Francis watching Youtube: Francis’ latest obsession is watching Youtube videos of highway travel. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of videos of people driving across bridges and through cities recording the highway sights.
Text-only mode for Youtube.
"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube."
Do you need a website? BooneOakley’s is on Youtube. Tres cool, these cats have vision. Via Herd.
It’s hard to imagine now but there was a time in 2006 when Youtube didn’t own the video world, back when it was an independent project from some of the Paypal kids. I preferred its competitor Jumpcut, which allowed you to do simple editing online—splicing videos with pictures, adding headlines, etc. Then came the feeding frenzy: Google gobbled Youtube and Yahoo scored Jumpcut and the fate of the video services quickly followed the fortunes of its new masters.
Jumpcut is officially closed now, so I’m downloading my videos from there. They’re all short enough to repost to Flickr (another Yahoo property (so why couldn’t Jumpcut auto-import into Flickr? Grr…)). So here’s my archives from the early days of user generated video:
Francis Makes a Mess (Summer 2006)
This was a daily (sometimes hourly) occurence a few summers ago.
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Loading the FGC Gathering Truck (Summer 2006):
A big moment for American Friends, 2006 was the first time the main annual gathering of liberal Quakers was held on the West Coast. Jerimy P and Stephen D. boarded a rented truck a week before and drove the FGC Bookstore from Philadelphia to Tacoma, Washington.
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Theo sings the Thomas Song (Spring 2007):
The Thomas the Tank Engine song as sung by 3-1/2 year old Theo (don’t be confused by his initial description of it as the “Gordon Song”!),
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Francis Sings Elmo (Spring 2007)
“Living Beyond Breast Cancer has won supporters for one of its biggest fund-raisers with e-mail blasts, brochures, and personal calls to big donors. But that’s so yesterday. For the first time, the nonprofit based in Haverford is posting to its new Facebook page information on this year’s Yoga Unites event, which takes place Sunday. It also is tweeting on Twitter as @YU4LBBC and uploading video to YouTube. Of course, Living Beyond also blogs, and it shares photos on Flickr, including one of women saluting the sun on the steps of the Art Museum, where the annual Yoga Unites takes place. As a result, the number of teams signed up for the event has nearly tripled, the group reports. That’s the bottom-line promise of ‘social giving,’ which uses online networks to raise awareness and, ultimately, money.”
Martin’s Commentary:
For context, my recent posts on Nonprofits and Social Media
Will Facebook (all but) Replace Corporate Websites
I’m looking at the work of a potential non-profit client now. They have a fine website: recently redesigned, it has intuitive navigation, good e-commerce and a design that projects elegance. The client is staffed with some fantastically-creative people and the web team is obviously skilled. Yet despite all this, the website itself feels oddly static.
Nonprofits and Social Media
Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists—tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam. A new era is coming with social media.
Batch vs Real Time Processing and the Emerging Web Culture
Malcolm Gladwell treats us to another of his counter-intuitive x-rays of the world’s workings in this week’s New Yorker feature, “How David Beats Goliath.” His focus on the difference between batch and real time processing is a key to understanding why many nonprofit and commercial marketing professionals can use Twitter, Facebook and other real time media.
