Monarchism when it comes to the British used to be about reverential distance. At some point, probably the 1960s, that began to change and, dear g*d, it's now at the point that this video is a "tribute".
A relative passed it on, it's a meme with 2.5m+ hits in just this version. It's someone who has discovered a morphing software programme - take a series of pictures and have them dissolve one into another. They discovered the trick and thought 'owh, her maj would love this'.
This is a video tribute to Queen Elizabeth II on achieving 60 years as the constitutional monarch of the Commonwealth realms, and head of the Commonwealth of Nations, head of state of the Crown dependencies and British Overseas Territories, Supreme Governor of the Church of England and in many of her realms she carries the title Defender of the Faith.
But it's not a tribute, it's a creepy distortion of the image, a parody that sits alongside morphs of Elvis and Michael Jackson. An awkward marriage of pop culture ('Chariots of Fire'?!) with language like "in her many realms" ...
Monarchism is so reduced now that the video producer and commentators cannot see what 50 years ago would have been obvious, that it's the definition of disrespectful.
The Thais have the right idea. If you're going to have this sort of constitutional arrangement treat the -- gild the -- gilded inhabitants properly ....
Youtube is really really really big. In the US searches on the site are around a quarter of all Google searches.
In this environment battles range as users debate issues via their own video creations whether via talking head to webcam or produced-up little films. Amongst the hot topics is climate change.
Peter Sinclair aka greenman3610 runs a graphic design and animation studio in Midland, MI and produces the very effectively done 'climate crock of the week' series. An activist and writer for 30 years in the areas of energy and environment, he is best placed to tear to shreds the sort of unscientific, unresearched nonsense on climate change which appears in the media frequently enough to feed a weekly series.
Battle, on Youtube, often involves DMCA, (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) claims against a video which usually results in it being removed from YouTube.
The DMCA, (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), was originally intended to protect copyright owners from internet abuse, but has systematically been used improperly, notoriously by authoritarian religious groups and cults (Scientologists) and people such as creationists, in order to restrain criticism and free speech on the internet.
This is what happened to Sinclair in July when he criticized and parodied the work of well known climate denier Anthony Watts, and his "SurfaceStations.org" project.
Copyright law allows for critical review, parody, and transformational use of material.
Sinclair filed a 'counternotice' with Youtube, affirming, "under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled."
Two weeks later Youtube told him, "this content has been restored and your account will not be penalized."
What the silencing attempt resulted in was greater traffic and visibility for Sinclair's videos. This has also been the case with other great science defenders using Youtube, such as Thunderf00t, an English-expat who takes apart creationist.
In his latest piece Sinclair takes on how one of the world's most respected and experienced climate modelers, Mojib Latif's observations in September on natural climate variability were misinterpreted by climate change deniers.
Ironically, Latif's message was precisely that natural variations in the long term warming might be misinterpreted, by the media, out of ignorance or malice!
Earlier he took on Channel Four's unfortunately resonant film 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'.
LibDem MP Lynne Featherstone is the party's lead on web stuff and so she should be - she's had a blog since 2003 and has fed it practically everyday since. Lynne even credits her election victory to her strong online presence and use of it as an organising tool.
When she came to updating her website she chose Simon Dickson of Puffbox, the man responsible for many website transformations including Number Ten's.
For her site Dickson has done something entirely new and - I think - brilliant. Called a 'lifestream' it brings together all the flotsum and jetsum of Lynne's online life in one place - her site.
So the grand concept of the site is the use of a tabbed 'lifestream' as the homepage. The initial view lists her last 10 actions, no matter where they happened - including Early Day Motion signatures, which required me to write my own scraper. Then, if you want to see her activity on one of those specific areas, you just click the appropriate tab. It's all driven by RSS; the tabs are powered by ajax; the lists are generated by a cron for obvious reasons.
It includes content from:
Her blog
Hornsey & Wood Green LibDem press releases
Her tweets
Her pictures on Flickr
Her in Hansard
Early Day Motion signatures
Her videos on YouTube
Media cuttings about her
So rather than a whole lot of icons you click through to find content this brings it all together. As I said, brilliant. And just maybe a first?
