Posts Tagged ‘You Tube’
“Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both present and past”*…
One of the videos that stream on end at Tyler Hellard‘s PopLoser.tv. As he explains in his newsletter, the always-illuminating Pop Loser…
A couple years ago, I briefly had a site at poploser.tv. I filled it with weird videos and movies from around the Internet, but never kept it up and eventually it lapsed (that’s the story of most of my web projects). Last week I was reminded that YouTube really is a treasure. There’s just so much… stuff. YouTube has a whole weird sub-culture (several, actually), but the site is most amazing as an archive and a look at what TV used to be, which seems less, but more, than what TV has become.
While re-watching old episodes of Twitch City (the greatest TV show ever made), I thought about PLTV and what I wanted to do with it and decided to try again. I’m working out some bugs and trying to get the perfect mix of videos, but the new site is mostly designed just to be left on. You can go there and let it play (auto-play isn’t working on mobile yet), enjoying the ephemera of what television was in all its wonderful weirdness.
In a [few days] I’m going to flip a switch so it’ll only show only Christmas content through the holidays…
Couch surf down memory lane at PopLoser.tv
* Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
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As we lean back, we might send elegantly composed birthday greetings to Emily Dickinson, who was better known during her life as a gardener and botanist than as a poet; only 7 of her 1775 poems were published in her lifetime– which began on this date in 1830.
“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever”*…
The internet runs on an attention economy. Those with the most views, clicks, retweets, likes, and friends win. That’s why Petit Tube is so wonderful: it presents only the least-viewed videos on YouTube. It’s a bare-bones site, streaming video after video (1:30 long tops), with two buttons: “cette vidéo est bien? and “cette vidéo n’est pas bien?” Thumbs up or thumbs down.
To say Petit Tube curates videos is probably an overstatement. Real estate tours with corny music aren’t popular for a reason. But even they have their charm, and you’ll also find the occasional gem of found poetry…
Consider this, for example: a Chinese youth orchestra’s rendition of “Scarborough Fair” (up to over 500 views as of this post, surely as a function of it’s featured place in the rotation on Petit Tube)…
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Read more about this celebration of the wonderfully weird at Studio 360‘s “Introducing the least viral videos on the internet,” and then dive into the wonder that is Petit Tube… where “with 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, Petit Tube [is unlikely] run out of material anytime soon.”
* Napoleon
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As we ponder popularity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Jazz Festival during his first public performance with electric instruments (and a band that included Michael Bloomfield and Al Kooper)… The cat-calling began with his opening number, “Maggie’s Farm,” and continued through three more songs, after which Dylan left the stage. As a peace offering to Pete Seeger and other aggrieved organizers, Dylan returned later to do two acoustic numbers… but the die was cast; thereafter, his career was electrically-powered…
For a sense of just how far things have come, check out Johnny Winter’s version of “Highway 61,” taped at a 1992 tribute to Dylan (on the occasion of 30th anniversary as a recording artist):
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