Almost a year after starting The Show, Ze Frank is still firing on all cylinders. Yesterday’s show was particularly good. Only a handful of episodes to go…Ze is stopping The Show on March 17.

• video
• Ze Frank

Ze Frank is headed to Hollywood to “

Ze Frank is headed to Hollywood to “pump that area”. (via fimoculous)

• Hollywood
• Ze Frank

New modes of production result in new forms of media, not always

Before YouTube and Google Video came along, video on the web often suffered from taking too many cues from the production values of traditional media. Even in the early days of YouTube, a typical video made by someone for an audience was like a mini-movie: 15 seconds of titles, followed by 10 seconds of the actual content of the video, and then 10 seconds of closing credits. Eventually, many people came to realize that all that crap at the beginning and end was unecessary…it’s OK not to have a 40 second video if you only have 10 seconds of something to say. Ze Frank took this notion to the extreme; he often launches right into something at the beginning, eschews transitions, and he just stops at the end. If an episode of The Show is 2 minutes long, it’s because he has 2 minutes of something to say.

Podcasters have been slower to break out of the mold provided by talk radio. The playing of music before segments and as transitions between segments makes some sense on the radio, where it’s used in some cases to fill airtime. But for podcasts, there’s no need to fill airtime with anything but content. 30 seconds of music before the actual podcast begins is the audio equivalent of Flash splash pages on web sites. For instance, the Diggnation podcast has 10 seconds of ads and 30 seconds of theme music before the hosts start talking and even then it’s more than a minute before there’s any new information. It’s important to set expectations and the mood (also know as branding), but it’s possible to do that in a much more economical way — something more akin to the Windows startup sound + “hi this is [name] from [name of show] and let’s get started” — or at other times during the podcast.

Interestingly, when I was looking around for examples of this wasted airtime, the folks making the most economical use of the listener’s time in producing podcasts were from the mainstream media. That is, the people innovating on the form are not the same as those who are innovating on production. Perhaps in an attempt to seem more credible, native podcasters have embraced more traditional forms while those with experience producing audio content for other media are more free to tailor their content to the new medium.

• audio
• podcasting
• YouTube
• Ze Frank

Why does Ze Frank’s face fill the entire screen on The Show? According to experiments described in The Media Equation, when participants were shown a series of photographs of people shot from different distances from the camera, “the faces that had the most impact on the viewers were the ones with screen-filling faces and that seemed ‘closer’ to the viewer, those with the least interpersonal distance”.

• psychology
• video
• Ze Frank

Fifty people showed their asses, so the infamous “lost episode” of Ze Frank’s The Show has been reposted to the site. Clean towels all around.

• video
• Ze Frank

Putting out a daily 3-minute video show on the web is getting Ze Frank [wait for it….] a whole lot of ass. If enough people upload photos of themselves with “sports racer” written on their asses, Ze will repost the so-called “missing episode” of The Show (a copy of which I have and am trying hard not to upload to YouTube). Questions: How are these people writing so legibly on their own butts? Are they getting someone else to do it…and if so, man, that must be an awkward conversation. “You want me to write ‘sports racer’ where?” (Probably NSFW.)

• NSFW
• video
• Ze Frank

Ze Frank and The Show gets some coverage in the NY Times. See The Show for yourself.

• video
• Ze Frank

Today’s episode of The Show aptly demonstrates the pitfalls of “user generated content”. (What, you don’t watch The Show? Get on it!)

• The Wisdom of Crowds
• video
• Ze Frank