Blog category: Web Video

Groovin’ | July 24th, 2009

This is all over YouTube, and I would describe it as “off the chain”:

G would be fine if we had tried that, but you better believe I’d be twisting my knee or something fun.

MTV: Suddenly Great Again | October 29th, 2008

MTV has been essentially a total negative in cultural energy for the past ten years, but then they go ahead and launch this site and totally redeem themselves:

MTV Music Beta

When they say beta, I really hope this one sticks around, because the site counts more than 21,000 videos dating back to Jimi Hendrix clips and plenty of other goodies: Metallica, Run DMC and Grandmaster Flash. I was happy to see Talking Heads as one of the most-viewed vids, so maybe there’s hope for MTV after all.

The intellectual property rights issues on this must be hella complicated, but this is more than worth it. I no longer hate you, MTV! (And thanks, Mark, for pointing this one out.)

Yo | September 15th, 2008

Recent things:

• I believe that even if I supported anything about Sarah Palin, I’d still be really sick of seeing her everywhere I turn. Conservatives would compare Palin’s star power to Obama, but Obama’s ascent took a good two years and wasn’t compressed into a two-week news cycle. He’s also one of the two people actually running for president.
• Another Palin-borne irony: after years of ignorant sports commentators decrying hockey as “not a real sport”, it’s now somehow true that being peripherally involved with organized hockey (even at the little-kid level) is considered a solid qualification for the Presidency of the United States. The NHL’s marketing department needs to jump on this with the quickness.
• Part of the reason I was excited to get to the University of Michigan this year was the chance to go to a school with a real football program. Nevermind my conflicted loyalties from being born in Columbus and having attending another Big Ten school; this was supposed to be my chance to claim a piece of the action as the Wolverines crushed all opponents. Instead I get games like this, this and also this (which, though a win, was most unimpressive.)

  Northwestern, meanwhile, is 3-0.

  Bastards.

• While searching for a sound effect that would convey Michigan football’s limpness, I did manage to get seriously geeked from this:

  ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A what.

• Congrats to my cousin Dante and his wife Kari on their new son (and, simultaneously, their anniversary), who was born just this morning and is the first of the new generation in my family. Pitt, you just gained another fan.

Obama vs. McCain on the Media | September 9th, 2008

I no longer work there, but that won’t stop me from plugging this nicely summarizing Slate piece by Tim Wu detailing the two presidential candidates’ positions on media ownership and net neutrality.

Suffice it to say that I fall squarely within the Obama camp on the question of net neutrality: the Internet can no longer be considered a product, but instead a network similar to the airwaves. Like the airwaves are licensed by the government, there’s room for licensing of the Internet’s physical network by bandwidth costs, but you can’t package “the web” and sell it to consumers in a realistic fashion. That’s a really old-fashioned way of thinking about it. Instead, the web is the marketplace wherein websites sell their goods and duke it out for audience and revenue share. To change the web into a cable-television model is just imposing an old-fashioned dynamic on a system that’s already created its own rules.

As for fair share of political views within the media, the lefty side of me thinks it’s necessary, but the MBA/realist side of me thinks differently: people are going to listen to or watch the crap no matter what you do, so somebody might as well make some money off of it. Do you then require those moneymakers to put on informed, objective (if that’s even possible), educated content as a result? I don’t think it’s even relevant: the media marketplace is so segmented these days anyway that the consumer is going to seek out whatever they want and likely find it, whether that’s on-the-scene reporting from Zimbabwe’s reconstituted parliament or the skateboarding dog.

It’s a dog on a skateboard!

Pittsburgh Penguins: Worst Actors Ever | January 30th, 2008

Thanks to Jerry for cluing me in to this awesome commercial. The first nine seconds are blank, but keep watching:

Why didn’t Malkin get an equally terrible/hilarious line?

Wiz Khalifa | November 8th, 2007

This guy came out last year, but I had to give blog props to Pittsburgh’s newest and best rapper:

412!

Too Easy, Yet Great | September 4th, 2007

You don’t see these guys living in DC. Some things about New York, I really don’t miss:

Though I’d say hipsterism became a parody of itself around 2003 or so, it’s still funny. (Thanks, John.)

Our Fellow Guests | September 3rd, 2007

These dudes shared downtown Indy and our hotel with us during the wedding weekend. (I may or may not have mentioned to the Slate V peeps a few weeks prior that the convention would be there with us.)

Good times.

The Humans Are Dead | July 25th, 2007

I planned to cancel my HBO subscription this summer, but then I caught Flight of the Conchords and now I’m stuck to the show like a junkie with monkey disease. So I’m going with a copout post of three of the best:

Big Ups to Things | July 9th, 2007

• Big ups to my friends at PandaSmash.com for doing a cool job cutting on the web’s video sites. Right here. I personally would like to see more of Emo Sam, potentially a spinoff series. Hey, it worked for Rhoda.
• Big ups to A-Z Guitar Tabs for having such a complete archive. You think of a song, it’s up on there. Now I need a site to keep me motivated to learn to play. Or I can just wait 15 years for guitar-teaching neural implants and keep playing Guitar Hero II in the meantime. Sweet.
• Big ups to Rock Creek Park. Pretty cool woods and forest stuff to do in the middle of DC.
• Big ups to Morningstar Farms Grillers Original. Cooked in the pan with a little bit of olive oil and topped with some A1, these are sometimes higher than real burgers on the taste scale.
• Big ups to sunblock. Irish people in sunny climates thank yinz guys for keeping us out of lobster territory. Less ups to being pale as hell in the first place, though.
• Also, big ups to lobsters. You are delicious.

I’m out.