(Just not sure about the name 'lifestream', only I can't think of anything better).
eGovernment Register reports today on 'social media' use in local councils (LAs), noting that work by Liz Azyan published on her blog at LGEOResearch.com shows it at:
Number
% of LAs
Facebook
48
11%
Twitter
128
30%
YouTube
63
15%
RSS
122
28%
Web dev blogs/feeds
6
1%
Now I would argue that RSS is a bit misclassified here as 'social media'. That's one interpretation of it but another is as a data feed. That's what the Mash The State campaign is about, having feeds which can be 'auto-discovered' and are machine readable.
What shocked me in these numbers is that Twitter has in a few months been adopted by more councils than RSS over many years. You have to ask as well what 'RSS' use is being reported. Is it merely a feed of press releases extolling the greatness of the council as opposed to, say, planning applications or sports events? Mash The State's campaign is actually about the incredibly modest goal of all councils have a PR RSS feed by the end of this year. The bar has been set low by a campaign group: this speaks volumes.
So why is Mash The State modestly and quietly plodding along but Twitter shooting off and quickly overtaking? Fashion, what else could it be?
Local government webbies have spotted this trend and worked on that because it's easier and, frankly, because Twitter is in the news and can be thus more easily portrayed as a 'must-have'. It's 'low-hanging fruit', an 'easy win'.
It's not just Twitter. Web development blogs can be incredibly useful for webbie teams to get feedback on site development - that's why companies from Google to last.fm run them. But they require that bit extra of time and resources, and planning and arguing (and understanding) for their usefulness. So why are they so rare and why is there no research or group arguing for them or people demonstrating their ROI and giving them momentum?
Same goes for Facebook and YouTube (and the absent Myspace and Bebo): their collective use far outweighs Twitter so why are they much less prominent?
There's another danger here which is that which being prey to fashion has for the longer-term embedding of web in local government.
For councilors and many council staff (plus service users), who want to see and experience clear benefit, the potential for (open source) applications such as those being developed by #rewired state and #youngrewiredstate is far greater to my mind than it is from Twitter. But in the political and PR battle for the attention of Lgov webbies, especially its movers and shakers, are they losing attention and therefore potentially funding and other resources, like developer time?
These numbers should make Lgov people stop and think hard about what we're doing and where the priorities are. Yes Twitter is great and I love it but let's not just cheer what they say about the progress of social media and quote the Twitter number, let's look at the laggards and ask what we can do to get those numbers up to where they should be.
Google UK launched it's local government division on Friday August 8 with a day-long event held at their London offices and attended by around 65 people.
As I have been talking and writing about their stuff (aka promoting!) for a few years now this day was pretty exciting for me.
I wondered how many actual local government webbies would be there, given how many not .gov people (consultants) I knew were going but there turned out to be lots.
As predicted, there was a certain magic to being @google with very funky offices, pretty funky people, a nice meet-up room (though the seats with little tables reminded me of old school desks and were a bit too easily tripped over), a smattering of 'Google gifts' ('Google goo'?) - including £300 of AdWords - and the most fantastic food I have ever had at a meeting/conference in my life.
As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government's needs and issues are very different, it's hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.
But they were completely open about not knowing, about having lots to learn, and given that so much of their offering is free some of the slight bitching I picked up on the way the day was pitched seemed a bit rich.
My only thought with this is to wonder why - it appears - they didn't try to hire someone/some people with local government experience when they started? There's enough commonality of experience in the sector for anyone who has worked in it to be able to steer them better towards what's likely to be of most interest to most local government people. I would imagine that one outcome of the day will be talking to and maybe partnering with groups like Socitm and IDEA.
Producing better websites
The sessions about their products worked best for this audience when there was a self-evident cross-over from commercial to public sector experience, as what they generally did was simply present the pitch which they would make to any company about their products.
For example, the one about producing better websites, which boiled this down to ten things they'd learned, was spot on as to a very great extent a website is a website is a website from a user's perspective. This is the exact same message which people like Gerry McGovern are sending to local government via Socitm's 'Better Connected' work.
