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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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):
Take something from the cache
Leave something in the cache
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.
by Armando Alves.
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.
‘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.
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.
Scarcity is always a straight way to get your campaign a boost. Or so they think at Amazon.de, where they plan to release the german version of “Harry Potter and the deathly hallows” the next 27th.
Instead of lining up at the stores perhaps there’s a better way: open up a huge bookshelf on the Internet, where the user can reserve their “own” Harry Potter book, even weeks before the official release.
You can choose and customize your own book on the virtual shelf, with the exact position of he book being saved, so you can remember were you left your books (i wish i could say the same with real books).
Yesterday, the husband of a close friend and co-worker died of cancer. I bring my web respect in the form of a inspiring (and last) lecture, of Randy Pausch, who has terminal cancer, at Carnegie Mellon.
Randy is Co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center and creator of the Alice 2.0, and shares with us his childhood dreams to groundbreaking achievements he made working with students and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University.
if you have to watch one video this week, this would be the one.
