Salon.com compiled a must-watch quicktime movie of TV anchors and reporters as they “grapple with their sources, the spin wars, and each other” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. If only it didn’t take a catastrophe of this scale, with such blatant misinformation from government sources trying to dodge responsibility for their inactions, for reporters to grow backbones.
media
If you like documentaries about bears, or a guy who lives with bears for 13 years until he is ultimately eaten by bears, then definitely don’t miss Grizzly Man. Just to keep things complicated the trailer isn’t on the official movie site.
What happens when Nato troops with something to say and a sense of humor make a Beach Boys parody video? There’s a diplomatic nightmare for those who put the troops there in the first place.
A spoof music video by Nato peacekeepers in Kosovo, set to the Beach Boys hit Kokomo, has sparked a diplomatic spat between Norway and Serbia and given ammunition to critics of the Nato-led force in the province.
The three-minute clip, filmed on a hand-held digital camera, features Norwegian troops dancing in fields and military bases as they sing their own version of the dreamy surf song.
The original tune about Kokomo beach in Florida is transformed into a biting satire on international intervention in places such as Kosovo and Rwanda.
“Somalia, Grenada, rescuing Kuwait, we screw ya, Rwanda, wish we could have helped ya, Iraqi embargo … ” they croon, with backing vocals and dance routines performed in combat boots and camouflage gear.
“Down in Kosovo, we’ll kick some [expletive] and then we’ll see how it goes, and then we really don’t know. Good luck to Kosovo.
“Every time we go to little places like Kosovo, we never really know what happens after we go … It’s Europe and Nato, why the hell do we go?” [link]
The video is so widely known that it forced the Norwegian ambassador Hans Ola Urstad to offer a formal apology:
“I really hope this incident will not disturb the lasting and deep friendly relations between our countries.”
But Kosovo Albanians may have a different take on the video:
“The clip shows that international soldiers in Kosovo are not machines but humans with feelings and opinions about reality. I don’t find the clip offensive but instructive,” Kosovo Albanian art editor Arif Muharremi said.
via Jim Gilliam
Global Voices Online is a solid citizen’s media project sponsored and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. It is “an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard.” GVO’s mission:
1) To call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, audio, and video blogs and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world;
2) To facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.
GVO’s daily World Blog Roundup is an invaluable resource for keeping up with issues and current events affecting people around the world.
Earlier this week, Tiger Woods made an unbelievable shot in the final round of the Masters and overnight Joseph Jaffe turned it into an ad for Nike earning him over 50,000 hits in a few days when he posted a 30-second and a 60-second version to his site.
In December 2004, George Masters’ iPod ad got a lot of press as the first ever homemade advertisement to ‘go viral’ and go big with 37,000 hits in just a few days. Masters made the ad and then posted it online to solicit feedback.. “Is this good?” he asked. He had no clue that his ad would become so popular or spread so quickly.
These two events represent a new wave of viral marketing, what I’m terming participatory viral marketing, in which individuals who are simply fans of a product or brand independently produce and post their own advertising spots which end up being incredibly popular. The video-editing software that comes with most home computers makes it possible for just about anyone to create professional quality ads. But it isn’t just the quality of the ads that makes them viral successes. Corporate marketing guys with far bigger budgets are falling all over themselves trying to figure out how to develop enough hype to make campaigns go viral by themselves. Yet overwhelmingly, the purchasing and placement of ads supporting a viral media campaign undercuts the viralness of the campaign itself; as soon as I see a two-headed dog on a billboard or at a bus stop I know it’s a top-down organized campaign by some big corporation (MTV2) that paid to put it there and I filter it out as more of the same old advertising noise and nonsense.
If homegrown ads are the message of participatory viral marketing, blogs are the medium. It’s not a coincidence that both the Tiger Woods and the iPod ads were posted to personal blogs. Seeing the ad on a personal blog establishes the ‘viral legitimacy’ of the ad: some guy like me made this because “hey, he just loves *insert brand or product name here*!” and he posted it to his personal site which someone sent me a link to or which I stumbled across. There is no connection with or involvement from the company who’s product or brand is represented. There is also no submission or approval process. People just happened to find this corner of the internet where the ad is posted. The whole process wreaks of word-of-mouth marketing, which is exactly the way viral media campaigns try to work.
The fact that consumers, who traditionally are passive receivers of advertising, will make their own ads supporting these products in their spare time for no reward other than the love of the product/brand signifies said product/brand is worth tremendous value at least in the hearts of those who make the ads. It’s only a matter of time before we see corporate marketers faking it, reproducing these homegrown viral marketing successes by posting ads to fake blogs, when they should really be focusing on ways to encourage participatory viral marketing, such as releasing high quality assets for more people to make more ads and publicly recognizing and rewarding past successes.
The Downhill Battle crew, through their Participatory Culture Foundation, have just announced a new project, Internet Tv, and released the sourcecode for developers.
The project is a a free, open source set of software tools for watching and distributing high quality, full screen videos over the internet at almost no cost to the publisher (BitTorrent, baby). For viewers, this means you can elegantly and simply subscribe to your friends’ channels, a channel for your zipcode, or organizations and watch a truckload of videos that you can’t get on regular TV. For videomakers, you’ll finally have a publishing tool for all your videos – it will be as easy as blogging– just upload your files and you have a channel. Anyone can find out about your channel and start subscribing to it, just like anyone can find out about your blog or your favorite blog.
This is really exciting stuff… launching in June.
Update: Listen in on Tim’s podcast interview with David Moore over at EchoRadio. It’s a good breakdown of what it’s all about.