The Social Media Guru

YouTube – The Social Media Guru.

Have you even read my online internet blog? It’s mega-awesome.

Hype Cycle

You’ve probably already seen this, even though it was published just a week ago.

It’s had nearly two million views in the last week, over 6,000 comments on YouTube itself, and been plugged into 826 blog posts. Among its honours, it’s the #2 – Top Favourited (All Time) – Sport. If it weren’t for Susan Boyle, it would be top video global of the month. It’s almost perfect in its spreadability:

• expertly filmed and edited
• great soundtrack
• the guy totally rides a bicycle up a frickin’ tree! a tree!

There are two schools of stunt videos: ones that go horribly wrong and paens to skill. This definitely falls into the latter camp. If you read through the comments on YouTube, you’ll find the general tenor is:

I’m not going to hold myself back..
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THIS???
OMFG I HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT GOOD HANDLING OF BIKE EVER.
Dude you fuckin rock, hold it up!

Like the spate of parkour videos that appeared a couple of years ago, it’s not just about skill: it’s transgressive – this is not the sort of thing your mum would want you to do. The police would give you a good talking to, as well. Actually, I don’t want you to do it, either – the tree will win. It’s not robbery or beating people up, though. This is peaceful – but definitely not passive – resistance. It’s all about ignoring the boundaries society wants to put on you. Jumping over the fence rather than going round it.

It’s also a film about being solitary: generally there’s no-one around but Danny, and where there are people they don’t get close, or even appear to notice. When they do notice – as with the closing shot, where he jumps off the bridge – by the time they’ve reacted, he’s gone. Especially interesting since one of the commentators says that he’s fairly well-known around Edinburgh and “always draws a big crowd”.

I suspect these latter two points speak very directly to the people who are spreading the film. This is a rebellion articulated through actions, not words.

At the same time, it’s very Scottish – or British. There’s a tone of grace, understatement and humility. The setting is the nice part of Edinburgh, not the ‘hood. There aren’t the fast edits and flash effects you’re used to in a stunts video. You aren’t listening to aggressive hip-hop or grindcore; you’re listening to a slow ballad called The Funeral. The guy doesn’t even speak, let alone brag or give us some nonsense about dedication and spirituality. And the video starts with him falling off the fence – twice, rather than a parade of victories. At 4:10, notice as he goes back and closes the gate he’s just jumped over – that’s a British stuntman for you.

Like most interesting things, it’s a mass of contradictions.

Anyway, well-done to Danny MacAskill and Dave Sowerby and also to Inspired Bicycles who sponsored them.

Sweded

Just watched Be Kind Rewind on PirateCity. In the interests of research, I tested an illegal video service that streams movies for free. The quality is fairly poor – somewhere between YouTube and Vimeo. And not ideally, I watched this widescreen movie in 4:3. Jack Black seems a lot slimmer nowadays.

As I am sure you know, the plot is that the videotapes at the store run by Mike (Mos Def) and friend Jerry (Black) are accidentally wiped. They decide to remake the movies themselves in order to avoid getting in trouble with the store’s owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Baker).

Surprisingly, the neighbourhood takes kindly to these homemade remakes, thanks to their authenticity, and… but that would spoil it. The remakes are retitled as ‘sweded’- hence the title of this post.

The movie is fun and has some memorable moments: well worth 100 minutes of your life. It’s a sentimental story, though, and, frankly, I don’t think that it could happen in real life.

In real life, raising the initial funding would be really easy but gaining community support would be a massive challenge. Almost the opposite of the film’s premise.

Community, home-grown video projects are typically created because there’s funding available from agencies like RDAs (Regional Development Agencies). They do some stuff. No-one outside the project cares, the project leaders only care because of the funding, and once the funding money is spent, they generally die away. They are supply-driven. Some bright spark in Whitehall or somewhere comes up with the idea of a community creative project and throws a couple of million at it. They haven’t bothered to survey the landscape and so it stumbles at the first hurdle, getting anyone interested.

