Perhaps this rant is just because of my disappointment in neither landing a gig for this year’s Episerver Days nor getting a good response on my pitch to help them with the event’s social media activites. But I would rather like to see it as an opportunity to learn. Again from others mistake, at least in my view. Compare my video conciderations 18 months ago and reflections on how Media & Message 2008 was video documented.

An hour ago I got an e-mail from Episerver that announced the release of videos and other presentations material from Episerver Day 2009. Sorry folks, I can’t embed anything here. Because the player they use (from Qbrick) does not support embedding. Why is that still so in 2009?

During the event the producers published a live video stream by concentrating on the speakers bodies and forgot their slides. A problem that was pointed out in Twitter by the remote viewer @janjarfalk. In post production (which takes time and money) they either inserted the slides over the video or synced them in a separate window beside the video. The latter is perhaps good for people who still spend their days in front of a web page. Sorry, but none of my mobile phones/players supports that kind of solution.

It looks kind of fun when Beata Wickbom uses her body and language in her Trendspot presentation to explain and overcome the fact that many of her slides did not show up on the screen . ”Fun”, because on the web page the slides are actually there! In other words, the video and the images tells different stories. Too bad, because Beata and the other speakers did a very good job on stage.

I am also curious about what those of you who did not see Micael Herkommer live think. Does his fantastic presentation style come through in the video version of his talk The Pragmatic Web?

In sum, my concerns are:

  • No support for embedding and sharing
  • No RSS feed for the videos
  • A click on the first video does not pause, but takes you to a promo for Qbrick
  • Confusing layout and different designs of the player for different videos
  • The mindset was live TV talkshow, not web 2.0 video documentation

It is OK to make mistakes. I actually love when people and organizations dare to try new grounds. But Episerver and Qbrick? Two major players in the web field – and this is what they present.

WIP, Work In Progress, might be the explanation. If so, please consider my thoughts when fixing things up. As I previously said: the content at Episerver Days 2009 was good.

p.s. Even though Episerver did not announce/propose an official hashtag we created #epiday09, which for example can be monitored via Twingly micro blog search. d.s.