As well, the OpenSocial and Enterprise Solutions sessions demonstrated that these Google products have self-evident potential local government uses and they chimed with existing use by individuals present and existing discussion within the 'local government community' such as, for example, around open-source/'free' and nationally with 'cloud computing'. (Following the event they set up LocalGovCloud, 'a place for local government folk in the UK to have a play with some of Google's enterprise tools' - this needs pitching at IT bods in lgov)
Video for visual explanation
Less successful were the YouTube, Adsense and Adwords sessions because they weren't tailored for the audience. I understand that the Google Maps session didn't address in the presentation it's issues for local government (to do with Ordnance Survey copyright), despite this being a major discussion is local government circles (though I'd left by then).
I wasn't impressed that the YouTube presenter felt that 150 hits was quite a lot. Though he did mention the use of video for visual explanation unfortunately he hit on a recycling example.
I've presented on YouTube use and written previously highlighting one video on littering which honestly seemed like a few council officers having fun rather than a well thought through online marketing exercise. To do both littering or recycling needs thinking through (i.e. 'what's our views target?' 'who are we targeting?') and is probably best done by professionals and either nationally or with a group of councils chipping in.
It appears to me that, at the moment, the most likely growth area for YouTube use is with politicians and maybe senior council officers using it.
This has enormous potential to go wrong, as I showed with a hilarious and viral mash-up of Gordon Brown's now infamous twitch-to-camera video. As well, the clout of those making use of it has the potential to waste budget/officer's time better employed elsewhere.
Yes, video can be a excellent medium for communication but only if it makes use of being a visual medium. As the Google guy did say, anything which needs to be shown, to be demonstrated, has this potential.
For example, in my presentation I picked a video of a council officer teaching students in a college about local building regulations. That's a obvious case where the benefit is self-evident and the entry/skill level for production is low. But in order to be sustainable and embedded in local government practice it does need a business case, it needs to be watched, which means marketed, and my presentation gave some ideas on how to do this. This example doesn't appear to have been promoted properly as it's only had 50 views - there must be more than that number of local apprentices, architects, joiners and builders for whom it would be useful?
Allerdale Borough Council's Building Control officers visited Lakes College West Cumbria
Most if not all of the people there were webbies rather than marketeers or communications people and the YouTube product - as well as, as Ingrid Koeler pointed out, tools like Google Reader and Google Alerts - could perhaps be best demonstrated to a separate audience of those council officers who can get best use of them.
Advertising
It is also the case with AdWords and AdSense that Google needs to be talking to people other than webbies in local councils, tapping into other networks of officers.
The presentation by Nottingham on their implementation was by a webbie and ended, after some discussion of whether the number should be revealed, with the income being stated as around £15k a year, which I don't think is a lot.
It was said that this money was used for website development but a missed danger here is that budgets will simply be reduced by that amount in a time of squeezed budgets and backed by arguments that other spending, such as on social services, is 'more deserving'. If website budgets become expected to be partly raised through advertising what happens when there's a recession and income drops?
This area needs much more serious work by Google, primarily I'd argue with the more commercial arms of councils. I would bet that most of these operations in councils - tourism, events, sport - are sorely lacking in any knowledge of how to maximise revenue from their web operations, so Google would be pushing at an open door.
The Google USB Stick Man pressie
Lincolnshire pioneered advertising on their council website but moved from using a big national operator with no experience in local government to one which specialised in council advertising (partly because the revenues were so low). The company they chose had the specific experience selling ads in council print and billboard but no experience in online so will take time to learn how to maximise revenue - there is an example of a gap where Google could move in but it needs to be talking to a different group than council webbies.
Usability and analytics
I did a session on Google Analytics at short notice (slides below). This followed on from the Site Conversion and optimisation bit, which had the excellent ten things they'd learned which ended on a #1 thing to do being usability testing. This meant that despite not being a pre-arranged tag-team with the Google presenter it ended up as a tag-team as we were both essentially talking about the same thing; the basics of producing a good website experience for users.
Both usability and analytics are something deprioritised and deskilled (usually explained as due to a lack of resources) in local government and this is reflected in most of the reviews of the day published thus far (links below). Yet both are vital to users and also to the aim of driving more users through online services. They need way more attention.
Sales funnel
As I said on the day, my impression is that local government has low expectations of service use - the bar is somehow lower. Socitm and others are trying to do something about this, through benchmarking for example, but this is an unsexy area yet an essential one politically because it explains to those making the decisions why budgets need to be maintained and the worth of investing in web.
