Results tagged “video”

A visualization of the ascent of many of the world's youngest countries showing their independence from colonial powers (British, Portuguese, French, Spanish) from 1800 to 2009.

France keeps its yoke on a stunning number of nations until 1960.

(Thanks to Jason for the video.)

A lot of folks seemed to like the Little Red Riding Hood video I linked to the other day, so I thought I'd reach way back into the archives (anybody still hanging around who was reading this site in 2000?) and dig out an old favorite.

Behold, "Video Computer System" by Brazil's own Golden Shower. (Don't blame me — I didn't name the band.) One of the first chiptunes tracks to really take off online, the song was pretty good on its own merits, but was bolstered immeasurably by having a flawlessly-executed montage of Atari imagery as its accompanying video.

Delightfully, after nearly a decade, the original video is still online. It seems, though, that the quality of those old quicktimes clips is a little bit lower than what used to be downloadable from the site ages ago, so I've uploaded a higher-resolution copy of the video to YouTube and embedded it here. The original credits for the film are still online, listing Carlos Bêla, Guilherme Marcondes, Mateus de Paula Santos and Mario Sader as the creators of the clip, for which they won an MTV Brazil VMA for Best Electronica Video. There's a special credit for Alfredo Hisa, who created the video's signature moment, a Matrix homage that is all the more impressive when you remember that the film that was being referenced was only about a year old at the time.

Golden Shower also offers a pretty interesting behind-the-scenes look at how the video was created. It's worth a look just for the time capsule effect of seeing a bunch of old-school iMacs running OS 9 and now-vintage versions of applications. Most entertaining to me was the still-extant blog that the team kept, listing mentions of the video across the web.

There's something to be said for web content that holds up well, even almost a decade later.

After all of the fun with the Snoop Dogg video a little while back, I figured I'd include some videos that are a bit closer to home, both from this past weekend's SXSW interactive festival.

First, Rocketboom captured the Battledecks competition, where I was thrilled to have shared the stage with a number of really funny people in trying to improvise a presentation in front of slides we'd never seen before.

Then, the following day, Mike Pusateri recorded a time lapse of the kickball game.

I especially love the taco break there in the middle, when everyone runs to go eat breakfast tacos. Yum!

Last time, a rumination on video quality. Today, a look at Ze Frank going Hollywood, courtesy of the NY Observer. The nut graf, to me, is buried halfway down the story:

In March of 2001, Mr. Frank was an art director at Dennis Interactive. He became an Internet rock star overnight when, as he put it, “The ‘How to Dance Properly’ thing hit.”

“You know, I made a little birthday invitation that I put online of myself dancing like an asshole with some sarcastic commentary, and I sent it to about 17 people, and then millions of people were watching it within a couple days,” he said. “It’s one of the strangest things that can happen to you. It’s just so crazy to be getting e-mails at that rate, where every single time you refresh there’s 60, 70 new e-mails from around the world. It was just so weird and exciting.”

Mr. Frank knew he was on to something. He quickly threw up a Web site and quit his job.

Again and again, the lesson I am learning is that jumping in with both feet and being really committed is the key to success. I've seen lots of people who have made little things that took off on the web, (hell, I've made some myself) and almost none of them have done what Ze's done with it. I don't know that my goal would be to get to Hollywood -- Ze's headed West just as I'm moving back East -- but it's still an impressive and useful reminder.

Andy Plesser of Beet.TV stopped by our offices at Six Apart a few weeks ago, and I had the chance to talk to him for a few minutes. Andy recorded the conversation on video, and now he's just put up "The Simple Secrets of Effective Videoblogging".

Though I'm pretty good with text blogging, I'm by no means an expert at video blogging, so this was really just a chance for me to talk about what I've observed from video blogs so far that seems to work well. The clip is only about two minutes long, and two more parts of the interview should be following shortly.

I love YouTube, but there's something you need to understand: YouTube just stomps around, recklessly murdering innocent bystanders. The latest casualties?

Joe Liberman's Political Career

Slate documents Lamont's ascendancy at Joe Liberman's expense, and what does John Dickerson name as the weapon of assassination? YouTube viral videos.

The Lamont videos were far more effective than tendentious blog posts, and they gave energetic supporters an outlet for their energies (a person can only pound so many yard signs). What's more, the videos offered a regular dose of entertainment to supporters who were interested but not obsessed.

Check out the Slate piece for a Top 5 list of anti-Joementum clips.

Windows Media Video

By dangling the DRM carrot in front of the legacy studios in music and movies, Microsoft was able to buy some content protected in Windows Media format. And by making Windows Movie Maker as good or better than iMovie, they were starting to get a foothold in content created by regular people. But YouTube doesn't convert Windows Media to work with its Flash player due to Microsoft's onerous restrictions, so you can't upload your Movie Maker clips to YouTube. (Naturally, Movie Maker won't output .mov or any other widely-usable formats.) Note to Microsoft: Community trumps codecs. Users see "I can't upload my Movie Maker clips to YouTube" as your bug, not theirs, and they don't want to hear about "transcoding licensing fees" just to watch funny videos.

Even if Microsoft makes it free for services to convert Windows Media Video to .flv for embedding in a Flash player (which won't happen), most of these services are running all their servers on Linux. They're not going to introduce Windows boxes into the mix just for this feature, because they're a huge additional management hassle.

My Free Time

TubeRaider alone has hours and hours of videos I could watch, if only I had the time. I consider it only fair cosmic retribution that it's costing them a bundle as well. Long live YouTube, serial killer.

Whoops, I should have mentioned this in time for you to see it live, but I was on Cranky Geeks with John Dvorak today. It's a fun little web video show (vlog? vlogcast? vlogcastumentary?) where me and John and Sebastian Rupley (PC Mag editor) and Mike Liebhold (from the Institute from the Future) were talking about a bunch of random geek topics.

Seems like the live streaming was a bit choppy, so maybe it's better to wait for the download anyway. Downloads of the video will be available tomorrow, and you can subscribe to the videocast in iTunes today. I promise it's the best dorky video show you'll watch that mentions Dvorak, dildos, and deep-fried dogs.