Web video goes back to the future

In the supposed cutting-edge business of online video, old looks more and more like the new new, which makes you wonder: is the Web’s most evolved content medium actually devolving?

Just this week, Yahoo! announced the partial shuttering of Maven, a company they purchased in early 2008 in order to, in their own words, create a “state-of-the-art consumer video and advertising experiences on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s network of leading premium video publishers across the web”.

Not so much. >>more on Metro

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Stream

“Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes,” wrote TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld recently. Pack a lunch and bring your paddle, there’s likely no turning back upstream.

If you’re finding you’re spending less time going to big portals such as MSN and Yahoo! for news and email, and sticking on social media sites, consuming and sharing content with friends, you’re mid-stream already, headed toward a rolling river, and perhaps the future of the Web. >> More on Metro

This is not a game

If the instructions “Follow the White Rabbit” or numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 give you a conspiratorial tingle, ARGs may be your bag, assuming you’re not already spending your Saturday nights piecing together clues scattered throughout the Web while your pals shoot JagerBombs.

ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game, a genre that’s pretty much followed the Internet’s trajectory into the mainstream since the mid-90s, with The San Francisco-based game Dreadnot laying the groundwork for the many ARGs that have followed. For the lay-paranoid, ARGs can be thought of as interactive stories played in real time, in the real world, where participants collaboratively piece together clues to an overarching mystery while the games’ “puppetmasters” throw up the pitfalls and paths for gamers to advance forward and backward. The Internet generally acts as the ‘console’, where players find clues and communicate with each other through web sites, email and social networks, but also phones and at physical locations. There’s no fancy suped-up processor, virtual-reality hand held device, or even dice, making ARGs simultaneously cutting edge and simple to learn… >> continued on Metro.

How to Win Friends and Influence People from Your Bed

12 word posting – Where sloth meets self-promotion. How classy:
Me on Metro

Hey Jules

That was the original title for ‘Hey Jude’, a song Paul McCartney apparently wrote for Lennon’s young son in the midst of his parents’ divorce.

My top 5 song list of all time has morphed many times since the age of 10 (If Facebook has an app for it, I can’t be the only one with this little obsession) as my exposure to popular music spread outward from my best friends’ parents’ Beatles albums (and my older sisters’ 70s Osmond Family records truthfully) , but Hey Jude has always remained rooted at the top.

This recent, 13,500 person-strong viral event in London’s Trafalgar Square (video below) emphasizes why: Hey Jude begins as an intimate piano piece with soothing words for a scared little kid, and rises to a symphonic celebration of human courage. The rest of its ilk are just feel good songs in comparison.

Ok, that may sway slightly in the direction of the melodramatic. But that’s the point of the song – don’t be afraid to run with it. And don’t tell me you don’t feel the same way after watching this (even if it’s all for a cell phone company).

The LP release

EP, below, came out last week. The LP just dropped here.

Twitdemic

Word of the swine flu’s global reach travels so quickly across the web, it’s enough to leave the pandemic-aspiring virus itself a little green with envy. Yet our shiny, digital messenger machine, when enlisted as weaponry in defence against the outbreak, comes with two sharp edges when in the hands of both the CDC and your paranoid, basement-dwelling set.

To wit, the Twit:

Exhibit A: As the UK’s Telegraph and other worldwide media outlets usefully inform, The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is using Twitter to post their latest official news on the swine flu and direct people to helpful information. Perfect – the CDC leverages the hottest online social media site to calmly dispense up-to-date, informed advice on a legitimate world health threat to a rapidly growing base of followers.

Exhibit B (via Daniel Sung at TechdigestTV): Family man Steve Lange mind you, super-keen to take his new Twitter account for a spin, perhaps didn’t pause to consider just what he was contributing to the swine flu digital meme with this blood-in-the-streets-inducing nugget of wisdom:

Golden Gloves

Lurking amid the axe murders and latest Lindsay Lohan flatulence this morning, I spotted this in my CityNews RSS feed.

It’s an audio slideshow, featuring young boxers and coaches at the Golden Gloves invitational in Brampton earlier this month.

