘around the office.

Being offered a chance to work on something like this is, simply put, freakin’ awesome and very educative at the same time and I figure that the best way to finish this report is by giving you something to think about:

Ain’t nothing like a man that can do what he wanna…

When I moved to the Netherlands a couple of years ago, my parents decided to choose the beautiful town of Oss as our hometown.

While there is nothing wrong with Oss in itself, after all, this is the city where the world’s most famous anti conceptive, the anti-baby pill, originated, Oss’ location is anything but close to the place xolo.tv is located in, Amsterdam.

What this basically means is that I get to enjoy the Dutch Public transport on a (close to) daily basis and as such, have made some interesting discoveries:

I have been commuting by train from Oss to Breda for more than two years now and have not had a single month withouth any delays, but never had more than two days with delays directly after each other … until now.

My first day at xolo.tv started with me nearly being late, not the kind of first impression you wanna make, not even if it is out of your own control and since the Dutch Railway operators love consistency, I was graced with delays of ten to fifteen minutes every day of my first week.

On my normal route, from Oss to Breda, ten minutes do not matter, because the same train I enter in Oss, is the same one that takes me straight to Breda but the situation is quite different when you are going to Amsterdam. There is at least two trains, at worst three, which means less consistency for the traveller.

And consistency is something I start(ed) to depend on: interning in Amsterdam is great, travelling close to four hours every day - not so much, because when you have to change trains all the time, your sleeping pattern gets all mixed up and my body, for one reason or another, is very unappreciative of that.

On a more interesting note, however: since I am interning in Amsterdam, I am actually getting more sleep than I did before, due to the fact that I simply cannot stay up too late anymore and also thanks to the downtime I have in trains, downtime that is used to sleep and just let my mind relax.

Back on topic, however, public transport. When you travel a lot, you get to meet a number of interesting or funny people and you experience a whole range of peculiar situations.

Commuting during rush-hour means that trains are crowded and everyone is longing for a place to sit; me on the other hand, I do not mind standing for one part of the journey, after all - sitting is what I do at the office (when we are not playing with the frisbees that is).

So the other day, while I was standing near one of the exits, I noticed another male who was fascinated by the amount of people that had to use the John (his words). He had been traveling with the same train for about half an hour at that point and completed another part of his journey (an additional 45 minutes) with me.

The guy literally made a listing of people using the toilet and his total count, after an hour and fifteen minutes, came down to 26 people. His conclusion was that some chef somewhere the day before had probably screwed up royally and that, in turn, prompted that much bowel movement.

I know that, sometimes, we should just stop to admire the little things in life, the things money cannot buy, I am just wondering if the things this guy was fascinated with are those small things (no pun intended)…

In the past years, I have worked for a great number of companies; they all served a different purpose – while one was purely about content generation, another was producing software and yet another focused on the building of websites for corporate communication.

I have long been fascinated by what is called the “social web” and it is with great pleasure that I can finally announce what a handful of people have known for about a month now: I am the latest intern to join Dutch-American start-up xolo.tv.

I was in the fortunate position of being able to choose from a handful of different companies for my first internship, but in the end, the products that xolo.tv are developing are the ones that appeal to me the most.

xolo.tv’s platform was first introduced to me back during PICNIC’07, when Marc van Woudenberg gave an impromptu presentation to a number of people during an early dinner, after the conclusion of the European Bloggers Conference.

I seeded quite a bit at PICNIC with my custom-made moo.com LinkedIn cards and Marc was one of the lucky recipients but since I did not have enough time to actually get a good talk going, I figured that nothing much would come of it.

For one reason or another however, Marc got back to me and after studying my profile on LinkedIn and approached me to set up a meeting for November 2007. Hah, take that all you nay-sayers who think that LinkedIn cannot be used to get a job!

