I think I rubbed someone the wrong way tonight. And I didn’t know how much I did until I read his blog post.
The two of us and about fifty others were at a blogger event at the Hilton in San Francisco. It was a big schmoozefest. Many of us knew each other. Andrew Sernovitz, author of “Word of Mouth Marketing” was giving away copies of his book and bottles of Makers Mark. I scored myself a book.
After the big giveaway I pulled out my Nokia N82 and shot some video, streaming live over the Qik network. You can watch the recorded 14 minute video below.
In the video are Marissa Root, Eric Doyle, and Denise Vardakas of The Conversation Group, Sam Levin of Cool Mac Pics, Brian Zisk of the SanFran MusicTech Summit, Oliver Marks, Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells of the Social Media Club, Deb Schultz, Matt Weeks, Dale Larson, Veek, Christel van der Boom of A&R Edelman, Meliza Solan of Vator.tv, and a well know journalist…sort of.
At about 2:30 in the video I walk up to the journalist with my camera up and he immediately puts his hand over his face. He obviously doesn’t want me to shoot him. He got very pissed with me and I kept asking him why he was so annoyed. I asked why he didn’t want to be recorded now? I had interviewed him on video a couple of times before. He said he had flipped a coin and decided he didn’t want to be shot. According to his blog post though I was far more irritating and intrusive.
At a public event where recording people is common should you ask every single person when you’re streaming video? Or if someone just puts up their hand should you move on? Regularly if I didn’t know the person I would move on. But I know this journalist, I’ve interviewed him on video before, and we said hello at the beginning of the event. So I implored as to why he didn’t want to be interviewed. And it obviously irritated him so much that he had to write a post about it.
UPDATE: 6/29/08, The video has been removed.
