Just posted this discussion to MacJournal’s forum, following up on some other discussions that tell me the world just hasn’t done what I want:

Hi, I’m investigating MacJournal to allow me to videoblog simply directly from my mac/isight.

The video instructions seems to be missing the middle part, i.e., everything after record & stop and before publish to my self-hosted WP installation.

is there a tutorial I’m not finding or an extra chapter to the manual? Because right now, I see the value in terms of journal entries for my own purposes, but getting those videos on to my blog seems to be a secret. And I’m unclear as to why the manual doesn’t seem to even acknowledge this.

FYI: I will be shooting all my own video, not posting links to youtube stuff or other found sources.

I am going to muddle through and see what happens if I just try it (i.e., the default way of doing things when we can’t find the instructions, at least in my family 🙂

Here’s what I’m looking for:

So I have a shiny new Mac (my first) with its nifty iSight/facetime camera, and I’m looking for advice on how best to incorporate video blogging into my WordPress self-hosted sites. I’d like to aim for something that would be good for daily posting. All of the video will be on one site for the time being, and I have a preference for hosting and controlling my own files (rather than just posting them to Youtube/vimeo by default).

The ability to shoot and use iPhone video (i4 w/ front camera) in the same general workflow would be a great bonus.

and a slightly more detailed description of the process I see in my head:

my thought is this:

I start “vblog.app”
I hit the big green button that starts my camera and starts capturing from my camera.
Big green button turns red.
I say smart things.
I push the big red button that stops the camera.
[All the optional editing goes here, but for my initial plan, that’s not strictly necessary.]
I push the big [WP blue] button that says publish.
I fill out the dialog box with a post title, any add’l text, tags, and category (all as I would in WP).
I push the big button that says publish.

At this point, everything else automagically happens and a post shows up on my site.

If I have to set prefs for video size, format, credentials for WP, and a third-party site (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), that could all be done in advance so the process starts w/o me. Or so I would hope.

If the complicated part is editing, I’m talking about cutting that out (advisable or not is a separate question).

I guess another analogy is if I hit the little picture icon on my iphone facebook app, it lets me access the camera or video camera, take a pic/video, and upload. I recognize that the answer may be that FB does all those intermediate steps automatically themselves, but then it’s no longer a question of feasibility but probably coordination/APIs. (Cf. http://www.cellspin.net/, which is an app tied to a webservice. And again, MacJournal claims to support video blogging, but I haven’t tried it out yet. Probably tomorrow!)

I’m used to being called nuts for thinking of how pieces ought to work as a system; it’s my superpower, as Seth Godin once asked. But this is what happens to me whenever I hit a speedbump of some kind: my mind starts racing, churning through all my experiences and the stuff I’ve read over the decades (yikes!) and the things I’ve learned how to figure out (like user experience, failure modes, and detailed planning) and out comes some reasonable version of what might work.

On a separate note, I need to find more and better ways of using my superpower. I need more clients with big thorny problems that need elegant and workable solutions.