Yesterday I found out that seesmic.tv is going offline. To be honest I haven’t been stopping by there, and the .tv part of seemsic is mostly a vestige of how the company originally started, so its closing makes sense. Nonetheless I find myself greatly saddened (at 2am after my dog woke me up) and so I post. For me seesmic.tv was a big turning point for me. This whole blog was started mostly as an experiment with embedding plugins in this new “Web 2.0” thingie. I was tweeting some and joining chats in the live broadcasts on places like blog.tv and ustream.tv. With seesmic.tv something else was started. I was part of their early beta users. We were all experimenting with this new thing and in these video experiments we developed some very real friendships. I remember conversations on politics where we found we could have different views and still discuss. We had late night silly discussions about who knows what, and early morning greetings over coffee. We had conversations with the famous that Loic brought through, such as Deepak Chopra and others. We played word games and charades. We helped friends teach their children about the world by sharing videos about where we lived.
In all this video at all hours of the night I gained confidence and voice. My friends inspired me and rather than a shy hidden person I started to think of myself as outspoken and someone with something to share. In the end seesmic.tv played its part in my life, and it left me changed and now it goes on into memory. It is sad that we won’t have any more #oldseesmicers reunions on seesmic, but perhaps it will encourage me reaching out in other ways.
When I tried to go back to sleep as the memories of seesmic.tv washed over me I was reminded of the image of a sand mandala. So many intricate patterns, precisely placed colors of sand. And then – with the sweep of the broom the beauty is scattered to be nothing more than a memory. But…the changes wrought through the work of placing the sand – those last – the impact was made. It isn’t in having the pattern before you that makes the difference but having had that beauty exist.
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Not all the video was silly, by any means.. there was much openness, sharing, creativity, exchange, even beauty.
It is true – the silly was only part of the conversation – perhaps what broke through the “ice”. In the end we talked about just about any topic and had real conversations and shared each others lives. If it had only been silly I suspect I wouldn’t feel so strongly about the friends that I made there, such as you.
I hope you don’t mind but I’ve edited the post so it doesn’t say “In all this silly video at all hours of the night” but rather “In all this video” as you so aptly point out.
Video conversation can go on, for example on http://phreadz.com
Just click any channel of the right handside list and sign up there. Once this is done you can go on sharing video conversation. The spirit of sharing among cultures of the world can not have died. Let’s live a global world but a world at a human scale: Video conversation gives this global world exactly that scale. Asynchronous video conversation is not only the recent past of seesmic; it is the bright future of a better world!
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