Rob's Northern Voice keynote now available online | Social Signal

Video genius Bruce Sharpe has just posted the video of my keynote from Feb. 21 at the Northern Voice blogging conference in Vancouver. It's my look at what makes the world of social media so damn funny. You'll laugh, you'll cry... and maybe you'll comment on it.

Graphic by Nancy White

Bruce has a great post about how he captured and edited this beast together; it's a lot more complex than I'd appreciated at the time, and the audio in particular gave him some real headaches - so it's astonishing (and a tribute to his skill) that the final result is so polished.

One of the really cool things about the video is something called Profuzion, a plugin for Apple's Final Cut Pro video editing software. It allowed Bruce to synchronize video from several difference cameras, including cell phone cameras, with a single click.

That gets my attention because it opens up some intriguing collaboration possibilities. For example, you could get all the parents who are videotaping a school play to send you their footage, and easily sync up the footage and switch from camera angle to camera angle, closeup to wide to medium. Or crowdsource the video coverage of a public rally. You can probably think of even cooler applications.

Profuzion bears watching - and so does Bruce. (Podcasters will already know him as the guy behind The Levelator, a one-click utility that quickly and automatically adjusts the sound levels in a podcast.) Check out his blog, 25 Hour Day.

(And for a little more technical prestidigitation, check out how Alex managed to reverse the flow of time in this Twitter stream of comments from the keynote. As someone who was present, I can attest that it involved an Excel spreadsheet, NASA and three pints of salamander blood. I can also attest that that's a lot of salamanders.)