I'm at the San Francisco Apple Store for the "Meet the Vloggers" event. There are about 40 or so folks here in the upstairs auditorium area. We came in a little late and must have missed Ryanne Hodson, who spoke yesterday at BlogHer. J.D. Lasica just spoke about Ourmedia, followed by Chris Ritke on 49media and citizen created media. Schlomo Rabinowitz came up and spoke about videoblogging using just a simple digital camera.

Next up is Josh Wolf, talking about his project Rise Up Network, a videoblog collective of socially-conscious media. Future plans include implementing a collective tagging and dynamic rating system for user-created video. Think of it as sort of the Netflix recommendation system for videoblogs: because what I like is often different from the kind of videos you might like, we need a more elegant way of filtering video based on our personal tastes.

Now speaking is Renegade Rene, talking about how we’re living in an age in which we can create the media, not just view it — it’s the age of participation. She’s talking about seeing the internet not as merely a place to exhibit her work, but as an actual studio, because of the online conversations with other artists and the continual co-inspiring of each other online.

The audience is asking questions, the first of which is “where is all this going?” Michael Verdi says (I’m paraphrasing): this is great for a small number of people communicating. It doesn’t have to be the whole world finding me. Maybe I have 3 friends, and I just want to tell them — small audiences are okay.

“What is the impact of videoblogging on journalism?” Josh Wolf: we need well-trained reporters to convey objective facts. But when everybody is carrying videorecorders around, there should be a way of integrating citizen media with more traditional media.

“You are on the ground floor of developing a grand new industry. The corporate world is going to start looking at you and asking you for help. How will you deal with that offer?”
Markus Sandy: I’m doing videoblogging to meet people and collaborate. The point there is that I’m not a person looking for big audiences. There are people who want to do that, but for me personally, that’s not my interest.
Dave Toole: if corporate comes in, you gotta follow your passion if that interests you or not.
Michael Verdi: This has the potential to change the world. My concern and my agenda for big corporate interest in this is that we can still preserve that aspect — that that part doesn’t get lost, and that videoblogging doesn’t become just another way of distributing television.
Stephanie Bryant: If I can turn videoblogging into a paycheck, I will.

Audience: This aspect of the internet is powerful. It’s a way to diffuse the crushing propaganda of our government. This is useful for people’s lives, not just how I can make a buck. This is a medium that is much bigger than any individual thing.

Audience: This isn’t a new idea. People have done collective media before in collective organizations online.
Zadi Diaz: the difference is this — you don’t have to join an organization with a particular ideology in order to be heard. We don’t have to be dependent on somebody else to do this for us — each individual can contribute to society on our own.

Audience: “How are videobloggers going to make money?”
Schlomo Rabinowitz: It’s too early. This medium is only a year old.
Ryan Hodson: A lot of us don’t want to be naive about it — yes, there will be money and commercialism. Jay and Josh and Peter want a “pay me” button built into video aggregators (rel=”payment”) so that if you want to support me, you can click my payment button to do so. What I’m afraid of is that it becomes like television, where I made $100 on this video post so I’m going to keep making more posts like that so I can make money. But at the same time I also need to make money so that I can do things like this — I came here from New York, and I need money to do these things.
Michael Verdi: There will be people who make videos that appeal to a wide audience. But that’s beside the point — even if that’s happening, I can still make a video for you and put it on the internet and it costs me nearly nothing. I have a videocamera and the rest is practically free. so this other thing happening doesn’t stop that. Something else we haven’t talked about tonight are things like people getting organized around things like information, politics — we have a few politicians videoblogging. Senator John Edwards has a videoblog that I helped set up where he answers people’s questions.

Update: As commenters pointed out, this post is in desperate need of some video. Here’s a link to the awesome compillation of videoblog posts used as the introduction to the presentation — it gives a great flavor of what videoblogging is all about.

I know some folks were recording the event but I haven’t found if any of those vids have been posted. If you know of any, please post in the comments and I’ll add them in here. Thanks!