What amazed me is the power of interactivity actually realized by video coverage of the Democratic and Republic National Conventions last month.  I’ll simply refer for the immediate moment to coverage of KCRW radio in Santa Monica, reported on by Anne Eisenberg last week in the New York Times.  Eisenberg’s story in the Times ogled at 124,000 views of 67 convention clips shot by KCRW staffers the Democratic Convention last month in Denver.

KCRW Reporters used cell phones – Nokia N95 phones on the AT&T 3G network – and uploaded to the KCRW web using Kyte’s streaming service.

We overlook, to some detriment, the power of intimacy in advocacy.  But video – particularly personalized and individualized video – has that power to recover the sense of intimacy lost in a big media, packaged view of politics and advocacy.  It makes me think back to those days when music was “piped” into rooms, almost like the oxygen that’s pumped into casinos.

Just look at “there” you are with the video streaming, as Andy Jordan showed us in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Tech Diary.

Intimacy was always the highway of personalized relationships.  Quite literally, intimacy gives you access.  There’s something happening here, in the wild wild west of a new technology through services like Kyte.  Oh yes, someone or some ones will seize control and “incorporate” the technology much like television and radio were “captured” by the professional class long ago.  But the ability to get into someone’s telephone and actually see them and speak with them is eerily like that coach’s voice speaking in the quarterback’s ear.  It’s old-school.

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