kottke.org posts about YouTube
The Associated Press and British Movietone are uploading 17,000 hours of archival news footage, some of dating back to the late 19th century. The videos can be found on the AP Archive and British Movietone channels. Some notable videos from the collection follow. Coverage of the Hindenberg disaster:
The celebration of VE Day in London:
Coco Chanel fashion show from 1932:
Martin Luther King Jr. and marchers being arrested in Selma:
See also British Pathe.
Burning a person alive is not a new act in warfare or intimidation. Far from it. So how did the gruesome burning of a Jordanian pilot become a incident that outraged the world and possibly altered a war? It was on video. Seeing a video changes everything. The existence of video footage can determine what leads the news, what drives public opinion, and what gets lodged in our memories. It can also determine who becomes a celebrity, who gets elected, which products we purchase, and confirm again and again the dominance of the once overlooked house-cat. Whoever controls the video controls the story. And since about 2005, the person who’s controlled the video has been you. You, the cat owner. You, the aspiring singer. You, the citizen journalist. And yes, you the terror group determined to intimidate and remain at the forefront of a global conversation. From The Telegraph: How YouTube Changed the World.
There’s a good reason your cat looks so depressed. The days of her antics dominating YouTube are long gone. As the New Yorker’s Tad Friend explains, in addition to cats “YouTube was adults with camcorders shooting kids being adorably themselves. It was amateur hour.” Since then, YouTube has gone pro. Jeffrey Katzenberg predicts that “within five years, YouTube will be the biggest media platform of any, by far, in the entire world.” It’s where your kids are. It’s where the new stars are. And it’s where your cat isn’t. Welcome to the new Hollywood and Vine.
Great essay by Paul Ford on the hidden infrastructure that makes most of your favorite user-created viral videos possible: 4’ by 8’ by 1/2” slabs of drywall, screwed into studs and painted beige.
The people dancing and talking and singing in beige rooms with 8’ ceilings are surrounded by standards, physically and online. Technological standards like HTML5 also allow us to view web pages and look at video over the Internet. All of their frolic is bounded by a set of conventions that are essentially invisible yet define our national physical and technological architecture. Their dancing, talking bodies are the only non-standardized things in the videos.
This is a nice article about how memes are often made or promoted deliberately by financial interests and not because of a spontaneous popular uprising, but mostly I wanted to highlight this statement:
Google’s YouTube, not Apple’s iTunes, is now the dominant force in music.
I’ve been convinced for awhile now that YouTube and not Android or Google+ will be their main source of revenue if/when Google’s search business wanes. (via @claytoncubitt)
This Reddit group is collecting links to full-length movies and TV shows that are available on YouTube. Like this unauthorized copy of Django Unchained:
See if you can get through the whole thing before it gets taken down.
Update: David reminded me that you can actually watch full-length movies and TV shows on YouTube for a rental fee. (thx, david)
Keith Ratliff posted dozens of videos showcasing high-powered guns on his popular YouTube channel, FPSRussia. Last week, he was found dead with a single shot to the head, surrounded by several guns…but not the gun that killed him.
The news, coming amid a national debate about gun control, rippled across the blogs and social networking sites where his videos were popular. Tributes on Facebook and Twitter came from fans stunned that such a well-armed expert had not been able to defend himself.
“For him not to pull out that gun and try to defend himself, he had to feel comfortable around somebody,” his wife, Amanda, told a television channel in Lexington, Ky., where he used to live. “Either that or he was ambushed.”
Here’s a FPSRussia video showing off a fully automatic shotgun that can shoot 300 rounds per minute even after being submerged in water:
And this drone with a machine gun on it is terrifying:
(via the atlantic)
Update: Just to clarify because I’m getting a bunch of mail about it, Ratliff was a gun nut and the owner of that YouTube channel, but he was not the person in all those videos…he was more like the producer/camera operator.
Also, that quadricopter machine gun thing is CGI and a commercial for a video game. Soon enough though.
AVOS, a new internet company founded by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has acquired the social bookmarking service Delicious from Yahoo!
Why has Yahoo! chosen to transition Delicious to AVOS?
While we love Delicious (and our users love Delicious), we wanted to find a home for the product where it can receive more love and attention. We think AVOS is that place.
When will AVOS officially start running Delicious?
We anticipate Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011. By agreeing to AVOS’s terms of service upfront, you will allow us to move your data when the time comes to transfer control to AVOS.
Delicious founder Josh Schachter reacted to the news on Twitter, saying:
inbox asplode!
You give it a year and YouTube Time Machine will show you videos of events from that year. For instance: 1894, 1943, and 1991. A super idea. (thx, alice)
In defending itself against a copyright lawsuit brought by Viacom, YouTube notes that the media company has been surreptitiously uploading its copyrighted content to YouTube for years.
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.
This jibes with what I heard a couple of years ago:
I heard that the staff of the Daily Show and Colbert Report upload the shows to YouTube as soon as they can after the shows air and then the next day, lawyers from Comedy Central hit YouTube with takedown requests for the uploaded shows.
(thx, @peretti)
Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 is a set of pieces written for the piano by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, some of the first western music to written in an atonal style. Cory Arcangel took a bunch of YouTube videos of cats playing the piano and fused them together into a performance of op. 11.
This project fuses a few different things I have been interested in lately, mainly “cats”, copy & paste net junk, and youtube’s tendency in the past few years to host videos that are as good and many times similar to my favorite video artworks. I think all this is somehow related.
Cory’s no-bullshit statements about his art are just as entertaining as the work itself:
So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos…
You can catch Cory’s project in-person at Team Gallery in NYC and at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria.
Josh Poehlein’s Modern History project takes screen grabs from YouTube videos and assembles them into collages.
These are wonderful. And he’s giving them away.
I am offering large printable files to anyone interested at no cost. Computer files are the most easily reproducible information on the planet. In this particular case I see no reason to imbue a false sense of preciousness on the work. The information I gathered to create the collages is publicly availaibe, and the collages themselves are no different.
(via conscientious)
Thru You is a site that showcases remixed YouTube videos…the singing from one video combined with the drums from another and the piano from a third and so on. I was skeptical but these are really well done. Do I even need to say that this reminds me of Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet? (via sfj)
Aha, Obama will be doing online fireside chats, but in video format on YouTube.
Online political observers say President-elect Obama’s innovative, online-fueled campaign will likely evolve into a new level of online communication between the public and the White House — the Internet-era version of President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” between 1933 and 1944.
Here’s Obama’s first video address as President-Elect. His transition team, potential cabinet members, and other experts will also be recording videos in the coming weeks.
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