internet video 

It’s been my week of internet video.

is wattagecat evil?

It started with the accidental discovery, via the front page of the very strange Encyclopedia Dramatica of Matt versus wattagecat on YouTube, which footage leaves me unsure whether to hail YouTube as the start of something amazing or a terrifying insight into imminent cultural implosion.

futurefilm and code burnout

Then, I spent yesterday evening at a FutureFilm event hosted by London West Side (who I’d prefer to be linking to but whose page seems to be broken; hence the dorkbotlondon link). Heard Jo Walsh talk about how she wrote several years’ worth of code in a few months, had a transcendental vision of the semantic web, and now gets migraines whenever she goes near a screen. She’s taking all her coding expertise offline. I think she’s on to something.

eye spy eyespot

For those of us not quite so bleeding-edge, I also discovered eyespot, a site that lets you upload and edit videos online. I’ve still got a ton of footage from Vinni Kiniki’s explosive curation of a collaborative graffiti mindbomb on Heleana’s bedroom wall at the last AHP that I could do with turning into something more palatable, and this might just be the way for us non-Mac-users to do it.

mobile-mentary

And I met a very nice bloke called Max, who wants to make mobile films. I came away with lots of thoughts about The Human Pet and the more well-known lonelygirl15, both interesting experiments in longer-running narratives in a user-generated format.

web telly?

Then tomorrow, the bloke from¬†Current TV¬†is in town. I’m really interested in how they’re thinking about online content; it seems increasingly likely that YouTube’s functionality is going to end up being a fairly unremarkable commodity, which may open space for more filtered broadcasting. That’s certainly what Vice Magazine’s new TV station is heading for.

I took a look at the latter this morning and don’t like how one-way the conversation seems to be. But I still think that there’s a big opportunity for media channels able to open up space for user-generated media but who are exploring the ways in which people still seem to want quality control, recommendation mechanisms, filtering and so on.

what killed which star?

Then, finally, my friend Brook (currently writing a murder mystery for a language company based in Second Life) tells me that The Buggles’ song ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ was the first thing ever played on MTV. Which I guess I should’ve known already. So I’ve been trying to figure it out: if video killed the radio star, did the internet kill the video star? Or did video kill the video star?

offline semiotic short-circuit

It went round in my head;¬†I downloaded it; hummed it all day; hummed it all the way through¬†the FutureFilm night. And then, in the pub afterwards, it came on the stereo just as I left. Totally freaked me out. Talk about uploading your consciousness directly to your reality via no interface. I really think Jo knows more than she’s letting on.