WOTE: A Fairytale of New York and YouTube

IT'S fantastic how more and more people are using the Internet to start and build their careers. It gives a strong indication of what the online public wants, it creates entrepreneurs and employment and it gives us more variety and choice when spending time on the Internet.

YouTube specifically is becoming the most impressive stage for career launching. Look at someone like Ray William Johnson who basically creates YouTube videos about YouTube videos and gets millions of views within days. He has a full production crew, merchandise, a charity and cool hair.

One group that I have been lucky to discover only this year via YouTube are Walk Off The Earth. They're probably most famously known for their rendition of Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye, which they all play on one guitar. This has racked up nearly 105 million views on YouTube. There is also a great parody of this by The Key of Awesome btw.

The Key Of Awesome WOTE Parody - Somebody That I Used To Know

But I digress. Walk Off The Earth are fantastic. The group consists of freelance musicians and a couple of members who were doing their own thing on the web. They have come together as Walk Off The Earth and have fast become quite well known. They have been featured on a few talk shows including The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Walk Off The Earth also have their own Wikipedia entry. Here's a short splurb about their early beginnings:

"Walk off the Earth is a Canadian indie band formed in 2006 in Burlington, Ontario. They have gained success around the world by making low-budget music videos of covers and originals. The band built their fan base independently with no help from record labels, booking agents or management" - Wikipedia

Part of their success has come from allowing YouTube viewers to suggest covers for Walk Off The Earth to play. In fact much of their work encourages interactivity or participation by fans.

One fan suggested a particular favourite of mine which I honestly can't get enough of. It's Fairytale of New York by Sarah Blackwood and Gianni Luminati. To date the video has received over 1 million views. I'm responsible for just over half of that and is what I really want to show you.

Fairytale of New York - Gianni and Sarah

I have such a crush on Sarah Blackwood.

PS: Can anyone work out the chords and tabs that the two lovebirds are using in this song? I'm dead keen to learn how to play this!

Links:

• Walk Off The Earth website
• Walk Off The Earth Facebook page
• Walk Off The Earth YouTube Channel

HAPPY FRIDAY: Viral wedding dance video

THIS wedding dance video never gets old. It's only been viewed 73.5 million times to date. I had my music player on shuffle the other day when it picked out this little dance number which I hadn't heard in years. It immediately reminded me of this video.

Granted this is a rip-off of the final episode of the American Office when Jim and Pam get married, but this one actually happened for real-zies. There have been so many copy-cat weddings since this viral video but it is still such a cool idea for a wedding. Boom!

JK Wedding Entrance Dance

What a fantastic way to remember one of the happiest days of your life! Has anyone ever attended a nontraditional wedding before?

** More Happy Friday Videos **

GOING VIRAL: Popular people and viral media

I’VE just finished reading a thought-provoking book titled The Tipping Point (2000) by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, who is a well-respected journalist at The New Yorker. In his book Gladwell focuses on how ideas, products and messages reach a tipping point where they spread like viruses and enter­ into popular culture.

Several of the examples Gladwell uses are taken between the sixties and the nineties, with one of the earliest examples being the stirrings of the American Revolution. Gladwell asserts that word-of-mouth is still the most effective method for creating social epidemics. Spreading the famous phrase “The British are coming” for example, spread like wildfire and saved the settlers of early America.

Gladwell argues that out of any population of people it is only a few who are responsible for making something go viral. These people he refers to as Connectors — trustworthy, charismatic people who are a part of many social circles and are therefore well connected. Whether an idea, product or message sticks is dependent on what Gladwell calls The Law of the Few.

Never have Connectors been more important to this social process than they are today in the digital age. Today people don’t even need to know their online contacts or followers personally to help them make something go viral. Social media has made it possible for anyone to become an influential Connector. It doesn’t even take long for a viral e-mail to find its way around the world.

Demotivational posters are one of the most viral forms of imagery on the Internet. A Google image search for ‘demotivational posters’ fetches more than one million results.

Advertisers still attempt to increase the popularity of products by using celebrity endorsements. Fans of such celebrities may very well be persuaded this way. However, there is a far greater chance today of a product or idea going viral based on what those same celebrities say on Twitter or on their blogs. If Stephen Fry recommends a good book on Twitter, there is a chance that over three million people will follow suit.

The Internet is a fantastic tool for self-education, but it has to be said that, generally­, people will follow the law of crowds. If 640 million people have watched Justin Bieber’s video Baby you are likely to assume that it must be good and proceed to watch it yourself; or, you may watch it just to see what all the fuss is about. When a record label catches wind of such popularity and comments are largely favourable, those 640 million viewers are counted as potential consumers and Justin Bieber becomes an overnight superstar.

