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We left the launch party kind of early. Well, actually, we arrived kind of late, because it takes a while to get from JFK to Manhattan, especially when you want to stop by the hotel on the way. It was probably just as well we were late, ‘cos that meant we didn’t see the presentation of 60 second story. See, we were first on the list (note to self: numbers in titles are cool for alphabetisation) and the panel went through the list, showing us each of the contestants’ projects in turn, but skimming the less immediately obvious ones very quickly. Ours didn’t have any big catchy images on the front page (too many words, words are so difficult, amazing blogs are popular really given how people find words hard) so apparently it was skipped past after about 3 seconds viewing.
We knew nobody there. I mean, I think I’ve exchanged emails with Jonah Peretti once or twice, and I know of Nick Denton (yeah, Gawker, blog media mogul if there is such a thing) and the guy who co-founded Hot or Not (oh dear) was there too, but you know, I was shy. Even wearing my I’m blogging this t-shirt. My first venture into the New York art scene (if this was that) was not a great success. Contagious media, it seems, is very simply about getting as many hits as possible. That means whatever you want to push has to have instant and broad appeal. Therefore the video of the Farting Saucers (a kid on flying saucers at an amusement park with an added audio track of farts) was pronounced a likely winner by the panel. I’m pleased to say 60 second story is way ahead of the farting so far — see, there’s a list of stats updated regularly. As you can see, we’re never going to make it to the top for pure hits, but we’re doing pretty well on the technorati links from blogs. And though I think such competition for links is despicable and found it all most depressing (it’s commercialism! with no money!) I’m deep enough in that I’m happy to be a linkwhore for this: link us! When we saw a genuine videoblogger outside Eyebeam, enthusiastically interviewing a guy from collegehumor.com with the video function on his still camera, I had to video him. That, of course, inspired us, so we now have lots of silly video footage on our still cameras that will be edited into a 60 second news report on the contagious media show. Quite soon. Meanwhile, I give you a loop of 14 seconds of video of a genuine videoblogger. Simply click play. update: We got all inspired by the videoblogger we saw last night, and lo and behold, when we put all the tiny video clips off the still camera into iMovie and pressed play they seemed, to us, an excellent report on the launch party. We snipped off some unfitting bits, added titles, experimented with various export settings and now, lo and behold, behold a video blogged report on the launch party by us. Click the bottom image to view. |
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jonah
Hi Jill. Don’t be shy next time, it would have been nice to meet in person.
Jill
Ooh. Yeah, I know, shyness is silly. Thanks for commenting, Jonah!
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