Some may disagree, but I have truly found the best YouTube video ever — it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s cute, it has a good song, it’s well edited, it’s short, and it anesthetizes or distracts small children (specifically, my two sets of toddler nieces when they’re on the verge of exploding). Finally, a real use for YouTube! If you have not seen it before, and even if you have, allow me to ask you to consider the artistic validity of the following, the legendary Kitty Cat Dance:
Seriously, it’s been seen millions of times now, CONTINUES to pick up views and notice more than two years after its release, and it has to be among the most successful YouTube clips so far. Listen to the song: it’s tight, develops well, is a little twisted in parts, and the punkish chorus is genius, since it helps keep the whole piece from becoming too repetitive or too cutesy. And the use of stills works great, since it lets you edit super-tightly to the music while also creating that immediate sense of unreality. You can learn a lot about what works on the web from watching this one. Again and again and again and…
MySpace Seeks to Make An “Impact”, Launches New Political Channel. In the process, MySpace sends me into anaphylactic shock by using the word “impact” to refer to something other than a physical collision (”Nurse, get me 20 cc’s of epenephrine, stat! Can’t you see that this man’s dangerously allergic to bureaucratic-speak?”).
Will the Right Develop a Netroots Equivalent? “Since the beginning, conservative blogging has been marked more by punditry than activism…and most are content to keep on doing just that.”
Online game to look at something not-so-funny: “World Without Oil is the first major project to invite the Internet’s staggering collective intelligence and imagination to address a real world problem: a realistic global oil shock.” A tip from my NET colleague Monica Walters.
Adopting the tone of scolds throughout time, she slams the younger generation (damn kids, get off my lawn!) as shallow and perpetually obsessed with dreams of personal fame. Citing carefully filtered sources (among them, the musings of reality TV stars and some 16-year-olds posting on a site called iWannaBeFamous.com), she draws the inevitable conclusion that as a culture we’re drowning in a sea of narcissism:
