Dreaming of May.

For those surfing the long tail and happening across the WWW blog, I'm going on hiatus for a couple months while I finish the ol' MBA. Plan to return in May 2009, far more aware of how little money I'm making off this blog. ;)

New videos then and possibly a new home on Wordpress (and maybe a devoted URL). Until that point, have a good winter and spring.

-C-

Insert Sophomoric Testicle Joke Here...

We don't usually like to feature commercials here at WWW even though a few are paragons of creativity. This is one, primarily because who would have thought to send 250,000 superballs bouncing down the streets of San Francisco. The "Making Of..." mini-doc, while being a little corporate, is still a real trip.




And here's the actually ad (long version)...

Video from Pre-War Gaza...

Nothing says Happy New Year like a humanitarian crisis (and I mean that apolitically, starving kids = crisis...not a complicated equation). As protests against the situation in Gaza occur here in Albuquerque and in Santa Fe (and I'm sure lots of other places), I've been looking for some different perspectives on the issues there. It's gonna be while before anyone can put a comprehensive look out there about the situation. Here is a link to The Economist's latest briefing on the issue, but here are a couple of videos from Zouheir Allnajar at CurrentTV that will hopefully add some nuance to your understanding of events there.

Long Winter's Nap...

Taking some time off over the holidays to do a little rethinking a reworking Web Worth Watching. Coming in 2009...a shift to Wordpress and a dedicated Web Worth Watching website (as soon as I can get it built).

I've also been thinking a lot about online video. For those interested in the topic, there was a great Online Video Summit a few months back. Definitely worth taking a look. Their embed codes are not written correctly but you can view the clips here. It's two parts and part two can be viewed here.

Folks have been discussing the integration of internet and television since the early 90s, but now it's finally started to happen. Although I haven't seen it expressly written in the press, it seems to me that companies like Netflix and Sling Media are almost now (at least for a discerning audience) direct competitors to Comcast, DirecTV, etc. I did an experiment over the summer where I "cut the chord" and began consuming media only through the internet (using a Verizon card - which I had already - through my Mac or the Blanche DuBois-approach with open wi-fi). Turns out, I'm $95 better off each month and haven't missed cable at all.

Anyway, I digress. It's a cool time we're living in. More fascinating ideas in video form soon!

-C-

Opium des Volkes?

Over the summer I ran across an inspiring talk by Karen Armstrong about the state of western religion (monotheism anyway) and how is can be a force for compassion and harmony. I decided then that it would be WWW's first Christmas post. Raised with no personal religious beliefs, as an adult I've had a fascination with religion...both our need for what it gives us and the rituals that we execute in pursuit of those satisfactions. Armstrong's work is always thought-provoking and I think you'll find this talk of particular interest.



Then, for an alternate (perhaps contrarian) perspective, here is a talk by Christopher Hitchens, discussing the ideas behind his book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Darwinian Inspiration and Perspective

I set out to pen a WWW post this week that was focused on food, hoping to create a sequel to my post from last August. After all, it is the holiday season and we Americans never met a holiday we didn't celebrate with a overflowing plate. So I started by seeing what was out there featuring Michael Pollan, whose books-on-cd are on the playlist for my annual cross-country holiday drive. And while I did find a great talk that Pollan gave about food, it was really more about a Darwinian view of the world.

And that reminded me of a similar, two-person talk I had seen featuring artist/musician Brian Eno, discussing his Darwinian perspective on creating art, along with videogame designer, Will Wright, the mind behind SimCity, The Sims and, most recently, Spore. So enjoy all three perspectives over a big plate of food at your favorite internet cafe.

A Tour Through Smell

Just one video this week, but that's because one video is all I think you'll need after this one. Here is a fascinating half-hour with Chandler Burr, perfume critic for the New York Times and author of the book, The Emperor of Scent. The economics of patchouli farming alone will dazzle your fellow holiday party-goers for at least a couple round of drinks.

Okay, okay, so maybe you want to go really deep into the science of smell. I can go ahead and hook you up too. Here's a long (90 minute) University of California lecture by Charles Zucker on the neurobiology of taste, smell and vision.

