Letter to potential feed creators

Greetings

I'm writing to see if we can help to network the urgent videos featured on your website. My name is Zoe Young, I am working with the Bretton Woods Project, IFIwatchnet.org and the Transmission.cc network of online social justice video projects to develop http://www.ifiwatch.tv as a 'network node' for independent video critical of the investments and policies of the international financial institutions.

Have you already seen this new model portal to critical media on the IFIs (World Bank, IMF etc)? It embodies a new model of online video distribution, enabling people to find the media that matters to them, wherever on the internet it is hosted.

If possible, we'd like to invite your project to participate, opening up your media to new audiences, by presenting it alongside other material on related issues.

What do you want us to do?

Specifically, we would like you to create media feeds from searches of your online video database. This allows users like us to run a search for IFI-related video on your site, create an rss feed from the results, enter this url into ifiwatch.tv's media aggregating database and then be continually updated with any further relevant material that you produce in future. We will then be able to display your latest videos on the subject whenever people search our site. Of course, this will not only enable ifiwatch.tv to network your material - other users of your site can create their own search-based feeds and be automatically updated in line with their own particular interests. Thus we and they can network your material with no extra work from you - once the feed is set up.

Why don't we just e-mail a list with news of new videos?

You can, and for some purposes this is suifficient. But the way the web is developing, distribution of information about online videos can now be automated, and videos reached directly on the web using a range of 'internet tv' formats. We are offering you a 'way in' at the start of this new decentralised approach to online video distribution, which can not only become much more effective at reaching new audiences, but also save you work.

Technicians' Time is Expensive and we have other Priorities for our Website.

Fair enough, it's entirely up to you if you want to participate at this stage. We are however able to offer some technical advice on this process, depending what CMS you are using it may be a small bit of work, and we have a little funding to cover exactly these kind of costs incurred in networking IFI media.

To Whom Do I Direct any Questions and Concerns at this Stage?

For general thoughts and queries, please talk to me, zoe * at * esemplastic.net. For more technical matters, please contact ekes * at * iskra.net and see http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/What_video_publishing_sites_need_to_create_in_terms_of_feed for technical specifications.

Looking forward to working with you to change the way our media is shared

Thank you!

mail sent to amazonwatch, april 16th, 2008

greetings I'm writing in the hope that we can work with you to help network the urgent videos featured on your website. my name is Zoe Young, I briefly met (and filmed, for 'raised voices') Atossa a few years ago. I am now working with the bretton woods project, ifiwatchnet.org and the transmission.cc network of online social justice video projects to develop ifiwatch.tv as a 'network node' for independent video critical of the investments and policies of the international financial institutions. we would love automatically to display links to relevant videos from your database on our website, if possible! do you have any plans to generate a media RSS feed from your video listing, so that our (and others') databases can be automatically updated when you put new material online in our area of interest? specifically, if you were to have a search tool which generates feeds from search results, this would be the most useful thing for us - and for any other projects focused on sharing media round specific aspects of these struggles .... if you have a techie who would be interested to follow this up, they could look at the page we are developing to help this work along - http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/What_video_publishing_sites_need_to_create_in_terms_of_feed if there are any tech questions that we can help you with, please contact kester at iskra.net thank you! very much looking forward to hearing from you and seeing where we can get with this new kind of work for the forests... all good wishes zoe