To be honest, I had no real clue as to what to expect from the talks up-front. Marc seemed to think highly enough of me to devote some of his valuable time to a meeting. I was impressed, plain and simple, but at the same time puzzled, so puzzled that I did not know how to prepare for the meeting and did all I could: learn about all past clients of xolo.tv, create a presentation (yes, just in case) on how they could expand their customer-base and

I had never had a formal interview, mostly because I always gained “access” to a job by sweet-talking my way in, not that there is anything wrong with it, but it is a totally different thing than what happened at xolo.tv.

What impressed, yet at the same time, scared me the most was the warm welcome I received. I burst in during lunch (which just so happened to be a tradition their other intern started) and was invited to join them and grab a bite to eat.

Soon thereafter, the talks started where I got a chance to showcase cuizine.tv and was then cross-examined by a number of xolo.tv employees and finally, after receiving a number of interesting and not that easy to answer questions, I was left with mixed feelings.

I knew one thing and that was that I wanted to work there. I also knew that the people working their all are specialists in one way or another and I somehow had to find a reason to convince them, because, frankly, I just had to do this, if not only for the reason that one of the clients was Bløf (yes, it’s true and yes, this was not my main motivation).

During the course of the meeting, Marc expressed his interest in setting up a follow-up meeting for December 2007 and it is safe to say that I was starting to get a good feeling about the whole deal.

The second meeting was much easier-going, basically all we did was sign a few papers and grab some drinks to celebrate, all the while discussing the secrets and intricacies of the female mind - go figure.

As part of my Bachelor’s Degree, I am currently doing an internship at xolo.tv, a company that focuses on a number of things that revolve around social media, video production and media sharing.

While the biggest part of my internship consists of actually interning and learning new things, a small part of the whole experience (and a rather big part of the grade) is related to keeping a journal that is accessible to anyone who is interested.

Considering that I am very proud of being able to intern at xolo.tv and at the same time too lazy to set up a new blog, just for the purpose of writing weekly reports, I figured that I might as well post my reports here.

The second (and last) day of Video Vortex kicked off with a promising presentation, given by Thomas Elsaesser on the narrativity in cinema and video in general.

Mr. Elsaesser used the Honda Cog ad, which worked very well with the crowd, especially since he also showed the “spin offs” of the actual ad.

Elsaesser concluded his speech by saying that:

YouTube can be addictive as it drags you along, but after two or three hours, a sense of entropy sets in and the joy of discovering the unexpected wears of

Powerful words, no doubt about it. All in all, his presentation is difficult to summarize in a few words, but definitely the kind of talk I was hoping to hear during the conference.

Next up was Jan Simons who talked about the effects of tagging (especially in the sense of Flickr) on a system as a whole.

According to Simons, tagging creates messy categories, which is of course true, especially considering that many things have more than one meaning (homonymy), such as “rock” in a musical sense and “rock” in a geological sense and then there are things that have more than one name (synonymy), such as the season known as fall and autumn.

It basically comes down to the fact that tags cannot be trusted when trying to categorize content, because, and I will use another example from Simons here, a tag such as “in England” might mean that one, a picture was made in England, or two, a picture could reflect the life in England.

The speech was concluded with an example of massive tag overuse, which can be found here.

The third speaker of the morning panel, Dan Oki talked about space and the importance of space in video as well as how, for example, the Blair Witch Project was important for the evolution of cinematography.

After a quick lunch, the afternoon sessions were set to start, but a Jane Doe (Gabriele something) took the stage to talk about a project of hers called “GaMa”, which tries to be a gateway to archives of media art.

A quick search reveals that they already received 1.8 million US Dollars in funding from the European Union nearly two years ago, yet the Jane Doe, initiator of the project, just explained that they are still trying to figure out their business model. It does make one wonder how the European Union decides who to fund and who not to fund …

After a quick intermission, the actual panel, with a focus on curating online video was kicked off by Sarah Cook

Patrick Lichty, professor of Interactive Art and Media Theory at the Columbia College in Chicago shared his thoughts about online video in relation to context, tradition and audience.