As Charles Arthur argues in his piece about Birmingham's website, yes, moving away from exorbitantly priced monoliths like Serco and Microsoft to open source should be happening but it:
won't mean in the real world of local government just lower development budgets but staff cuts as well;
will still produce unoptimised sites and less successful 'funnels' to services if usability and understanding of web stats isn't similarly prioritised;
if the political case for the value of websites isn't made and backed up with facts and examples.
The answer here is education, with both a surface exercise and a deeper one as well available to people online skills development and through face-to-face training. Sorting out how to do both usability and analytics often leads to a haze where the amount of information, options and ideas confuses. The required skill level for entry is perceived wrongly far too often as high. For example, doing simple 'guerrilla' user testing is not hard.
I think people need plans and business cases in order to be able to get the resources they need to get the most out of usability and analytics and to know when they need them as well as online education resources to show them what they can do themselves.
Here Google can play an enormously useful role I think. As they have a huge and diverse customer base, they have developed excellent, usable learning tools which have both simple, grounded take-aways and great detail. The Public Sector Web Professionals group has skills development as one of its main aims, so a collaboration seems like an obvious road to go down.
Sarah Lay had written up her extensive notes from the sessions "Every conversation has to start somewhere and I think the relevance of yesterday will be best judged on what happens next."
Ingrid Koehler picks up on similar themes to mine "Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale. And the key to this one was helping the people in the room make the sale to internal stakeholders."
Michele Ide-Smith "Very thought provoking and Google were great hosts."
Al Smith "The day was not very well tailored to the audience. But it's best not to dwell on the negatives"
Sharon O'Dea "This was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see."
Carrie Bishop "The new local authority role will be as a service enabler – the glue that holds a locality together and supports other organisations to provide services that residents need, as well as helping to create the conditions in which residents can meet their own needs – from neighbourhoods getting together to share the cost of green energy through to social startups and local businesses. It’s a new model for local government and a radical adjustment that I just don’t think Google have got their heads around."
The House of Lords shows itself - again - to be the most thoughtful and progressive chamber in a new report 'Are the Lords listening? Creating connections between people and Parliament' from its Information Committee.
Parliament has some really daft rules against use of video of proceedings, which it has been extremely slow in changing. Leading the charge against this has been LibDem MP Jo Swinson.
The Lords new report backs Swinson's campaign to free up reuse of video and - hurrah! - backs embedding and republication.
42. 'Embedding' is the process whereby a document or file of one type is inserted into a document or file of another type on the internet. Embedding is central to much use of multimedia in web pages, which tend to embed video, animation, and audio files. In our Annual Report 2007-08,[11] we reported the growing number of people asking to embed parliamentary material (such as video footage of proceedings) into their own web sites. Such embedding would, for instance, allow other web sites to include windows within their web pages so that clips of parliamentary proceedings could play within their own pages instead of having to open a separate window and application to view the clips. Under the terms of the current licences, the Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit Limited (PARBUL) cannot allow any of its licensees to offer embedding. Peter Lowe of Sky News found it "extraordinary" that Parliament did not allow embedding (Q 311).
43. The BBC asked Parliament to change this policy so that it could include footage from Westminster in its 'Democracy Live' website, which would also include footage from the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the European Parliament (QQ 308-09, 314; p84). Last year, we called for further research to be carried out on allowing embedding of footage of parliamentary proceedings. During our inquiry, it was made clear to us that embedding would allow wider access to parliamentary proceedings through websites and other channels (pp 16, 143). Peter Riddell, Political Commentator and Assistant Editor of The Times, said that it would be "a tremendous help" to journalists preparing articles online (Q 191). Channel 4 said that enabling users "to embed clips on their own sites, and then use social bookmarking tools to promote these clips to others, is an effective and low-cost way of expanding the reach of Parliament—as the easier it is to spread information the more people will see it" (p 104). Jo Swinson MP told the Committee: "we need to wake up and get into the twenty-first century on this. If we can actually get clips of Parliament out there, particularly in two or three-minute pieces which are easy to watch, easy to forward to friends, that is a much better way and a much easier way for people to understand what is going on in Parliament than having to watch the BBC Parliament channel for hours on end until something they might be interested in comes up."
