David Pogue - An Real Talent
by Michael HoffmanThursday, February 15th, 2007
My wife and I had a nice time last night watching videos on the website of the New York Times. Really. We were watching David Pogue, a multi-talented technology writer in funny and informative video clip after clip. In his short pieces he reviews technology products and services. Sound boring? Not at all! His piece about the Vonage USB device is a riot. You really should watch this stuff and you can start here with this clip.
A few observations about this that you can take into your nonprofit organization:
1. Effective 2-4 minute videos can be done with no budget, if you have a creative talent around and can give them a bit of time to play.
2. You don’t need fancy equipment or editing gear to do videos like these. You do need basic equipment and a lot of practice.
3. The concept has to work for the piece to work. You have to have something to say, and a hook to build the piece around.
4. Pogue’s pieces are funny, and funny doesn’t always lend itself to the work of nonprofit organizations. But if we can make torture funny — see these clips we did for Amnesty International — then you can probably do more than you think.
5. These kinds of pieces are no replacement for the kind of cinema verite documentation that we often do with our nonprofit clients. But these kinds of pieces are about leverage — you already have interesting, funny, engaging personalities within your organization and these techniques allow you to use them to connect well beyond what was possible before.
6. The Times misses an opportunity by not allowing me to embed the video clip here. They are thinking that if I embed the player here, then I get the benefit of the traffic that on their site results in a page view — which helps sell to advertisers. This will change, because with AJAX pages that don’t load with new information, traditional page views are meaning less and less. In any case, you won’t make the same mistake. When you have engaging video to share, let it go and carry your message as far and wide as the web will take it.
February 24th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
[…] I wrote recently about the great little videos David Pogue does. He just did one about SecondLife, which is something that I talk about in our consulting and seminars with nonprofits. Mr. Pogue does a nice job of showing us around. I think this is very very early and as a nonprofit you have a lot of basic things you have to be doing before you put resources into SecondLife. But I also think it’s for real. I think their decision to make it open source — allowing anyone to extend applications on it’s platform — is going to turn out to be a huge decision that will create a mechanism for rapid and exciting improvements. […]
December 19th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
[…] I am very excited that David Pogue, my favorite New York Times technology columnist, is the keynote speaker. For those of you who read this blog you know that I am a big fan of David Pogue. You can see previous posts from me on his work here and here. […]