Pass Out The Crayolas

In today's news....

Quite a few years ago now, I was with Al Gore and Joel Hyatt when we were just starting Current TV.

We had a 'difference of opinion', which led to my leaving being asked to leave the managment team.

We could all see that there had been an explosion of video creation.

The problem with it was, (at least from my perspective) that is was a mess. Most of the stuff was utterly unwatchable. But it showed vast potential. People were interested, they just didn't know what to do.

I wanted to hire 200 of them full-time, put them through rigorous training and create an elite corps of Video Journalists who could travel the world making great content for the Channel - and also serve as a model for everyone else.  It would have been like a Video Peace Corps - a 2 year stint and then up and out.

Al and Joel didn't agree.

They saw the tens of thousands of videos coming in the door and they thought we were done.

We weren't, as the current state of CURRENT (so to speak) so clearly demonstrates.

It was, as though, after the invention of the printing press, Gutenberg had simply passed out crayons to every German peasant he could find and said - OK! Make me a book and I will publish it.

Alas, the peasants were illiterate - and so was most of the new video public.

Now Twitter has announced that they are going to make it possible to tweet video.

This is great as a platform for distribution - and it's goign to drive the video revolution even faster, but it also makes it all the more important to push video literacy and video education.

Otherwise, we're going to end up tweeting the same kind of crap we see on youtube, or our refrigerator doors.

And that doesn't drive much of a revolution at all.