44. People should be allowed to embed the House's proceedings on their websites, so that our proceedings can have as wide a distribution as possible on the internet. We recommend that a trial start as soon as possible. We have invited the BBC and the House of Lords administration to bring forward proposals for how the House can maximise potential synergies with the BBC's forthcoming 'Democracy Live' website.
Yay! The irony here though is how slow the BBC has been with the option to embed on its video. There does seem to be a lot of internal resistance and only some news video is embeddable. What's bizarre is that you can find loads of BBC news video on YouTube, which they don't police.
As well, people are getting iplayer content and reusing it, here's how to get the iplayer embed code. That's not being policed either.
Here's what the Lords says about Parliament and YouTube
38. In May 2008 Parliament launched a YouTube channel, which it uses primarily to show short films promoting and explaining the work of Parliament. The Hansard Society praised the videos about the work of the House of Lords (p 13). We used YouTube throughout our inquiry, to update people outside Westminster on what had happened during our meetings and to provide an insight into the views of witnesses and members of the Committee. In June 2009, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee and the European Union Committee released videos on YouTube to mark the publication of their reports.
39. We also used Parliament's YouTube channel in our inquiry to allow people to contribute by submitting their views on video. Dr Jackson said that this development was "very exciting": the fact that members of the public can upload videos gives the channel the potential to be "a powerful interactive instrument" (p 139). Parliament would benefit from the interactive nature of such websites, by treating them not simply as publishers and distributors but as places where user-generated content can be created and displayed.
40. Members of either House are allowed to post footage featuring the member on the member's own website. However, at present, the two Houses do not allow parliamentary proceedings to be posted on YouTube or any other third-party hosting website. This ban has attracted negative publicity; and Parliament has been criticised for not embracing new technology. Last November, we agreed that Lords be allowed to place on YouTube (and similar searchable video hosting websites) clips of their contributions to the House's proceedings. The final administrative and legal steps around copyright are being taken, and the Committee will inform members when they can start to upload their contributions to YouTube. Technical training will be provided for members who wish to take advantage of this new possibility.
I cannot in any way claim to know what people are thinking or meaning on the ground, but for centuries, 'Allahu Akbar' has been in the Muslim world a battlefield of meaning and ultimately of political legitimacy. They are five syllables pregnant in meaning, mutability and richness, not simply a ritualistic or fundamentalist dogmatic trope. Nor is 'Allahu Akbar' simply a prayer. In fact, despite all its negative, violent connotations in the West, 'Allahu Akbar' has been uttered by Muslims throughout history as a cry against oppression, against kings and monarchs, against tyrannical and despotic rule, reminding people that in the end, the disposer of affairs and ultimate holder of legitimacy is not any man, not any king or queen, not even any supreme leader, but ultimately a divine force out and above directing, caring and fighting for a more peaceful, rule-based, just and free world for people to live in. God is the one who is greatest, above each and every mortal human being whose station it is to pass away.
The fact that 'Allahu Akbar' is echoing through the Iranian night is not only an indication of the longing of people there to find a peaceful and just solution to this crisis. It also points to how deep the erosion of legitimacy is in whosoever acts against the will of the people, in whosoever claims to act on God's behalf to oppress his fellow human, including in this case some of the 'supreme' Islamic jurists themselves. This all goes to show that Islam, far from being merely an abode of repression and retrogression, has the capacity of being a fundamentally restorative and democratic force in human affairs. In the end, so it seems, at least in the Iranian context, 'Allahu Akbar', God is greatest, is a most profoundly democratic of political slogans. So deep is this call, that what is determined out of this liminal moment may very well set the terms for (or against) a lived, democratic Islamic reality for decades to come.
John Steed from Cheltenham Council talked about how the massive flooding of the town a few years ago gave a kick-start to their social media efforts - and quickly won top level support after a brief hesitation.
They used a free blog service, Flickr and YouTube to keep residents and others informed during the crisis. They couldn't rely on the website alone and this allowed them to help residents help themselves - posting photos of what was happening for example.
John talked about what's been going on since then and they are making some great use of social media, being innovative and implementing some good ideas. Their Flickr content has evolved into a 'go to' place for local photos as local photographers get engaged. Their videos are useful in being visual and showing some beautiful parts of the town.
