25th July 2007 - Be in the New Media "know" on a Friday afternoon

Yesterday I was at a conference at which a speaker from Google showed the audience some of the biggest rating stuff on YouTube and asked who had seen it. I was the lonely geek who raised a hand.

I figured on this basis it would be good from time to time to circulate some of the stuff doing the rounds so that next time someone asks if you know about The Chinese Backstreet Boys you can nod knowingly and point out the very best diet coke Mentos viral back at them. If you don’t understand a word of what I’m on about, I’ve pasted some links below. This isn’t about huge sites like Bebo, Flickr or Last.fm but about random videos and obscure sites that people are talking about. Feel free to share your own or tell me not to bother…

This week in new medialand

Chinese Backstreet (ancient in the world of new media, but mentioned above so I thought I’d include it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNjVHmN7uco&search=chinese%20backstreet%20boys
you’ve almost certainly seen this. Done in a bedroom, millions of views to date, these kids are now sponsored by Pepsi and indeed Mastercard did a rip off at the Brits. Big brands parodying unknowns – this was the start of the future (and other horrible new meeja clichés)

Mentos
“Mentos sweets react with Diet Coke causing an almost immediate release of the carbon dioxide. The escaping bubbles quickly turn into a foam, and the pressure builds dramatically”. This rather arcane chemistry experiment quickly became one of the biggest “explosions” of video on YouTube with hundreds of ways of showing the effect.
From the basic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5_V5FB23tE&search=mento
To the highly produced
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw-eEWtPm8Y&search=mento
To the totally hilarious (made by some guys who now make virals professionally)
http://www.davideodesign.co.uk/pepsigirl.htm

Spoofing well known content is one of the most extensive uses of YouTube, here is Tango’s take on Sony Bravia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qRvXh_0HbU&search=bravia%20tango

This is the “banned” South Park/Tom Cruise video which is a rip off of a hideous R Kelly “Closet” video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRCK3Wi9Nv4&search=in%20the%20closet


Many of you will have seen all that stuff already, much of it has been lurking for ages, so here are some cool sites to look at instead:


You’ve probably heard of RocketBoom. It’s a daily show about weird stuff on the web (go to www.channel4.com/thisisaknife for C4.com’s weekly show inspired by the origianl). RB started out being produced in a New York bedroom (as all the best things are). After a couple of months they auctioned the opportunity on Ebay to be the first advertiser to feature within the show. Someone paid £40k. Most days RocketBoom gets over 300k plays with some popular days receiving over1 million plays.
http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/

Upload a photo of yourself or your friends and find your celebrity double. Some are rubbish, some hilarious (especially when they are of the opposite sex)
http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/face_recognition.php

The Swarm is a site that allows you to see in real time which websites people are looking at. You get to see a visual map of all their current screens and can click on them to go straight to those sites
http://www.swarmthe.com/

This site aggregates the music people are talking about in blogs and allows you to play it directly
http://hype.non-standard.net/about.php

Every World Cup goal in one place. Select the game you want (click on the score), then click the ball icon to see each goal
http://www.11football.com/coupedumonde2006/index2.php
Uploaded almost instantaneously as it happens in real time

Celebrities before and after touchup. Horrifying. Brilliant.
http://www.fluideffect.com/

This has been sent to me three times in the last week, several versions are doing the rounds. Works on a basic mathematical principle but its spooky the first few times you try it
http://www.milaadesign.com/wizardy.html

Totally pointless but quite fun – lots of 80’s videos (apparently 80’s vids are the most uploaded content on YouTube in the last few weeks)
http://www.freephotosandvideos.com/