Two years ago, Dustin got himself a couple of chickens. Dustin also seems to be a good ol’ boy with an advanced degree in something.
He recorded this entertaining video illustrating the curious way chicken’s keep their head fix, regardless of orientation or direction. It’s apparently thanks to something called the vestibulo-ocular reflex:
As with most of the delightful, webby things I discover these days, I found this one on Reddit. A user suggested that “Someone needs to mount an 808 camera on the chicken’s head, then attach the chicken to a mountain bike.” Dustin went to work, and the subsequent video is pretty entertaining, too:
For reasons I don’t remember, the other day I was looking up the song “Book of Love” by The Magnetic Fields. While poking around YouTube, I found this delightful cover by one Nataly Dawn:
She’s got a whole fagile-voiced Regina Spektor-Feist thing going on that, given my taste for female singer-songwriters, appeals. She has an album out, and I gather she’s a bit of a YouTube star. You can learn more about her on her MySpace page.
I’m kind of fascinated by the split-screen, deconstructed style of the video. It’s a classic example of turning a constraint–no band or recording studio–into a virtue.
Heading down the Internet rabbit hole, I also discovered that Ms. Dawn is one half of Pomplamoose. They’ve got a bunch of tunes on YouTube, and they’re mostly videos shot and edited in this same style. It must be pretty time-consuming to cut together, say, this version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”:
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 viewsâ€â€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.