Many of the best images capture scenes and subjects outside of the ring: an adolescent boxer, sparring with his coach in a lonely hotel hallway, a female boxer’s sideways glance, lost in a thousand-mile stare.

Starkly beautiful black and whites, complemented by audio interviews and ambient noise that convey a bigger story of these young athletes’ lives beyond the spotlight.

Good job City, a refreshing perspective the eye in the sky won’t see.

Go here for more of this kind of storytelling.

W.R. ‘Bud’ Thornton: Ass or Fox?

Just sat down to add my own two-cents on the CBC Jian Ghomeshi vs Billy Bob tilt, making the cyber-rounds at YouTube (embedded video below) and esteemed society-class chronicler, TMZ, when I see my own crafty uncle has beaten me to the punch.
Frank’s take on this messy train-wreck from CBC’s Q studio covers my thoughts with far more spunk and skill (albeit with a  jab at ‘Upper Canadians’ that left this dandy shifting uncomfortably in his pantaloons), including a cowboy twist of his own.
One query though: Maybe this baffling version of Thornton (aka ‘W.R.’ or ‘Bud’ as he’d prefer to be known in the musicians’ set) shows he’s taken a PR lesson from Joaquin Phoenix, assuming you believe Joaquin’s meltdown on Letterman was actually orchestrated to draw attention to his upcoming and secretive quasi-autobiographical docudrama, where Joaquin allegedly plays a loonball version of himself, transitioning from Hollywood star to rapper? There’s a certain tantalizing appeal to outfoxing the media at their own game in crafting an absurd persona and tabloid storyline before they can.
Thornton is on tour and trying to promote his band and hillbilly-meets-British-invasion flop ‘The Boxmasters’, where he’s apparently prone to slip into a curmudgeonly, wild west shtick, onstage and in interview.  His album packaging, affected posturing and band attire suggest he’s cheekily shrouding himself and band in the veil of some jaded, journeyman act, longing for the hey day of a musical genre that seems to have never have actually existed. This latest Ghomeshi interview and another with the Calgary Herald may just be an extension of the brand.
Then again, maybe Billy’s just not that sharp, as his ability to so naturally play Karl Childers in Slingblade would suggest. Still, he could have been engaging in some good ol’ fashion interview atossin’ to grab a little press.
It reminds me of a story I once heard from a guy in Vancouver who played in the alt bad Limblifter. When Oasis came to town in the mid-90s, Limblifter opened for them. You may recall this as the same concert where someone threw a birkenstock on stage, which prompted Noel Gallagher to pronounce that they were ‘not a bunch of monkeys’, and see the band walk off the stage and not return after playing for a grand total of 15 minutes.  According to the band member from Limblifter, it was all set up in advance. Oasis hadn’t garnered any negative press in a while to prop up their bad boy persona, an essential component in the Oasis marketing machine. He also said Liam and Noel were just about the nicest guys he’d ever met.
Who knows what Billy Bob’s really up to in this current asinine incarnation. Maybe he really is just another Hollywood prima donna, all in a lather that the world won’t recognize his other godly talents, worthy of Tom Petty. Maybe he’s every bit the bastard that I am at 6 in the morning (read this was the time of the interview taping). But if there’s any method to this bit of madness on the airwaves yesterday, it’s W.R’s very acting skills propelling his musical ambitions forward.

G20 Red Reaper

G20 Summit, London, G20 London, G20 Protests, G20 Demonstrations

Originally uploaded by G20London2009

Impressive photos rolling out of the G20 summit on Flickr, such as this one. Big Ben looms as a silent witness to the giant blood-red reaper, surely slaying tiny, plump bankers, fleeing in the streets.

It’s certainly has a more profound visual effect than these jackasses, currently in constant rotation on US/UK TV news outlets. The same jackasses at any of these world summits, always in the front row, ecstatic they have a way better excuse to randomly raise shit and bust skulls than Arsenal’s loss to Man U. last week, in turn de-legitimizing the real, well-meaning protesters further back (some making the unfortunate choice to sport bongos), beyond SKY/CNN’s aperture and interest.