Nothing really ground-breaking there other than a couple of, to me, obvious reasons why artists have not yet embraced YouTube and probably never will, unless YouTube changes the way they treat their contributing members.

Lichty’s conclusion quickly referenced LOLCats and that, somehow, made the whole thing go full circle.

After another quick break, Tilman Baumgärtel started the final panel of the conference, Participatory Culture.

Pirated media in Asias was the main topic of Baumgärtel’s talk, he explained how piracy in Asia is different to Europe, because of the lack of availability of high-speed Internet access in rural areas and also because of the lack of trust.

Whereas in Europe and the Americas, downloads are the primary form of piracy, Asians prefer physical stuff such as CDs and DVDs.

The speaker also talked about a movie called Ciplak, an ultra-low-budget production that was filmed over the span of a month, with a Canon XM2 Mini DV cam and equipment such as Ikea lamps.

The movie, however, looks great and I would recommend anyone interested in indi-media (or Asian movies) to check it out - we were treated to a few minutes of it and all had a good laugh.

At one point, Baumgärtel talked about how some film makers use pirates as a(nother) selling channel: pirates are seeded with a semi-good quality version of the film and after enough momentum has been established, the director releases a DVD with a high-resolution version of the movie and to make it even more interesting, also includes games, screensavers and a making off. While it does sound a tad crazy to most Europeans, I can see how this kind of marketing would work in a market that primarily relies on piracy.

It would appear that the whole piracy thing is a very strict business. For every one master copy of a new movie that enters the country, three copies are made and distributed, within 24 hours or less, to the different islands. Only then does local reproduction of a pirated movie actually start and even then, the production only happens during the day. The reason for that is simply that the pressing plants generate more noise than most neighbors would accept during the night and with the police breathing down the necks of pirates, giving “the man” another reason to lock you up might not seem the smartest move.

More information on Baumgärtel’s talk and works can be found on asian-edition.org, a name that spans from the time where the government of an Asian nation issued a decree that allowed the local populace to copy and distribute European and American books and other publications.

Ana Percaica’s topic was “Avi and Divx Art” and brushes topics such as the copyright laws in Croatia and the destruction and confiscation of videotheque copies in the early Nineties.

She talked about how, for example, a home-made porn video of a local celebrity gained so much exposure that we number of downloads came very close to the number of total inhabitants of Croatia and did a good job at explaining why the whole concept of “copyright” does not work all that well in Croatia.

Severina, the porn-lady, was also the underlying topic of the whole talk; it would appear that, in order to protect her innocence (uhuh), Severina apparently asked for all downloaded copies back (yes, the audience chuckled on that note), a clear indicator that the concept of downloads is not as obvious as it would appear to be.

Severina even instructed her lawyer to force the portal that distributed the clip to remove it, but could only support her claim by stating that the video invaded her privacy - which it did not, since she was the one that leaked it initially and her follow-up attempt, claiming that it was “video art”, was also dismissed, based on the grounds of the fact that home-made porn is not art, because it simply is not innovative. Maybe you should have gone for the whipped cream and honey after all, Severina?

The last speech of the day was given by Dominic Chen, who works with Creative Commons Japan.
Of all the speeches that were given during the whole conference, I would have to say that his was the best.

His topic, the critical point of the commons and digital prochronism (yes, it is a mouthful) was both interesting and innovative.

Chen presented on the explosive grow of content and the need for a meta-platform that would be able to handle the growth, he touched on subjects such as the war for openess between Google on Facebook and spiced up his talk with interesting images and video clips as well as clean presentation slides.

All in all, Chen shared some great notes and thoughts with us and really knew how to handle the, seemingly difficult audience.

As always, once Chen’s speech got interesting, the producers told the speaker to wrap it up and call it a day. A quick recap was given and the bar opened.

The first Video Vortex in Amsterdam, to me, was a moderate success. The second day was much better than the first one, mostly because the speakers were more interesting to me and talked about stuff I actually could relate to. Nonetheless, it was a welcome change of the