Agencies leap at the chance of delivering to this non-existent demand, and come up with all kinds of reasons why yes, it really is out there on the street because that couple of million sounds pretty sweet. They have probably failed to deliver on a couple of projects like this before, but they do know how to write a tender document. The creative industries are rife with this shit.

As we all know, successful projects are driven by demand. And so, is there a demand for sweded video community or even a sweded commercial project? The geek demand I know about. The star wars pixellated remake (link) and sweded Doctor Who are out there, but I don’t know about mainstream stuff.

Is there sweded Desperate Housewives?

[SPOILER]

In the movie, the protagonists are eventually slammed by copyright lawyers and have to come up with their own material. I am not a lawyer and so I am not sure of the legality of that. I believe pastiche and parody allows some protection.

Take the Test

I was totally taken by surprise by this one.

(A little further research has revealed that it was created by WCRS, and that there is some controversy over the originality of the idea. What a shame.)

Internet Helps ermm.. Harms TV?

Remember last week, when CBS announced that its YouTube presence had lifted its audience figures? Letterman was up five percent in the month since they’d started posting excerpts on the service.

Well, today, the BBC publishes research that suggests the contrary:

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

And online and mobile viewing is rising – three quarters of users said they now watched more than they did a year ago.

But online video viewers are still in the minority, with just 9% of the population saying they do it regularly.

Another 13% said they watched occasionally, while a further 10% said they expected to start in the coming year.

So what does that mean? Is internet video good for TV viewing figures, like CBS said, or bad, like the BBC says?

In part, the answer may lie in the methodology employed. Asking people what they do does not return the same results as measuring what they really do. People try to please researchers, and they represent themselves as the person they want to be. They might also not really know where their time goes.

There’s another way of reconciling the results. It also might mean that our television viewing is becoming more filtered. Internet fans are watching less, but they are watching more of the shows that create a buzz on the net. It’s the long tail of television that’s suffering not the fat head of the Simpsons, Family Guy, the Daily Show and the other top YouTube favourites.

Elsewhere: Michael Urlocker discusses how the broadcast business might respond to this disruption. Antony Mayfield thinks the trend will continue.

Not So Lonely

The new Wired has a great feature about the lonelygirl15 story. Lonelygirl15, you will remember, was a hit YouTube vlog about a teenage girl, her family and her ambiguous relationship with her friend Daniel. You’ll also recall that the central character, Bree, turned out to be an actress called Jessica Rose, working with a guy called Mesh Flinders and a doctor, Miles Beckett, and his wife as business partners. Emails to Bree were answered by the doctor’s wife, Amanda. What seems fascinating to me is that although Bree and her relationships were fictional, the truth isn’t a million miles away from the fiction. Bree and Mesh were really an actress and an aspiring film-maker. But who did you think they were, since their videos were on YouTube? The real Bree and Daniel are probably already on the video network somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

Some edited highlights from the section covering what happened after the deception was uncovered, which was the last time I read anything about this. Notable is the complete failure of the mainstream media to cope with the phenomenon:

No backlash

Many assumed the series would sputter and die. Media reports zeroed in on how viewers had been duped, suggesting an inevitable backlash. But the fans – raised on the unreality of reality TV and with the role-playing ethos of the Web – seemed to take the revelation in stride. One guy who had corresponded regularly with Bree wrote to ask if he’d been conversing with Jessica Rose.

“No, you’ve been talking to Bree,” came the reply (from Amanda). “If you want to talk to Jessica Rose, you can go to her MySpace page. If you want to keep talking to Bree, use this email.”

“Fair enough,” the fan wrote back, and then went on to tell Bree the latest news in his life. To many, it didn’t seem to matter whether she was real or not.

Viewers and revenue

The show has a reliable viewership of 300,000 per video, and the team posts two, sometimes more, each week. Lonelygirl15.com, the site Beckett and Flinders maintain as the center of Bree’s universe, generates about $10,000 a month in ad revenue by attaching commercials to the end of the videos they stream. [...]

But what of the future?

[TV execs fail to understand the format] Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.” [...]

If this was going to be the first successful Internet TV show, they felt it needed to embrace the medium. As a result, they still don’t have a deal.