Written on July 4, 2008 – 5:34 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the infamous and hackled post by Dan Ackerman Greenberg? This viral video professional revealed some of his secrets in a guest contribution on TechCrunch, advising people to create fake accounts and more of those shady activities. His post started a storm of discontent and Dan was virtually killed in the comments. I’m sure he didn’t mind though, as he’s making millions with the promise that every video he touches, breaks the 100,000 views barrier. Well, here’s a tool he probably uses for that: Hey!Spread.
This service posts your video on nearly 20 different video hosts at once - how’s that for viral? You either upload the file or use the YouClone - a tool that rips it off Google’s video site to post it on the other hosts as well. Moreover, it tracks the popularity of the video by giving you a neat overview of the number of views - making it possible to see which site works best for you. It also allows you to compare it with other videos - even those from your competitors.
This will cost you some money though - one to three 5 cent credits per video -, but if you hang on to Timothy Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week theory, you’ll realize your own time is worth more.
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There is an interesting viral coming up on Youtube. A guy calling himself Eric Brody started a video blog a few weeks ago and has been uploading simple video’s about his new job, how bored he is and how he hopes to meet women online though his blog. Then, yesterday,in an angry post he told his audience he was fired from his job and was sent home with a box with his belongings. So far nothing exciting.
But today he uploaded a video titled ‘case 1017′ which he says he found in his box with personal belongings. It shows a weird scene, filmed in secret, of an apparent cover-up, somewhere in the US. There is the usual muffled sound, gunshots and shaky camera movements. As noted in the comments the video looks just slightly too good to be a home video so we can assume this is a viral video in the style of Cloverfield or even The Blair Witch Project. Or maybe it isn’t. Check it out yourself.
The ‘Fired from work, found a disk’ video (watched only 120 times)
The Case 1017 video (watched 120.000 times):
What I find interesting is that the movie industry is turning movies into something bigger than just the experience of going to a theatre for a 2 hours. George Lucas was one of the first, or most prolific, directors embracing merchandising which turned his movies into a starting point for a lot of kids who then spent years playing with their star wars inspired toys. Making up new episodes in their own heads along the way.
Now the movie becomes ‘just’ a part of a story. One day the characters in movies might start their existence years in advance with virtual characters on Facebook, fake movies on YouTube and real Google Ranks and online identities. The movie will then look and feel more like a documentary which will make it less clear where reality ends and fantasy begins. With Cloverfield and maybe ‘Case 1017′ we will see this movement begin where the Internet is not just used as a promotional medium but as a way to tell a cross-media story.
Written on January 4, 2008 – 5:15 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond played Tetris with real human-beings in an auditorium. This stop-motion video was played for Les Urbaines Festival in November 2007 in Switzerland.
Moreover, it’s extremely popular on YouTube. Six hours ago, this video was watched 250.000 times, now it counts 716,078 (!). Be number 716,079 and enjoy this digital art viral!
It would be easy to dismiss TownNote after looking at its 1999 style website for more than 1 second. It seems like nothing more than yet another digital eCard service. But after playing around with it for a minute and using it to send a group note to one person I suddenly understood the power of sending a card to one person with a group. So am I sold on the subject? Well…
TownNote makes it possible to send an eCard to one or more recipients and have it signed by a whole group. The concept is deceivingly simple and there is no sign of the usual banners, gradients and keywords associated with Web2.0 here. It just does what it does and it does it without flair or much fanfare.
So why do I write about it? Well, because although this isn’t a sexy service it did remind me, slightly, of a similar non-sexy service that I checked out in early 1996: Blue Mountain Arts.
“What, 780 million for an eCard service???”
You might not remember it but this was one of the first eCard services around. Nobody seemed to notice them but then one day they announced that they were bought by Excite@Home for a whopping $780 Million! Everybody in the internet industry looked up and said ‘What, 780 million for an eCard service???’. Until we looked at the numbers. It turned out that Blue Mountain Arts was THE viral growth company. Everybody was sending everybody eCards and Blue Mountain Arts was the central hub connecting everybody to everybody. It seemed to make sense.
And now there is TownNote. Will it rock the world? Become another Blue Mountain Arts? Not likely. But I’m sure it is possible, even for 1999 style design anti-Web2.0 businesses to build traffic with a simple mechanism that makes it easier to communicate with each other. So check the website, ignore it and then in a week or two, when you start receiving eCards (signed by your aunt, uncle, and all your nephews) think about this post, and send us a TownNote too.
UPDATE: better looking and more Web2.0 too is Squidnote.com. Not to be confused with Squidoo by the way. I guess resistance isn’t futile after all. ;-)
UPDATE II: Charles Duze from TownNote contacted me to let me know that they aren’t even IN beta yet and we can expect more new soon. Looking forward to it!
Written on July 4, 2008 – 5:34 pm
Written on March 16, 2008 – 2:07 pm
It would be easy to dismiss 
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