RAS Lecture on Min Yeong-hwan this Tues Eve

First, for everybody, here is a link to the page that has a list (and embedd vid players) of what seems to be all the lectures uploaded to date.

http://raskb.korea.com/raskb/category/VOD%20Service

More on that at the end…

But next -

I am absolutely thrilled the RAS-KB has gotten into the videos.

I’m curious what the response has been from the people giving the lectures? A prof of mine once said that perhaps one reason why sites like RAS-KB and the NK human rights NGOs might have trouble moving to video is that academics might feel protective of their content and not want to give permission.

I am also curious to know if the videos have started bringing in more traffic yet?

I’m just checking them out right now (but on a slow modem).

I’m watching

http://digest.korea.com/media/en/500k_Ras_0912.wmv

about North Korea refugees. That opening title shot is much more professional than I can do. But from looking at the man introducing the speaker, if is like I had imagined – it is pretty much like C-Span.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I am wondering how much of a hassel (or not) it was for the RAS to get these videos up and running? and how much it cost?

If you don’t want to say publically but would through email mine is usinkorea@hotmail.com

The reason I’m asking is that I sometimes still email some of the NK human rights groups imploring them to get video up on the net to spread the message — and occasionally emailing something like the RAS or the East-West Center or Korean Studies Center at U of Hawaii and so on asking if they are going to move in that direction too.

I think the main stumbling block to taking advantage of the mega and increasing opportunities to promote a group’s work through what the internet increasingly offers is that profs often have few computer skills and imagine that doing this would take a lot of money and effort – but it shouldn’t – at all.

I pay about $30-$40 a month for my storage space and bandwidth via Yahoo web hosting. I get between 150 and 300 hits on the videos a day, and that trickle only eats up a small percentage of my bandwidth each month, but that is 150-300 different people a day getting a chance to see the stuff I offer.

It took some time for the traffic to pick up, but I’m a nobody, and the traffic did pick up.

I worked on this site

http://www.usinkorea.org/North_Korea/videos/conference/index.htm

last year hoping to use it as an example of what can be done easily and cheaply.

If the guy who thankfully shot the video had only had a tripod, the quality of those videos would have been much improved, and we set all this up on the fly at the last minute via the K-blogs…

I can’t track how many of the video hits I get are of the videos off this page, but the main index page gets a trickle of hits each week – and I am an absolute nobody in the area of NK human rights or Korean Studies (and I had also taken that section of my site down, because I don’t focus on NK issues – but I put it back up perhas 2 months ago after someone asked about it – so it has not had the chance to build back up hits via search engines and word of mouth).

I would imagine an org like RAS or a group like LiNK or a place like Marmot’s Hole that set up the same web hosting with Yahoo would bring in a lot more people into watching the videos and absorbing the messages in them.

I hope some more people will email and nudge especially the NK human rights groups to get into using video to promote their message – but also the other centers around the (English speaking) world that regularly have conferences and lectures on Korean Studies related items.

If we give them an idea that there is an audience for this stuff – particularly the NK related stuff –

and that it is so easy these days to get such simple edits of videos up for people to see -

more might do it.

Now at the end – back to the link I started with –

It was a little hard to find the page where I could see what all videos were up.

The RAS might want to think about displaying a button to navigate to this page more prominently on their main page.

The “more lectures” button at http://en.korea.com/ is good and noticable, but it leads to this page right now – http://raskb.korea.com/ which makes it seem like there is only one other lecture VOD available.

I had to look around and click on the “VOD SERVICE” tag in the “Categories” section on the left of the site to navigate to the page that lists all the videos that seem to be available

and I doubt most people will notice that tag because it doesn’t stand out and they might not think to look for something like that.