His talk inspired a lot of people on the day and - as one twitterer noted - why we don't seem to applaud any longer at these sorts of events is a mystery.
I just love David Mitchell. Not only is he a brilliant comedian who can do slapstick as well as satire but he's a great writer whose columns never fail to hit the spot. He's smart, witty and not shy of being political. He hosts The Unbelievable Truth on Radio Four expertly. His appearance on Question Time saw him displaying all these talents with no script writer.
I'd vote for him.
I've discovered he has a YouTube channel where he delivers some excellent monologues like this one on TV rudeness:
I've never understood the appeal of shows like Dragon's Den either. I guess I like my wit more on the Gore Vidal level than the Ballantyne.
All his skills make him, IMO, just about the only candidate to do a UK version of the Daily Show or, even better, Real Time with Bill Maher. That is, world class political satire. Maher just had Gore Vidal on his show and, rare for Vidal, more than held his own with him. Similarly ranty Marcus Brigstock once tried the Daily Show format and failed miserably.
If you hadn't heard, one of the islands on Queensland, Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been running a search for a job online. Only they've made it sooper-viral, by making it youtube and the job itself is, well, brilliant:
An Australian state has launched a global search for candidates for "the best job in the world" -- earning a top salary for lazing around a beautiful tropical island for six months.
The job pays 150,000 Australian dollars (105,000 US dollars) and includes free airfares from the successful applicant's home country to Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland's state government announced on Tuesday.
In return, the "island caretaker" will be expected to stroll the white sands, soak up the sun, snorkel the reef, "maybe clean the pool" -- and report to a global audience via weekly blogs, photo diaries and video updates.
To my mind, this is the best job applicant of the bunch:
Why is this the best marketing ever?
The campaign was part of a drive to protect the state's 18 billion Australian dollar a year tourism industry during the tough economic climate caused by the global financial meltdown.
While the campaign has elements of some reality television shows, a candidate's looks will not be a prime requirement, Tourism Queensland chief executive Anthony Hayes told AFP.
"No, I don't think beautiful is what we want, I think charismatic is what we want," he said. "The reality is we are looking for a fantastic communicator.
"What we want this person to do is travel throughout the Great Barrier Reef and just try every experience, every adventure they can find and report back via blogs and video to tell the world why Queensland is a great place to come for a holiday."
Potential Great Barrier Reef tourists are definitely online. Smart. Plus, here I am doing their marketing for them :#
Footage filmed by Jamal Abu-Sa'ifan, a Palestinian resident of Hebron, documenting a settler shooting two members of his family. The event occures following the eviction of the new settlment in Hebron. Settlers attacked the nearby house of the Abu-Se'ifan family, and during ensuing clashes, a settler fired his handgun at Hosni Abu-Se'ifan (40), who was hit in the chest and is in stable condition, and his father, 'Abd al-Hai Abu-Sa'ifan (65) who was moderately wounded in his arm. the two were taken to a Hebron hospital. The video shows other members of the family manage to overcome the shooter, then a security guard from the nearby settlement Kiryat Arba arrives and the scene, and fires his weapon in the air.
The Israeli organisation Btselem has done a good thing in distributing 100 small video cameras, bringing the reality of the occupation's effects on Palestinians to Israeli TV screens amongst other things.
But if you visit their site, the video page uses a terribly old hat and clumsy method (though you can download them) and - most importantly - doesn't connect with the sort of viral tools that have become de rigueur with other campaigners such as Amnesty as well as, obviously, clued-up politicians.
Btselem have a YouTube channel but they don't promote it. Once I saw this video, I had to hunt for it to bring it to you (and thereby increasing the viewership for Btselem) because - of course - papers like The Guardian and others insist on turning it into 'their own' copy and it's unebeddable.
They should just embed the YouTube copies on their website as well as adding download links to them and also include the YouTube logo linking to the channel, promoting subscriptions.
It's an old story. Your first record is a smash, your first novel wins the Booker - then what? Can you top that or forever live in its shadow.
So it is with viral video and after hitting the sweet spot with a 10m views message about watching out for cyclists, Transport for London is getting diminishing returns.