YouTube has great power to influence popular culture as it continuously evolves. Social media research conducted in 2009 reported that every minute, 24 hours of video footage is uploaded onto YouTube. Whether any of this becomes sticky and goes viral depends on those few individuals who, firstly, spend a lot of time on YouTube, and secondly, who are well connected and widely followed. What the rest of the world will consider popular largely depends on what they will consider to be popular.

It’s an intriguing yet daunting thought. A reflection of some of the most watched YouTube videos of all time include “lolcats”, people singing or dancing, and people falling over or getting hurt. Cats hold their position as the second­ most popular pet in the world, two of the most popular TV shows watched today include Idols and Dancing with the Stars and there has been a proliferation of reality shows depicting dangerous stunts or bodily functions — Jackass, Crazy Monkey, Dirty Sanchez, The Dudesons, Balls of Steel and Kenny vs Spenny, to name just a few. One would imagine that countries such as Bhutan, which are not a part of social media phenomena, would find such epidemics quite bizarre.

It appears that cultural globalisation lies in the hands of a few. We can either choose to take part and be contributing spinners of the growing web or we can be susceptible flies caught in its sticky threads.

THE EXPONENTIAL TIMES: Extra! Extra! Etc. Etc.

I TREATED myself with the purchase of a NAG (New Age Gaming) magazine the other day, which came with a glossy-ink-scented E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) supplement. The accompanying DVD was also largely dedicated to E3 and consisted of around two hundred game videos, trailers and GameTrailers.com awards.

I do not work for NAG nor do I sell their magazines. I was merely mesmerized by how far gaming has come in the last few years. We are certainly living in exponential times with the bacterial-like spread of information and new technologies.

Gone are the days of chalkboards and letter posting in the developed world. The sale and consumption of hard-copy books is fast dwindling at the hand of the Kindle and other eReaders. If Wikipedia were to be published as a book it would be over two million pages long. There are now even babies in Egypt named “Facebook.”

Exponential Times in Gaming

3D graphics has reached a point beyond comprehension five years ago. The number of gaming devices and vibrating motion controllers on the market this year can have one gleefully immersed 24/7, if you have the time. The exponential rate at which new game titles are being released has made the task of writing letters to Santa quite a meticulous one.

Exponential Times in Social Media

In 2007, one out of every eight U.S. couples met online. It is now estimated to be one in five. When television first entered our lives, it took 13 years to reach a target audience of 50 million. Facebook took just two years to get the same number of people on board its platform.

Greater than the exponential development of technology, is the exponential availability of information. It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information that anyone living in the 18th century could have consumed in their entire lifetime. The amount of technical information available is more than double every two years.

Exponential Times in Education and Employment

This exponential growth of technology and information is changing the way children are educated. Students are now being prepared for jobs that don’t yet exist and being trained to use technologies that have not yet materialised. It has also been shown that students who are online tend to outperform those who receive more face-to-face education.

This is of course changing the way that people are employed globally. It is estimated that 95% of companies that are online today recruit people using LinkedIn; around the same percentage of businesses use social media for marketing purposes.

Exponential Times Year to Year

In 2008, more than 200 million cell phone calls were made every second. This has roughly tripled every 6 months since. In 2009, every minute or so, a day’s worth of video footage was uploaded to YouTube. In 2010, the number of Google searches completed every ten minutes could have powered Las Vegas for half an hour. This year there are roughly 80 million Farmville farmers versus the 1.5 million real farmers. The moment you’ve finished reading this, most of this information will be outdated.

Here are two of the videos where you can find this information as well as more and more and more...

Exponential Times in 2008

Exponential Times in 2011

** More Web Developments & Absurdities **

VIDEO: Macbook thief gets defamed on YouTube

I CAUGHT wind of a fantastic story on 5fm while stuck in traffic this morning. Apparently some guy had his fancy new Macbook Air stolen from him. A while later, Steve (we’ll call him Steve) remembered that his Macbook had an auto backup function which automatically backed up his data to an online server. When Steve went online to have a little peruse through his data he skillfully managed to find the identity of the Macbook thief. Not only that, but Steve also came across a video the wannabe rapper had made using his newly acquired Macbook Air.

Steve reported the identity of the Macbook rapper to the police and uploaded the video to YouTube. It has now seen over a million views and is appropriately titled, “don’t steal computers belonging to people who know how to use computers.” The rapper has asked that the embarrassing video be pulled from YouTube and that he was sorry for stealing the Macbook. Steve and his new fan base told him to get bent.

Don’t steal computers belonging to people
who know how to use computers

lol