July 10, 2008 by Trent Adams
Matt’s dancing videos have been a viral meme for a few years, but in case you never stumbled across them, now’s your chance to jump on board. The latest video is truly inspirational. It’s incredible how powerful something as simple as a goofy dance can be to bridge cultural divides. What an amazing world it would be if we could simply dance together.
Check out Matt’s blog for the full story (and links to buy the soundtrack).
June 20, 2008 by Trent Adams
OK, I’m not usually one who plays the meme game… but this is hil-bloody-arious. They could have played up the departmental rivalry angle a bit more, but the production value alone makes this worth a viewing.
January 21, 2008 by Trent Adams
This video might not be new to you… but given conversations I’ve had recently with folks deep in the tagging space, I thought it made sense to resurrect it.
Ya’ gotta’ love the “Pandora Like” checkout scene.
March 16, 2007 by Trent Adams
OK, I admit I don’t generally watch video programming in a totally passive way. For example, when watching a movie I find it hard to fully immerse myself into the narrative if there are (to me) glaring inconsistencies in the universe of discourse (eg. the film’s authors set the rules of their fictional stage, then violate them) or if the production design doesn’t match the thematic structure of the story itself.
That being said, I do find I’m a relatively passive audience in the sense that I don’t go out of my way to find video programming in which I might be interested. Sure, I’ve got a DVR queued up to record what I think I’ll want to watch, and I’ve also been a Netflix member since year one. I tend to rely on my queue being full based on recommendations by others.
Further, I tend to rely on unsolicited recommendations. What I mean by that is I don’t actively go looking for something new. I know that’s a failing of mine (in that it limits my world view to being a parasite on others), but there ya’ go. If you like it, tell me why, and I’ll consider it, too. Call me lazy, but I don’t think I’m that far off the mainline on this front.
The flip side to this is the fact that I tend not to like the mainline offerings. Hence the conundrum I’m often in when free time comes up which I’d like to fill with some good (to me) video entertainment. I need a magical machine that automatically feeds me programming I’d like to see. Not the watered-down popular stuff (ie. what’s generally on TV or produced by Hollywood).
To this end, I’ve been keeping my eye on some of the emerging video platforms. The massive aggregators haven’t hit my personal sweet spot primarily due to the fact they take too much time to find anything worth the hunting time (especially when they’re packed to the gills with drek). Then there are the video-enabled social networking sites that’re popping up… but their primary focus seems to be on community (oh yeah, and some video). Fortunately, a couple players have hit the scene that are attempting to rekindle the passive experience of TV while not trying to be “all things to all people”.
The first I really felt was on the right track is Joost (formerly “The Venice Project”). For those not in the know, this is the latest effort by the crew that brought us Kazaa and Skype. Dan Taylor provides a great write-up (with screen captures) in his First impressions of Joost post. They seem to get the passive experience right by being video first (by channeling quality programming rather than UCG), and community second (with subtilely integrated chat/share/etc. tools). Taylor also makes a couple very good points:
At this early stage Joost still essentially feels like a technological proof-of-concept, albeit a very compelling one. Whether it succeeds in changing the way the world consumes TV, as it’s founders clearly hope, now depends on the quality of the content. Saying no to user-generated programming is an obvious differentiator from YouTube et al. but also a clear marker in terms of where Joost hopes to position itself on the quality spectrum.
The second one, which I found just yesterday, is Divvio. The jury’s still out on this one for me. The interface looks way too much like a web site (whereas Joost is much more of a TV-like experience), and it doesn’t have the visceral impact of Joost. And while they try to provide “playlists” (of both audio as well as video content) for continual viewing, they still seem to require too many clicks for my lazy, passive tastes. In fact, in this case they’re not really that much different than YouTube/Google, Grouper, or iFilm).
The hip thing Divvio is bringing to the table, however, is adding a layer of personal preferences into the mix (something Joost doesn’t seem to be doing). Now, if they can get that working (and improve their UI), it may be interesting to see what they’ve got. Unfortunately, a recent Business Week article pointed out an interesting comment attributed to founder Hossein Eslambolchi:
Early users will need some patience. That’s because Divvio will crawl only 750,000 sites at first, a tiny fraction of the entire Web, and because alip [adaptive learning intelligent process] needs time to learn. Divvio figures it will only hit the mark 10% of the time for its first customers; he says that will grow to 60% by yearend.
What does all this add up to? Well, not a lot right now, but the new ground these two companies are forging appear worth following (at least for a while).
(PS I’m all out of Joost tokens to their beta, but feel free to toss me an email if you want to be on my growing “waiting list” should I be granted any more.)
