The other day I was searching for the correct phrasing of a poem, and happened upon the SpokenVerse YouTube account. It features nearly 600 poems read aloud in a unadorned, gruff English voice. Here are a couple of poems you may be familiar with:
The video preview frame for the third poem, Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler”, features an exposed if tastefully photographed nipple. It’s otherwise safe for work, but I figured I’d better err on the side of caution.
As I mentioned, I’m revising the video chapter of our book, and so I was happy to discover this recent Slate article. For a month, Chris Wilson monitored the performance of 10, 000 newly uploaded videos. Here are the results:
After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views—that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.
An site called, uh, Rubber Republic ran a similar study (PDF), and found that 10% exceeded 1000 views, and 1% received 500,000 views.
I was doing some rewrites on the video chapter in our book, and discovered that this unremarkable clip was the first ever video posted to YouTube. It features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim making a bad joke:
It’s interesting how much this video predicts the vast majority of YouTube videos: a young person speaking in direct address to the camera. He’s not in his bedroom, but otherwise it’s utterly typical.
I’m a descendant of the McLeans. Emilie Delphine Robb of New York granted Zavikon to Andrew McLean of Passaic, New Jersey on June 27, 1918. Andrew was a cotton goods manufacturer. He died in March 26, 1931. His property was then divided among his children. On August 22, 1931 they sold Zavikon to Philip A. Castner of Philadelphia. The Great Depression caused the McLeans to end the family’s business and sell Zavikon!
I’m always pleased when something on this site enables a little connection like this that didn’t exist before.
The auction location is 8275 Manitoba St. in Vancouver, BC. The auction starts at 10AM on Friday, March 7th, 2009. Merchandise previewing is this Friday March 6th, 2009 from noon - 6PM.
This is a happy coincidence, because earlier today I was chatting with somebody who’d invited me to speak at their event. I’d written up the usual session description, and she’d asked me to swap out the phrase “real-world case studies” for “local examples”. I asked why, and she said:
Some of the feedback that we’ve received from other social media sessions say, “That’s great for those in New York, Toronto, etc., but what are people here doing?”
And here, lo and behold, is a local auction house making effective use of YouTube:
That clothing video has already had 3500 views (it would have had more if they’d used a description title and written up a description of the video, including a link back to their auction site). A nice result for the tiny effort it took to create.
Somebody from the National Film Board of Canada emailed to tell me they’d launched a new version of their site at NFB.ca. At first glance, it looks like a nice, clean redesign, with the emphasis on the films, where it should be. The ‘featured film’ this week is an hour-long piece called “Carts of Darkness”, which tells the story of some Vancouver homeless guys who get their thrills by racing shopping carts. You can watch the whole thing on the NFB’s site.
Or, because the NFB was clever, I can embed it in my site, just like YouTube:
I quite like the slick, icon-free way they implemented the ‘Share this film’ feature.
Not all of the implementation is quite that slick. I searched for a favourite wacky film from my childhood, “Paddle to the Sea”, and the clip on offer is served up in the dreaded RealPlayer.
It’s understandable that their archives would be a bit of a format nightmare, though. This looks, after a quick look around, like a wise evolution of the NFB’s web presence.
[BioWare co-founder] Muzyka explained that the designers of the game wanted to ensure that The Old Republic was a story-based MMO that followed in the tradition of the Knights of the Old Republic. He added that while people have often asked BioWare if the company would ever produce the third installment in the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, this new game amounts to installment Nos. three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and beyond.
The Little Things
There’s no release date as yet, so the game is probably more than a year away. I visited the game’s flashy-flash website in the hopes of subscribing to an RSS feed or something, so that I could periodically get news updates. There’s a newsletter, but I’d rather not give them my email address. I didn’t see a feed on the home page, but I did see this familiar row of social media icons:
Great, I thought, I’ll just subscribe to the Twitter feed. The link goes here. Unfortunately, there’s no account there. In fact, ’starwarstheoldrepublic’ is too long for a Twitter user name.
Ah well, maybe I’ll just subscribe to their YouTube channel instead. I click the little YouTube icon next to the Twitter one. Nope. That’s an invalid user name, too.
The other icons–Facebook, MySpace, Flickr–do work. But it’s a reminder to ensure that you get the little things right. I’m guessing their website has received, what, 50,000 visitors in the past day? At the very least.
No RSS feed on the home page and a 40% failure rate on their icons is a bit of a shame. I doubt they’ll lose many players at this stage, but those early adopters are too valuable to give away so easily.
After digging around a bit, I did find a developer blog for the game. I’m going to subscribe to that for the time being.
I should say that I’m looking forward to trying another Star Wars MMPORG. I quite enjoyedStar Wars Galaxies, at least until they screwed it up.
Today I happened to see the video for the catchy Sara Bareilles tune “Love Song”. I first heard this song about a year ago, but apparently it just went huge on the Tube o’ You.
I was struck by how much of the video was shot in the style of the average YouTube video. Ms. Bareilles is centered in the frame, looking directly into the camera, and the shot is basically just her head and shoulders.
Compare that with another singer-songwriter-at-the-piano video from 2002: Vanessa Carlton’s “1000 Miles” (could she look more underwhelmed in her photo on Wikipedia?). I’ve put a few screenshots together to illustrate:
Obviously this is only a single data point, but I’m reminded of an earlier post I wrote about musicians co-opting the style and conventions of YouTube.
Music video directors must recognize that a huge part of their viewership has shifted mediums. I wonder how much (and how else) the move to YouTube is impacting videos? Do they use more saturated colours? Simpler set ups? Any thoughts?
On a related note, it’s interesting that I’m not allowed to ‘embed’ (that is, include in a blog post or elsewhere) either of these videos. It’s been disabled on YouTube. What are record companies and managers afraid of?
I wanted to post a quick note to say congratulations to the Strutta team for their official public launch today. Congrats to Danny, Jordan and the rest of the Vancouver team for a job well done. Here’s the blurb on Strutta:
From grassroots scrappers to all star pros, Strutta brings players together from around the world in the spirit of true competition. Whether it’s beatboxing, shredding up the slopes, or giving the legends a run for their money with a smack on Guitar Hero III solo, there is a game for everyone on Strutta. Players upload their original performance videos to compete with their peers and prove they are the best in their game.
I don’t have a lot of feedback on the site yet–I only checked it out for the first time last week. The design is unassuming, and it does what it says on the box, which are good things. I’m not sure how I feel about getting randomly redirected when I visit www.strutta.com, but I’m guessing that’s a launch gimmick.
My opinion is a bit moot, though, because I’m really not Strutta’s target audience. I’d guess that they’re shooting for the 12 to 25 crowd. Plus, I’m barely a video watcher, much less a creator. Lastly, I’m not particularly competitive. Or playful. Fortunately, there’s zillions of youthful, chippy video-makers out there.