Grey Matters - Perception: Taste, Smell and Vision

Self-reflexivity

When media turns its attention on itself the results can often be pretentious. Hopefully we're going to avoid that this week. I've found a couple of interesting pieces about the Web 2.0 phenomenon on also about video the web. I'm hoping this will be of interest to you as well...since you're here watching some video on the web.

The first is a talk that Al Gore gave in the days following the election at the 2008 Web 2.0 summit.



The second video is a lecture given by Silicon Valley exec Peter Hirschberg, who looks at how the Internet is naturally supplanting TV as the medium of the masses.

Peter Hirschberg: The Web and TV, A Sibling Rivalry

The Thom-Thom Club

A couple months back I featured a lecture by Thomas Barnett on the deployment US military might in a post-Cold War world. Below is a talk he gave in Maine where he moves from a diagnostic to a prescriptive point of view on the the topic. It's a fascinating point of view, proffered by a guy who seems to have genuine fun giving his presentation.

Then, another sequel talk of sorts. I'm sure most followers of this blog know Thomas Friedman, who penned The Lexus and the Olive Tree and, more famously, The World is Flat. He takes a different look at some of the issues Barnett touches on, but from an economic (specifically petro-political) perspective.

Modern Day Piracy

A couple of weeks back, I was reading an article in the Economist on pirates. I have read similar news bites in the past, but still piracy for me was limited to RIAA/MPAA propaganda or one half-decent Johnny Depp film (don't talk to me about the two sequels). But the videos I'm posting today have helped reshape my understanding.

Modern Day Pirates



Then a different point of view on the issue, this one from the Voice Of America. I find this exploration of the issues considerably drier, but perhaps a bit more substantive. If these guys were outside a Indonesian brothel, I'm guessing there wouldn't be cameras around (you have to watch the first one to understand that).


On the Line: High Seas Piracy

Sostenibilidad

Gonna return to environmental themes this week with a couple of videos about how the Spanish are tackling sustainability. The first looks at the Canary Island of El Hierro, which is supposedly on track to be fully sustainable by the end of 2009.

Canary's Eco Island



Next is a video from GreenEnergyTV (so note the potential bias) looking at Barcelona's efforts to achieve sustainability.

Barcelona: Sustainable Energy City



The final video is a talk by Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Recorded in early 2005, he discusses why we must ween ourselves off foreign oil. I don't agree with everything he says (his reference to biofuels ignores the intensive water needs of that 'solution') and the age of the talk shows in his statistics on fuel costs. But what is interesting is what he has to say about the mechanics of conservation for automobiles.

Amory Lovins: We Must Win the Oil Endgame

Gladwell's World

Occasionally I like to tap into some innovative thinkers here in the WWW blog. A while back I featured some lectures by Jarod Diamond, and this week we're going to hear from Malcolm Gladwell. Author of The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell is a writer for the New Yorker and has some interesting insights about American (and often, more broadly, Western) society. In this first video, he appears with Mark Kingwell on at CBC radio broadcast to discuss social change.


Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Kingwell on QTV (CBC Radio)



In this second video, Gladwell talks about a man whose studies around the marketing of food lead to an eventual democratization of taste in American culture.


Malcolm Gladwell: What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce

War with Iran

Extending our poly-sci coverage from last week, I've found a couple of interesting pieces about Iran. Our foreign policy approach to that country is an issue that will almost certainly need to be addressed by whoever wins the election on November 4, and I've selected these pieces to try and give a little context. These pieces offer very different perspectives on the country. The first is a citizen journalist piece that briefly looks at life inside Iran and the fear that the US may launch a war against the county.

A View from Iran


The second piece is more formal telejournalism and investigates whether or not the US has already started a proxy war with Iran through resistance groups on the Iraq-Iran border.


America's Secret War

A Couple of Looks at 'Fortress America'

With the American elections just three weeks away I went out looking for some different points of view on Election 2008, and I ran across this surprisingly good piece of citizen journalism from Current.com that explored attitudes toward Americans by citizens of other countries. Check it out...