The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America. Frank Rich
Stars
Nate Silver. And fivethirtyeight.com (it's a trio that does it, not just Nate). Proven with their on-the-money final calls on the electoral vote and percentages. Traffic went through the roof and the MSM came calling. And if he doesn't get a 'Webbie' award, there's no justice. Rachel Maddow. A power butch dyke is now the most respected voice in US TV news. Wow! (as she might put it). Hillary Clinton. Glass ceilings well and truly shattered. Redemption in Denver and, later, Florida. YouTube. Ok, here's Huffpost's round up of the best. As Techpresident pointed out, just Barack's vids alone ammounted to $46m worth of free advertising. Techpresident. By far the best place to follow how the Internet MADE Obama. Cannot emphasise this strongly enough - he would not be President-elect without the Internet - and glad to (finally) see some acknowledgment of this gamechanging fact in the MSM. The web. Not only because without it there would be no Obama, and not just because of the bright light it shone on dirty tricks and lies (Arianna's point), but that the change it's brought will continue on - he himself has said that he wants to continue the momentum after he's elected and use the tools in government, this was in his half-hour infomercial. I'd also note that groups like moveon and sites like dailykos and huffpost will be used as tools to rally support for change. The dems don't have a filibuster proof senate majority so to get things like health care change they will use the web and all the tools. Here was Obama's email to his list post victory: "We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next."
Tina Fey. Who? You'll know soon enough. Here's her best SNL comedy sketch. Jon Stewart. Yes, he's a funny guy but his clip compilations were absolute political genius and skewered consistently throughout the campaign. Web news. Now the main source for the young and, as Pew just showed, now bigger than newspapers overall. Mike Gravel. Mad, mad, mad. Brought a touch of Dada to the campaign. Bless. Doris Kearns Goodwin. The historian always ready with an anecdote. The Onion. For their perfect satire of network news. Guiliani's drag. Remember that? And then he had the nerve to attack 'cultural elites' in Minneapolis? David Axelrod. "The past is not prologue we've shattered that". Romney's dog. Remember this? The one he tied to the car roof? Red State Update. Just crawl-on-the-floor funny pisstake on 'Appalachia', here they go on the dog:
Doofuses
The BBC. And it all came to a ignominious end on election night itself. Did anyone watch? I have documented how, frankly, biased the coverage was but it was all to one end, the traditional one of pretending it's closer than it is just to make a story where there isn't one. In the primaries it was 'Clinton still might win' - when she had no statistical chance. In the general it was 'McCain still might win' - when the polls said otherwise. One of the key things i spotted was just who BBC America editor Justin Webb linked to - the MSM, consistently. This isn't the sort of approach the beeb has preached about. "Here's the deal". The 'go to' line for far too many. Clinton. She redeemed herself but the depths she and her supporters lowered themselves to needs recalling. This included her extensive gay following. Oh, and Bill. The MSM in general. Keith Olbermann made this point well, if you look at McCain's gaffes vs Obama's it is clear that a different standard was being held. If Obama had made anything like as many (remember Lieberman wispering in his ear when McCain stuffed up to a camera in Iraq about who the enemy was?) he would have been toast. Joe the plumber. Simply an idiot. Matt Drudge. At the end he was touting his number's - but they'd been beaten months before by the web's new stars, led by Huffington Post. His major league screw ups and blatant bias can only damn his chief selling-point: that the MSM follows his lead. PUMAs. Clinton's 'loyalists' damned and screwed by Clinton herself. Until September they screamed the same anti-Obama rubbish as McCain ended on (see image, right). Capitalism. McCain condoms? Lieberman. And now comes the reckoning. Reverend Wright. When the shit hit the fan I actually listened to his speeches and he made a lot of sense. When he took his show to the national Press Club he was nothing but an egotistical showpony. Green screens. As in McCain's weird appearance in front of one. Should. Be. Banned. Voter suppresssion. Americans can but hope something will change but it likely won't, Robert Kennedy Jnr and many others leveraged the web to shine a spotlight on this year's suppression efforts. Plus Obama's teams were right-on-it. As I predicted, it counted for nothing in the end but it shouldn't take overwhelming numbers to just about win. (Plus to get on the ballot in the first place). Six hour waits. For a Brit, this is madness. But Americans haven't yet done anything about what is actually an international shaming Robocalls. Some reported getting literally dozens a day, more if you were unfortunate enough to live in New Hampshire. They got worse as McCain's campaign got more desperate and were the hollow centre to any claims he ran a 'decent' campaign. Holograms. CNN's election night tecnowizzadry just highlighted for me the emptiness of their core content. The journalism I watched? MSNBC. Plus they were actually tomograms and the presenters couldn't see them. Ralph Nader. There is always a space to the left of the Dems but Nader proved he's not it with his narcissistic final (?) run this time. To see how broke his political space has become check this interview where he calls Obama an "Uncle Tom". Palin. n'est-ce pas, and all she represents for the future of the GOP. As the bloodletting begins on the right, former speechwriter David Frum has a very interesting piece 'Republicans face fraught choice between two roads to revival' and the parallels with 1997 and the Tories are ripe. The argument is that they need to ditch the social conservatism. One good thing though? Because of her we met the brilliant Muckracker and his Mudflats bog - and now we now lots more about the weird and wonderful world of Alaskan politics.
