It's All About the Conversation

You’ll probably need to download the silverlight plug-in for this, but it’s interesting in a not fun sort of way…

Or to see it on the BP site, go here:

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.  2 Students from MIT launch a camera into near space for $150.  Check out their site, and the time lapse of the camera shooting every 5 seconds of the 5 hour journey.

Here is the Loveland Pass panorama, in full size….

Loveland Pass Panorama - Click for larger image

You can read more about it and download it here:

http://debaclesoftware.com/

A short while ago I mentioned that I found on Google’s site that they’re adding 10 hours of video per minute.  While impressive numbers, it’s actually mich higher, about twice as high…  According to Mashable, YouTube is getting 20 hours of video uploaded per minute!   There are 1440 minutes in a day, and that means that there are 28,800 hours of video uploaded per day!!  It makes me wonder how many people they hire just to install hardware.

How long can they lose so much money?  $470,000,000 this year alone.

I agree that You Tube is one of the strongest online communities, if not THE strongest, but somehow, they’ll need to figure out the monetization problems.  No business can run with losses that continue for too long.

That said, taking advantage of You Tube’s channels for all of your company video is a pretty good way to broadcast yourself.

I was listening to Jimmy Buffett Live in Hawaii in my car when I heard the news.  The only word that came to mind was “AWESOME!”

Jimmy is a brand unto himself.  So are Parrotheads.  And now, he’s taken the stadium naming rights away from Corporate America and into the social, entertainment, fun world.  Too bad this is only for one year, and that it’s supposed to end by the Superbowl, but, I expect it will live on forever and this will always be Landshark Stadium as Jimmy Buffett turns corporate branding on it’s ear.

Many of the articles say that one of the primary reasons is to get more people to football games.  I didn’t actually think that declining attendance to football games was a problem, but I bet this will work in terms of making them more fun.  You know he’ll be at many games and I expect he’ll play a lot too.  It’s the next step in the Margaritaville world.

Read one of the articles here.

See a short AP video here:

AWESOME!

Right now there’s a cool, new interactive ad for Apple staring the Mac and PC guys on CNN.com by their agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. It’s a follow up to another interactive ad they did a while back.  If you get a chance today to see it, look fast as I bet it won’t last long.  It’s interesting, and quite obvious that they chose Tuesday to put this out there, since Tuesdays and Thursdays are the busiest days on the internet…

See the other ads below:

I saw a blurb from the Christian Science Monitor today about Viral Videos.  The top 20 viral videos of the day are listed in order of popularity.  See: http://www.viralvideochart.com/ Interesting how Susan Boyle is in it twice (#1, #19) and Britney Spears only has 1 (#11) of her hair extensions getting pulled out on stage (heh heh).

Then, there’s http://www.viralvideos.com/ which has a completely different set of top viral videos…

I’m not really sure where they’re getting their data, but do know that viral videos are a popular way to get attention and if your video is good, it’ll get attention somewhere. A google search for “viral videos” brought back 7.4 million results.

According to YouTube’s fact sheet:

Traffic and Stats

People are watching hundreds of millions of videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

That’s a lot of video competition…