I’m at the NDP convention this weekend and one fun thing they did is release a YouTube playlist of all the candidate’s favourite songs. Reflecting the diversity of the party, there’s classics and country and indie and metal and dance. If you can’t be at the after parties, it’s the next best thing!
One other cool feature – they’ve got all TV’s at the convention showing a live feed of the convention hashtag – #policy11 – which was apparently trending across Canada earlier today!
…his friends promise to have a six-month party in his absence. This is the video that was waiting on his Playstation when he got home along with an instruction to “push play”.
(via MetaFilter)
This site is pretty cool – people place a book cover in front of themselves in such a way as to make their body part of the cover (for example, if the cover shows a face, it will appear to be their face. Hmm, maybe instead of explaining it, you should just go look at it!)
Last Friday, I wrote about Chat Roulette Love Song which was the extremely successful proof of a guy’s Masters thesis on viral video.
Speaking of Friday, another recent viral video that blew up even bigger than Chat Roulette Love Song is the video for “Friday” by Rebecca Black which has gained over 30 million (!) views in about two weeks!
This one was a product of Ark Records, a company in Southern California which allows parents with a couple grand burning a hole in their pockets to have a song and video professionally produced for their child. (Is that anything like my parents buying me a magnet with my name on it when I was a kid? ;-))
Originally coming into the spotlight via the web site of Comedy Central’s Tosh.O who labeled it as “the worst song ever” (and currently with 20 000 likes and nearly 200 000 dislikes on YouTube), it spread like wildfire across the Net with people debating its “merits” – is it cheesy or just good fun? Lyrically vapid or no worse than any other pop song? Auto-tuned to the extreme to cover an untalented singer or just reflecting modern pop sensibilities?
Beyond the enormous number of views, it’s had some other success – entering the Top 20 singles on iTunes, gaining some time on some morning talk shows and even helping provide justification for Ms. Black to make contact with the original tweener YouTube star, Justin Bieber (although the love wasn’t apparently reciprocated.)
(head over to MetaFilter to catch up on all the ins and outs)
I missed it this year but I think it’s an annual event so maybe I’ll get to the Havana International Book Fair someday?
Our first morning in Varadero, Shea, Pace and I woke up early (well, we woke Mr. Sleepy Head up!) and made our way down to the beach which we ended up having pretty much to ourselves. One of many special moments from our trip…
If you’re not familiar with ChatRoulette, read this old post first.
As I say in that post, a good portion of Chat Roulette’s participants appear to be young men looking to expose themselves to unsuspecting (although if you’re on ChatRoulette, it won’t take long to become “suspecting”) viewers.
Occasionally though, Chat Roulette breeds some incredible creativity – whether it’s a person doing mime for whoever pops up on his screen or someone creating ad-libbed songs or, as shown below, doing a full-on musical production (along with many customized live elements as the song goes on!) to “propose marriage” to an attractive young woman.
I gotta say, the first time I saw this, my “fake” radar started beeping like crazy – it was too intricate, too well-done, had too many customized elements. I thought it was most likely some indie band trying to create a buzz video to help their career, like OK Go or Atomic Tom on the NY Subway.
But looking into it further, it appears to be totally legit and was created, with two months’ preparation by a Dane who did his Masters in Social Media with a focus on viral video who wanted to see if his theory could work in reality.
It obviously worked – as I type this, it’s over two million views on YouTube and growing!
(via MetaFilter which has lots of other speculation and insight.)
…Happy St. Patty’s Day!
But as someone points out in the comments, “Shane will be drunk temporarily but the interviewer will be a twat forever.” (Though that’s admittedly a pretty broad definition of “temporarily”!)
Ah well, he’s always been a gooder, addictions or no.
We all know that most books are better than the movies that they inspire. Books give much more depth and insight and allow you to actively create a world for yourself rather than having one created for you passively.
But a recent Reddit thread asking this question led me to do a general Google search which finds all kinds of places contemplating the question of which movies were actually better than the books they were based on.