A Remix Culture

I’m a fan of remixes and mashups. A couple years back mashups exploded onto the scene. One of the most downloaded albums of all time is Danger Mouse’s Grey Album – a creative mashup of JayZ’s black album and the Beatles’ White Album. The Grey Album was plagued by copyright issues and couldn’t be officially released but that only fueled demand and massive downloads via p2p networks.

They often say where audio goes video follows. Bands were crafting their own master pieces via their desktop computers long before it was possible to edit video on consumer gear. But with the current explosion in user generated content, large numbers of people are spitting out content for mass audiences consumption. It seems likely that the next evolution in user-gen might just be found within in a remix / mashup environment.

THE FIND: One of the more exciting remix communities that I’ve seen so far is eyespot.com.

Eyespot allows users to simply shoot, mix and share their content. If you don’t feel like making the commitment to upload content there are a number of media sets that you can choose from. Media sets are collections of audio, video and stills, most of which fall under a creative commons license.

Hats off to Eyespot for creating an easy to use rich feature set mixer. The mixer allows users to experience the thrill of editing without the typical steep learning curve of traditional editing software. It is obvious that eyespot’s tools are being created for the masses who are embracing user-gen content.

One feature that is particularly impressive is the eyespot’s ability render various video, audio and still formats into a single file. In addition eyespot provides users with five output options – mac, pc, ipod, psp, and divx.

When it comes to sharing users can send videos via email or by entering their friend’s mobile phone number. Eyespot is also providing a variety of mobile options. The newest is Mobile Share a simple-to-install application which allows users to easily record, send, receive, publish, search and rank video directly on their phones. Users can also subscribe to mobile video RSS feeds so that they can receive new videos automatically.

THE PROS: Rich features and a simple interface make eyespot a great place to experiment with creating content. The use of media sets that carry a creative commons license means that there is always content to remix. The multiple formats in and option for pc, mac, psp, ipod, divx and mobile sharing output make it a diverse platform that allows for sharing not only with friends by also a variety of devices.

THE CONS: None at the time of this writing

OVERALL: I really enjoyed eyespot and highly recommend it. If you’re looking to edit and share some home movies or if you’ve been dying to mashup your latest skate vids, eyespot is the place for you. At its core eyespot is a remix community that allows anyone to create content.

MANY QUESTIONS: Normally I ask one question but since I was able to do a phone interview with Eyespot CTO and co-founder David Dudas, I thought it would make more sense to link to it. To hear the interview visit workbookproject.com