As of the hour I write this, the polls in NY are still open until 9pm – if you haven’t voted, go vote!
I did vote, but at least two areas of voting in which I was not terribly happy. Oh well.
At least see what tonight will bring!
Poking around Time’s special Midterm Blog (fascinating stuff – heck, they got Time tv/media critic James Poniewozik on board!) and they linked to Cute Overload as a way to make us feel better on this Day of Madness (can’t find the original Midterm Blog post, but it’s somewhere there). I’ve passed by this Cute Overload website before – sooo cute!
The election starts in about 3 hours. I’m going to be a pessimist and say that the Dems will only tie in the Senate, while sweeping the House.
Much of the recent political momentum is due to videos published on YouTube, which was recently cited by Time magazine as the Invention of the year. This was the next step from the Rodney King video; now everyone’s Rodney King videos have instant worldwide distribution. I’ve tried the upload interface and it is really uncomplicated – you upload whatever video file you have, and YouTube figures out all of the conversion, resizing, streaming, and all that other hard stuff about videos.
The other slick thing is the legal team that figured out how to use the DCMA in their favor; unlike Napster, as long as it stays in the DCMA’s common carrier safe harbor by doing what it has to do, YouTube is pretty much immune from lawsuits no matter what people put up on the site.
The other great thing about YouTube is not just it lets you catch up on the last 20 years of pirated broadcast history, but it is a revival of the lost art of parody, and also is an education in what is “real”.
For example, this guy makes the observation that one of Jolin Tsai’s Mandarin Chinese songs sounds a lot like English. (click on the pictures to play the videos).
Katers17, who is part Native American and works for a video game store chain in England, blows away the competition in an online video date-off, apparently only with a webcam:
After the founders of YouTube hit the jackpot, they did, of course post a video:
That invited the NoHo Girls (a group from North Hollywood apparently experimenting with creating an online soap opera) to goof on the YouTube guys:
The Vietnamese chick in that video, Berry “Blue” Nguyen (we’re not really sure it’s her real name), had her own intro video. It wasn’t clear whether her Valley Girl act was real or staged:
That led communitychannel, a 20-year-old Chinese-Australian from New South Wales to parody Blue’s act:
YouTube has become the killer video app, not just because of technical advances, but it is providing the vocabulary and mores for the average person to communicate using video in the same way that letter writing was in the last century. It’s about time.