And finally ...
Rachel Maddow's brilliant take on the funniest moments of the campaign:
And some of my posts from the past (arrrrgh .. ) year and a half:
One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is "clueless."
Here's how I responded to the commentator's points.
"Firstly: Why is every council doing this separately? Simple. Every council's bin and recycling arrangements is different"
But they're not. Many are the same or pretty much so. What is the efficiency loss in not sending out similar messages? - for one thing. And where can councils connect with other councils doing the same and share cost - for another thing? Answer? Nowhere. That's my point.
Plus there's isn't even one central (web based) resource point where even more generic messaging resources are available.
This is very inefficient when most British people spend lots of time online.
I wish the audit office would focus on shit like this rather than the stuff PSF is currently highlighting ... [NB: Most PSF content is behind a firewall, this comment refers to how the audit office believes council staff are all "potential fraudsters" and thus want their bank details].
"Councils have been given great big dollops of central government money to spend solely on recycling publicity"
Er, this just speaks to the first point I'm making and you expand on this - use of amateurs etc. I found this when looking for centralised resources around marketing around recycling. Including video. The EU actually has a good video (past blog post), but Whitehall?? Whitehall tips on online marketing around recycling? Hello?
Point taken, as it's not viral yet. But I was trying to get to the different dynamic which works in this space. What you think of as crappy might actually end up going viral. Allerdale made me laugh - that's a plus.
"All these things require skills that only come with professional training and years of practice"
This is absolutely not true for viral video! C'mon! have you seen utube lately? I have seen enough viral video to recognise in Allendale's a potential viral. It actually looks like some of the professional virals I've seen, who - shock - attempt to evoke amateurism.
Like with most things web I was pointing at entry points, things you can do, to get some audience for video rather than just post it and wait for an audience (which is, truth, what most are doing). But yes, it would probably actually pay - i.e. have an ROI - to hire someone who has-a-clue to promote and advise on what you're making.
But don't confuse this with film-making or other skills. What works in online video is a whole other ballgame and really it's - in what we're talking about here - simply putting your efforts in front of as many possible eyeballs as possible and keep doing it and keep honing. This we just don't do.
"What makes some council officer decide he can stand in a stupid suit and green make-up and be an actor for the day, instead of... er... doing what the council tax-payers expect them to do."
Like what? Excuse me but this is a bit patronising. I would never criticise someone for trying, just offer some tips about how they might get their point over and seen by more people. I'd like to see you face the opprobrium of doning a green monster suit in an effort to stop people littering :] This (poor) guy just needs more tips on how to get that message across. (for one, the vid should be half the length at least, which is pretty easily achieved using cheap video editors).
I would say that UK online video, from what I can see, is still in the 'taking off' stage compared to elsewhere (like, er, France). But having looked around it's clear that the potential audiences - yes, including localised audiences - are huge.
It's another channel with mass potential. I s'pose, given how we're barely if at all in others it might seem a little pointless but with viral video it's amazing how quickly something pops up which, er, 'hits the spot'. and I would be the last to be shocked if this actually came from some enterprising council officer prepared to make a fool of himself. And in a good way!
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