The View from Over There



Of course, most of the folks featured in those videos can't vote in American elections so for a slightly more domestic point-of-view check out this videographic presentation from The Economist magazine on Anglo-Saxon attitudes to many common issues. It's an interesting comparison of American and British cultures.


Divided We Stand

Some Like It Hot...

Figured I'd stick with the arts for another week, but this week the artistic motif is fire. Check out these films from a couple different years of the Burning Man festival (remember how it was before the money flowed in). There's not much else to mention about these, they sort of speak for themselves. Oh, but I will add the first one has a little pixelated nudity...but should be SFW.

The Shiva Vista Project


Flaming Lotus Girls: Mutopia


Then, to cool things down a bit, check out this performance from Pilobolus. (If you're body conscious, don't watch this one after eating.)

Pilobolus: A Performance Merging Dance and Biology


-C-

Minds Wide Open

Ever since I read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open I've been fascinated with the human brain...how little we understand about it, but how much it governs (whether we like it or not) every...single...thing we do. So I present to you this week, a pair of videos on our brains. It's a topic I'm sure we'll come back to in the future, so if you have any you'd like to see featured here send me a link.

For today, the first is a captivating lecture from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuro-anatomist who recognized she was having a stroke and what she learned from that experience.

Jill Bolte Taylor - My Stroke of Insight



The second is lecture by Jeff Hawkins, most famous for inventing the Palm Pilot, but also very passionate about brains and artificial intelligence. I'm embedding a 5-part playlist from YouTube of a lecture he gave at the 2008 RSA conference.

Jeff Hawkins: On Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog

I've been looking for an embeddable version of this for a while, and I found it so I thought I'd post a little something fun this week (it's a musical!). This was project that developed during the writer's strike last spring. This was done relatively cheap (by Hollywood standards) and wouldn't usually qualify for WWW inclusion except that A) it's from the mind of Joss Whedon, and B) it exists solely as a web exclusive video. Shows you how far the web has come in just the last two years. Anyway, enjoy! I'll embed the whole thing first and also include the chaptered version below that.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (full version)






Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (Chapter 1)



Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (Chapter 2)



Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (Chapter 3)

A Different Colbert Report...

Haven't done much artistic on Web Worth Watching but I recently ran across these languid pieces from still photographer/filmmaker Gregory Colbert. Embedded here are a couple of excerpts of his work. Can't decide how I feel about these. Either they are hauntingly beautiful or horribly pretentious. I think it all depends on how jaded you are when you watch them.

Ashes and Snow: Feather to Fire


Flying Elephants Presents (Parts 1 & 2)


-C-

Is It Always Greener on the Other Side?

When I first got out of college I lived in southern New Jersey, which had a lot of sod farms. Having cut a lot of grass in my teenage years (8 acres...usually once a week...walk-behind mower...I had good calves) I could appreciate the acre upon acre of well manicured grassland. But it did seem a little extravagant to, in essence, adopt a lawn.

Now, living in the parched American southwest I have developed a new appreciation for grass-free living. Here xeriscaping is all the rage. Don't get me wrong, I still do miss the feel (and especially the smell) of a newly mown lawn. But this week's films, all three parts of Isaac Brown and Eric Flagg's film, "Gimme Green," call into question the environmental impact of this national obsession.

Gimme Green (Part 1)



Gimme Green (Part 2)



Gimme Green (Part 3)


-C-

Tales of a Weather Paparazzi (taken down)

Update (9/30): Seems like Current took this set of videos down. I'll keep looking for it else where and re-post if I can find it.

-C-


As I type this, Hurricane Season is in full bloom. With Gustav now taking a back seat to the very scary TBD that is Ike, I started looking for interesting video on hurricanes. That led me to this 5-part, first person series about self-described "Weather Paparazzi" Doug Kiesling and his experience in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Some might refer to this as "weather porn," but if you've never been in a hurricane this is some pretty intense footage.

Part 1: The Day Before

Part 2: New Orleans, From Dusk Until Dawn

Part 3: Katrina On Canal Street

Part 4: The Escape From New Orleans

Part 5: New Orleans, The Day After Katrina


-C-