On New Years Eve Radiohead released a 52 minute live performance of On Rainbows titled Scotch Mist. It features some poetry as well as imagery selected by the band (Current is also playing it on the teevee). Yet another move that makes me think Radiohead totally gets the web. I hope they sell a billion albums.
It’s days like this, where the unexpected rain forces exceptional stress on the public transit system and thousands of unhappy commuters bump into each other, wishing they had their summer back and that the world was a little more civil. A little more like this:
The Polite Umbrella is an art project by Joo Youn Paek that allows a nice person to adapt the shape of their umbrella and respect personal space by pulling on some strings on the handle. I think they should be mandatory in New York.
…is that you might end up with a giant pair of boobs next to your campaign videos.
I commend Barack Obama for his use of Youtube, Flickr and Facebook, and I apologize for the fact that “search sexy singles” is the most appropriate advertising they could find to put alongside your campaign.
Last week YouTube released a new player along with a few other features across the site (for some reason they have yet to blog about these changes). Personally I liked the look and feel of their old player more, but that is beside the point: the new interface exposes the most popular off-site links to the given video (a.k.a. backlinks), allowing users to discover who is really driving viewership. From my brief interaction, it appears the video must be embedded on the source page, and not simply a text link. Here’s the backlinks for their most popular video of all time (Evolution of Dance):
What you find inside this little hidden window is usually not startling: MySpace profiles, i-am-bored.com, and so on. But in some cases the backlinks are more interesting. Take for instance the popular Treadmills video by Ok Go is apparently the most downloaded music video of all time. In YouTube’s backlinks we find the largest driver of traffic to be a weblog named fugufish, with over 200k links. Who is this mysterious blogger? Were they the first people to identify the video, or simply a maven that brought it to a larger audience? For a researcher of diffusion (such as myself), these links are fascinating, and start allowing us to understand how giant internet memes tend to spread.
This move also continues to solidify YouTube’s place in the ever-evolving media ecology of the web. It solidifies the video site as a platform integrated with other media providers. You can think of this feature as a sort of traffic-share with those sites that drive the most viewership; just as AdSense shares Google’s ad revenue with publishers who use the ads, YouTube will now reward bloggers with traffic for using YouTube as their video platform. YouTube was a pioneer in the platform approach to building an audience, and they continue to innovate.
This is the personal weblog of Cameron Marlow, research scientist at Facebook. You can find a comprehensive list of content in the archives, or you can simply search using the box above.
