Good Reputation Sleeping

Evolution

Ever since the Tower of Babel, effective communication has been a work in progress. Communication on the web is no different. As journalists, one would think we'd have this figured out. Sadly, we don't.

Here are a couple of attempts at evolving the way we communicate with our audience from The Sunday New York Times.

- 'At Home Again in the Unknown'

Great article about my favorite Icelandic treat, bjork. Online, the article is 'spiced-up' with audio from the interview. A small, but very meaningful value-add. I love being able to hear her voice and I love being able to get some additional content I don't have to read.

- 'How YouTube Helped Lisa Nova Start Her Career'

LisaNova has been one of my YouTube subscriptions from the start. She is droll and bust a gut funny at the same time. She is also timely; able to riff off the current culture at the drop of a hat; her latest, 'LisaNova Does 300' may be her best.

Nice, short and sweet piece in the Times about her rise - and for anyone who thinks YouTube is a fad...please pay attention!

Pistols at Dawn

Dueling web video projects from two of the old/new media powerhouses, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Both attempt to take a fresh approach to what we call 'journalism'. Both succeed in different ways.

First, earlier in the week, was 'onBeing' from the Post. Clean, simple and personal. Short stories of Washingtonians by Washingtonians courtesy great video interviews by Jenn Crandall and great interface design by Rob Curley and crew. It has proven to be one of the most successful pieces ever posted on washingtonpost.com.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine online features director Jake Paltrow's commissioned piece, 'The First Ones', interviewing some of Hollywood's finest. The format is again, very simple - one question, "what was the first film that made an impression on you?" The answers are short and sweet and artfully filmed (almost painfully so), and it works. The interface is nice also, allowing you to watch the whole thing or pick where to enter.

These two projects are not quite YouTube, but are also a nice step away from the TV-derivative stuff we are used to seeing from MSM. Hopefully we will see more like this; video journalism that starts to feel like the web is truly its home.

Random Thoughts on a Roll

10 Minutes in N.Y.
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

- Presentations and the "Laws of Simplicity"

- 2006, Brought to You by You

- YouTube Quick Capture

- Not Boasting, Even Though He Could

- Maeda's Simplicity

YouTube Nation

The New Yorker: It Should Happen To You.

The New Yorker tracks the YouTube phenom via the video posts of litlleloca.

"The Oscar was delivered rather unceremoniously—not in March, at the Academy Awards, but in August, three and a half minutes into a sketch Ryan was filming, while she was still in character as Cynthia, an eighteen-year-old Latina from East L.A. who is better known as Little Loca, after the handle Ryan uses when she uploads some of her homemade sketches onto the video-sharing site YouTube. This was about the fortieth in a series of short Little Loca videos that had by then attracted over a million viewings, thanks to Loca’s “big old mouth” (both literally—her heavily outlined lips command attention—and figuratively) and her irreverent putdowns (“You better watch out, fool, because God’s gonna come around and strike you down with some lightning if you don’t be careful”). Loca was wearing a bandanna and hoop earrings, and sitting on a sofa, against a plain white wall, between two women who were known to regular viewers as Smiley (a friend of Ryan’s) and Silent Girl (Ryan’s cousin). Rap music was playing in the background."

“Damn, this shit is heavy,” Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette from Smiley and waving it around. “I could knock somebody out with this.” Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. “I want to thank YouTube,” she said. “You’re so important in my life right now. And without YouTube there’s no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this.” - Ben McGrath, The New Yorker

To see how life imitates art, check out 2003's William Gibson novel Pattern Recognition. Viral video as uber-marketing tool. Sound familiar?

Citizen Media - My First YouTube Video!

I tried to upload this video to Google Video but for some reason could not log in.
So I went to YouTube, where I had set up an account ages ago, just to see what it would do.

Nothing fancy here, just a rollercoaster ride at Disneyworld taken with my Canon SD 500. The video is re-sized and re-processed into Flash Video, which takes a while. The service is somewhat like flickr, although not nearly as well organized and the U.I. is pretty bad.

This service and Google Video are on the cutting edge, however, and with more and more people using digital cameras that take decent video, they will only get better and become more popular.