Michael Wesch, author of the famous Digital Etnography video, produced a new short video “summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. ”

Link to video

Together with 200 students, they started a brainstorming exercise on how students learn today and their future challenges, on a Google Document, edited 367 times during one week. All of the information was later organized into a film script, filmed by Michael and inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s ideas.

Source: Information Aesthetics

To refresh our daily creativity, it’s always helpful to have a different perspective, such as to change our online video diet. Here are some fine selected resources that are guaranteed to ignite your creative sparkle.

Some of the videos are really worth keeping for future reference, so get the Firefox extensions DownloadThemAll and DownloadHelper to easily save them.

1. The mother lode: Archive.org

   

   If you care to browse for a while and ignore the game trailers you can bum into the original 1932 Nosferatu, The Kid with Charlie Chaplin, What To Do In A Zombie Attack or something more surrealistic such as Un Chien Andalou by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. As many of the movies have keywords and descriptions, it’s easier to find a movie on a particular subject.

2. A daily dose of entertainment:Videos with Bibi

   

   From Brazil, a premium selection of movies available on the web. Recent additions include It’s a Wonderful Life by Frank Capra, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins or Sicko by Michael Moore.

3. Curating the web: SpecialTen.Tv

   

   One of my favorites, with several awarded short movies and with careful chosen content (heck, they even feature Arcade Fire) . Warning: be generous on the bandwidth.

4. Ideas worth viewing: Ted Talks

   

   Each year the world’s most brilliant minds gather at Monterey, inviting speakers such as Al Gore, Richard Branson, Steven Levitt, Steven Pinker and many others discussing themes ranging from Technology to Global Issues. The videos are later posted live, but with such passion from the speakers it’s as if we were there.

5. Concrete Video poetry: UbuWeb

   

   There’s more at UbuWeb than meets the eye, so when you land on the film section you could spend days wondering around the video works of acknowledged directors or artists such as Orson Welles, Dziga Vertov, Marcel Duchamp or Ginsberg.

6. The cream of the crop: Motionographer

   

   A digest in motion design and animation, where you can find works by renowned studios such as Blur, Lobo, Imaginary Forces or Psyop. And even if a picture is worth a thousand words, they also have great content.

7. DIY video hackers: MakeTV

   

   The video podcast of MakeZine, it’s a somewhere between a video tutorial channel and a crazy professor showroom.
   Learn how to program in Arduino, make a ring out of a coin or build a Grocery Propelled Vehicle on a Weekend Project .Pretty cool if you ask me.

8. RIP: The Show with Ze Frank

   

   One of the first “weblebreties”, the man really knows how to entertain. Having seen him live, my best compliment would be to regard Ze as the “Buster Keaton of the web”.

9. The real fun: Comedy Central

   

   South Park, Daily Show with John Stewart, Sarah Silverman. ‘Nugh said.

So, what’s your excuse for still watching home made videos on YouTube?

Are you addicted on TV series? Do you considered yourself a geek?
Then you can’t miss “The Big Bang Theory” on CBS.

© CBS

The show features two MIT like geniuses and a blond neighbor working in a cheese factory, with exquisite dialogues discussing string theory or quantum mechanics. A must, and not a bad idea for adjusting TV to today’s digital connected audience.

For RSS feed readers, here’s the Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1WQVME4Ojg

More videos at YouTube’s CBS channel.

Al Gore’s Internet TV project is launching their new beta version at beta.current.com, with new features that should keep them a close competitor to Joost but also Youtube.
The biggest change seems to be (one more) social network, with the option to connect to other users with similar tastes or share your uploaded content with friends.

The beta version still lacks some of the quality content of parent site Current.tv such as Google Current, but with the ability to build a network of friends and a crowdsourcing community filter, it stands as one of the most serious competitors to YouTube, and a much safer harbor to brands.

One of the most interesting features on current.com are viewpoints, a place where users can record (via webcam) their opinion on topics such as climate change, stem cells or Iraq. Talk about digital democracy :)
CurrentTV strategy of filtering the best content but providing the community the tools to foster creativity might be just the right way to go in today’s video overloaded landscape. Let’s hope they manage to blend it right with the parent site.

Magic. Anagram. Video.
Of course i’m talking about Arcade Fire’s new interactive music video.

Click around (or hover) and rejoice.

URL: www.beonlineb.com
Development: Vincent Morriset
Production: Nu Films

Source: Stereogum

You know those weekends where you have no idea what to do or what to visit?

How about some geocaching?

If you haven’t heard about it, don’t worry, me neither. Well, that is until last weekend when i was introduced (thanks Ricardo!) to this GPS treasure-hunting game, a global activity with more than 400,000 “caches” (waterproof containers) in 222 countries.

All you need is to get a GPS device, register yourself in geocaching.com and find the cache coordinates (in GPX format) you want to search for.
Once you start, you will eager for your next challenge, always confident that the community members have hidden the caches in interesting places. If you think it’s easy just because you have the latest GPS gadget, don’t! The hard part comes when you find out how hard it is to reach to some places or your GPS signal suddenly goes berserk.

The beauty of it, it’s how simple it is (although variations are encouraged):

1. Take something from the cache
2. Leave something in the cache
3. Write about it in the logbook

The site offers some precious advices and helps you get started with this addictive outdoor experience. If you want to get involved, Geocaching.com even provides tips and materials to place you own caches.

So, what does this have to do with online advertising, you might ask? Everything!
It’s a DIGITAL based SEGMENTED activity involving SEARCH and ENTERTAINMENT with highly motivated COMMUNITY USERS that leave their FEEDBACK on LOG books and TRADE gifts. Connect your own dots.

Róisín Murphy releases her new single ‘Let Me Know’ on October 8th with the brand new album ‘Overpowered’ following on October 15th. Co-written and produced by Andy Cato of Groove Armada, and mixed by Dan Carey (Kylie, Sly & Robbie, CSS, Lily Allen), ‘Let Me Know’ is a huge, floor-filling monster of a tune. The track was inspired by Róisín’s performance at legendary New York DJ Danny Krivit’s 718 Sessions in 2006 and perfectly showcases Róisín’s love of dance music coupled with a huge great melody.

RSS readers: link to roisinmurphytv video

‘Let Me Know’ features three brand new B-sides and some stunning mixes from both Andy Cato and Joey Negro. However this time they’re spread across the formats rather than stuffed on to one bumper-CD.

Are you seated? Great, because what Adobe is cooking up for the next Flash version is out of this world.

• Realtime video preview at authoring mode
• Inverse kinematics in shapes or movieclips
• C/C++ translation to Actionscript 3 (Ruby interpreter running in Flash player, or native porting of Quake I from C to Actionscript 3)
• Flex Builder on Linux (now available on Adobe Labs)
• Flash Home for Mobile

Get a sneak peek by Peter Elst at Adobe Max conference.

Nice to know that portuguese brands are spreading some link love to from national bloggers. Rather than the usual top 100 blogs, the portuguese brewery, is awarding the best portuguese blog with €3000.

From the site:
“Super Bock Super Blog Awards are a tribute to you and all those who celebrate every day the portuguese language and the freedom of speech, helping to create a new Internet, a Web 2.0. Let’s make our own blog party in Portugal, awarding the importance of this (…) platform”.

“With this initiative, Super Bock intends to promote the best Blogs, and invite all portuguese to be part of our national online identity”

There’s not much of a chance for me to win, since they only allow portuguese written blogs. Go figure.
Anyway, if you’re a portuguese blogger, go ahead and register your blog.