Category: Video

David Eggers

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I got a little shot of inspiration today by listening to Dave Eggers’ TEDTalk where he tells his story about how he took his desire to give kids more academic attention and formed a movement.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QbzvT6vko]

Eggers is an inspirational guy and here’s a link to a good quote i found from him last year.

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Ninja Kitty

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This just made my morning.  Sometimes cats are just fickin’ hilarious. I love the arrogance about them.  George Carlin used to say that cats felt no guilt and the reason for this was because they lack eyebrows. Dogs, who have huge eyebrows were always feeling guilty when they did something wrong.  Funny.  Check this out:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muLIPWjks_M]

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YouTube getting its ass kicked by Hulu?

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I read an interesting post by Cuban called “Hulu is kicking Youtube’s Ass”  where he argues that YouTube’s business model is broken and that Hulu has the only sustainable model going forward. He argues that because Hulu has rights to sell ads on their videos they are doing a much better job in revenue per video and revenue per user. Hulu is gaining momentum.  Cuban argues that they might already have more monetizaable users and traffic and that by next year it will have more revenue than YouTube.

These are fighting words but it does lead to a bigger question of whether you can monetize users and self-expresssion.  Web 2.0 is all about user created content but if that content is only that and not something that can be monetized – then do you have a big business?  Facebook and MySpace have taken shots lately of not being able to monetize their huge traffic.

Almost as if YouTube heard the conversation, they announced today that they are removing the 10 minute limit on their videos for Partners. I could see them getting more into Hulu’s business as time goes on and licenseing more and more content to distribute and sell ads around.

Nathan Myhrvold – Pretty Badass

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I just watched this video about Nathan who is quite an incredible guy who spends 18 minutes describing what he does. It’s a lot of very scientific stuff like:

  • Archeology – digitizing Easter Island statues and the pyramids
  • Inventing new nuclear reactors – which are more efficient and better than the current designs
  • Inventing meta-reactors which are really real invisibility cloaks
  • Bio-medical research – is studying the eyes
  • Building radio-telescopes and funding the SETI project. If you want the movie Contact, he describes that all the characters are based on real-life folks. He’s the creepy rich guy
  • Cooking – took a sabatical from Microsoft to study cooking in France and occasionally works at a Seattle restaurant
  • BBQ – he won the world championship BBQ prize
  • Paleontology – he’s discovered a T-Rex in a badlands

It’s just a video about him and how he loves to do a million things. As he says, the talk is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” But that’s how he operates. One thing that stands out is that he seems to be one of the bigger badasses alive. I’m happy that people like them are out there and trying to discover the past mysteries of the world and invent new ones. Pretty interesting stuff…

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Prince vs. Radiohead

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An interesting post here about Prince’s behavior on YouTube. Many people don’t know this but Prince is a Nazi on YouTube.  Anything about him, any song, any mention and he issues a takedown notice.  None of his songs are on YouTube.  This hurts the Qloud experience, so obviously i know about it.

But things got interesting this week.  At the Coachella music festival a few weeks ago Prince played the Radiohead song Creep.  In the world of YouTube, Radiohead is the complete opposite of Prince.  They put lots of their stuff online for free (including an entire album) and even have their own YouTube channel.  So when Prince tried to take down postings of his performance of Creep YouTube is caught in the middle.  Prince doesn’t own the rights to the song and in fact during a recent interview Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke was quoted as saying, “Well, tell him [Prince] to unblock it. It’s our…song.”

I like the battle.  I can understand Prince’s strategy of trying to create scarcity of his product to it doesn’t get dilluted or played out, but i love Radiohead’s strategy of putting all their stuff out there for the world to hear and play with.   Who’s side are you on?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FutZukovyAQ]

Youtube is incredible

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The beauty of Youtube is the simplicity. Because it’s so open-ended, you get an amazingly broad amount of submissions. They don’t niche it they just say “submit” Here are 2 great examples of just pure gems that have no other outlet. The first is a 14 year old in China who is just a RIDICULOUS guitar player. The second is a video of a 14 year old who has put together his own little song using some clever video editing tricks. Neither of these would be found without YouTube. I love it

And i’m not the only one. 43 million views! That’s some serious traffic.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=QjA5faZF1A8]

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=mHwV2JuwZls]