internet

A 1915 lecture in PDF and other formats.  Woohoo Internet.

A list of songs that sound alike. Stuff like that is what the Intenet is all about.

All sensible predictions about the internet are right – but they’re a decade or more out. They’re a decade out because they’re mostly dependent on people using the Internet and capable of using a search engine. There will be (roughly) linear growth per year of school leavers in Western Countries where Internet connections are becoming ubiquitous among the middle classes. It will become a primary source of media, entertainment, and news, for many people. Sites that cater to the youth market will experience the most rapid growth and have the best advertising potential. Second to that will be news followed by everything else. The old media will lose print readers/viewers proportionally. When those less adept at the Internet become a minority there will be as much money in online things like blogs as there is in the traditional media. Because audience numbers of popular sites will justify big money advertising. There will be another dot-com boom when the Internet reaches saturation point among adults – maybe in a decade. Old-media will go the same route as radio did when televisions reached saturation point. Adapt. Popular sites of today may end up as institutional as newspapers if they’re around for the duration of the shift to the tubes.

At the start of the popularisation of the Internet there were a lot of people with dubious Tank-Girl haircuts, William Gibson novel in hand, making wild predictions about Virtual Reality and the like.  Even William Shatner got in on the act with TekWar.   The days of the two Williams.  With the abundance of Internet mania it’s gotten a bit clichéd to go on about how the Internet is going to change things.

Adam Hart-Davis, if you can get over being spoken to like a 5 year old nephew, and his avuncular mien, made quite good documentary called “The Thinkynge Revolution” as part of his “What the Tudors Did For Us” series.  You can watch it here.  Although, of course, future historians may refer to the Internet Revolution as the Pornography Revolution and say things like “imagine if Caxton had done smut”.

Early Sunday morning I was listening to Russell Brand’s radio show and he mentioned one of his and Matt Morgan’s YouTube videos (The Weatherclerks) and how it’d only gotten a thousand hits. That is quite a pathetic amount of hits for a video that had been on YouTube six months. The problem is the way the videos were released. The first set of his unseen old-school (sort of old-school, post drugs) videos were disseminated via ‘Warren Kelp’ (an obvious sockpuppet) with some bullshit about the videos being found in a skip. That was all well and good, but the only people that would come across the videos were people specifically searching for Russell Brand. The largest proportion of his fans are ordinary people and are not going to do that. I saw the videos soon after their internet debut and featured them on this blog, but I, and people that come here (hello!) are elite internet ninjas. Many of whom have seen or heard of Russell Brand prior to the last couple of years (like me; he was funny out of his head on smack, back in the day in dingy Islington pubs, and he’s still funny minus the smack in front of audiences of hundreds. That’s a hell of a transition). Releasing the videos to the baying hordes, even with a celebrity name attached, is no good without doing internet basics like building up an internet audience (which is totally different from a telly/stand-up audience, and will become increasingly important in the next few years).

I think YouTube is proof that people will watch things that aren’t normally featured on television or the screen. Every celebrity should own a basic HD camera, such as the Canon HV30 (see note, it’s important), which produces good quality video without much technical complexity, or cost, or barriers to just switching on and filming. Buying a more expensive camera means more fucking around than is necessary, and nobody busy wants to fuck around. Buy a camera that doesn’t require training to use (the HV30 is excellent and produces excellent video). Film mundane stuff (people are interested in the mundane of any celebrity), stick it up on YouTube, build up some e-fame (which is like real fame, but with significantly less money) and profit. Videos a minute or two long. Below ten minutes of your life a week. Stick to basic editing, using the software that came with the camera, upload it to YouTube. It’s not difficult. Why more celebrities don’t do this is beyond me. Especially if they realise what the Internet is going to do to TV – like Tay Zonday does here. The time and money invested is minimal for hedging your bets on the Internet vs. TV question.

Then, the next time something like The Weatherclerks is released, far more people will watch it.

Note:

Canon: this is technically a plug I will sell my soul for a EOS 1Ds and a few professional lenses. I’ll even take the Nikon D3 off my shopping list for this year. In fact every photo I’ll produce this year with the EOS 1Ds will have “this was not produced by a Nikon D3” as an unobtrusive watermark. If, on the other-hand Nikon are reading this – quick – send me a Nikon D3 with several pro lenses – get there before the competition. It’s the first rule of business. There’s not many things I’d whore myself for, but for either one of those cameras I would cave in, contrary to the advice in this Bobby Conn video.

This is very funny.

On the Internet nobody knows if you’re trolling.