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Watch our first story (Oct/Nov 2012): Voting Stories.



 

This is Videos by People.

Social media like YouTube were supposed to let everyone get their stories out. You'd just make a video, it'd go viral, and your message would be heard by millions - you wouldn't need the resources of a huge company. The problem is, how does a video go viral? Actually... it helps to have the resources of a huge company. That way you can buy space on blogs, hire a staff to post fake comments, and have them share the video on all their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Social media distribution is structured to favor videomakers who already have large networks. So is there any hope for those of us who are not-so-well-connected? Videos by People is an experiment to see if alternative structures could give individual videomakers a better shot.  Read more...

The first topic was Voting Stories - themed around voting for the US Presidential Election. It's also the topic that inspired this site. Some recent cell phone videos about voter suppression tactics in swing states have been picked up by mainstream media. Why do those particular videos go viral? Are there other videos out there that we don't see? What about people experiencing voter suppression outside of swing states? Don't their stories count? Voting Stories lets people post videos about voting problems, but also about anything else related to voting. The weird, wild, wonderful, and awful things that happen locally during election season - in the US or elsewhere.
For example: Here's my voting story.

That's about it, except to clarify that I'm doing this as a quick, simple, and very rough experiment. It's entirely non-commercial, and it's not funded by anyone. (That header image is my genuine chicken-scratch, folks... no paid imitations here!)