Back when I was hosting a Veteran's website, I developed on the fly a perl program suite which would convert alternative video formats into flash video files for use with You Tube. Simple web programming to have a user upload a video file and then press a submit button to have then file converted then stored and queued up for play from a database, web page list.

A public facing vestige of part of the program can be found here

Charles Johnson formally left conservatives in a post in November 2009 ( his de facto exit was years before then ), and since that time has some very interesting new friends, one of whom is preparing a Pajamas Media type venture jointly with Johnson.

From the article

Later this year, we'll be launching a two-pronged campaign by which we hope to increase both the reach and efficiency of the blogosphere, as well as to bring pressure to bear on the media at large. Much of this effort will involve a loose network of bloggers that we're now in the process of recruiting in order that we might all coordinate on exposing the failures of certain news outlets, for instance. This campaign is being planned in large part around software that’s currently in development by open-source advocate and information technology specialist Andrew Stein and which we believe will assist bloggers in making better use of their medium's existing advantages; this system will provide for a measurable advance in the manner by which bloggers may distribute, obtain, evaluate, and build upon segments of information. Between the software in question and that skill set unique to those bloggers who have successfully adapted to the information age, we expect that we'll have some success to the extent that we receive the assistance of others who are similarly concerned about the manner in which Americans are informed about crucial issues.

The link in the title of this post references a piece of software written in Microsoft C sharp ( .NET ) which will enable bloggers to distribute videos which is probably the software referenced in the Vaity Fair article..

My best guess is that this new alliance will make lavish use of YouTube in distributing their videos, but will also use this new software to enable the conversion of mpeg files into flash video files and, also presumaely, enable the automatic uploading of said videos to YouTube to a common location

The main question is will they be effective?

Web programming is easy, and so is the linkage of the conversion software into a web interface, so the technology is there to help distribute their material.

But what of the content?

My guess is the the quality of the folks involve will determine whether the project will make much of an impact, not necessarily the content itself.

And this project may well be just one of those institutions built to simply be sold to a larger entity to simply eliminate it as a threat to the customer.

Johnson is an excellent web programmer, but his sense of business has been wanting. Despite what he or Pajamas Media says, there was a problem, and it is still a subject of some speculation after Johnson severed ties with PJM

It will be interesting to watch what happens and to see how they get funding and what trajectory the project follows.


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