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One of the annoying things about 9/11, or 11/9 as we prefer to call it outside the U.S. in modern ISO standard notation, is the token posting of security guards around our big monuments. In particular the Sydney Harbour Bridge, this whopping great mechano set built in 1932 and still the world’s largest single arch bridge. Meet the little guy assigned to protect this great national asset.
More significant though is the fact that I’ve filmed this, and joked about destroying the bridge, which is arguably in this day and age, enough to warrant a visit from the bridge police. Just don’t tell them OK?
I smiled to myself when I read this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald, and an article titled Tassie YouTube star calls it quits. Tassie is short for Tasmania, which I guess you could call Australia’s Hawaii, except unlike Hawaii, we successfully killed off all Tasmania’s indigenous people, making us perhaps not so fun loving and fancy free as our tourism advertisements may suggest.
Anyway, in the above SMH article, the term video blog (note the space) is not only used several times, but is used in a way that indicates the author considers it, if not common term, then at least having passed into the standard English lexicon.
More interestingly for me, considering my upcoming War & Peace article on defining videoblogging, is the fact that the term video blog sits so comfortably in an article about a personal video blog, which without preempting my upcoming post too much, is in itself a tautology.
Every now and then I upload a video, or make a post, which I secretly wish would get BoingBoinged. You know the feeling, you sit back thinking “Yeah, this is pretty cool, a nice commentary on pop culture”, hoping that someone will think to submit it to Cory and Co. Of course I’d never submit it myself, that would be cheating.
There are about 3 or 4 I thought might get a look in, but no, I’ve never been BoingBoinged. I reckon I got close with Five Minute Matrix, but when it got ripped without credit and uploaded to iFilm, that pretty much ended that idea. I even considered my Images of Culture video might get a look in, but no…
So, figuring that my best bet would be a follow up of another BoingBoing story, instead of trying for a story of my own, I remixed an answering machine message from BoingBoing, where a reader was complaining that they showed how to detect counterfeit U.S. money. I didn’t know what to put in visually, so I reused an idea I had about a year ago, that Google Images, and now Flickr, are snapshots of our culture as at now, sort of like a web based MD5. You basically take each word from the audio track, and match it with the first result for that word in Google Images.
I admit it, I was grinning a little, thinking this one might just get BoingBoinged, but then the archive died, and I couldn’t upload for two days. Then when it came back up, there was a backlog of a few days. Then when the video cleared, it disappeared altogether. So I checked Ourmedia, because I use their front end, and they said the tool may not be working, and to use SpinXpress, which had just been updated to support the archive. Anyways, I had problems with that as well, it wouldn’t upload both my format files, and even then it didn’t appear on the archive. Grrr.
Today four copies suddenly appeared on the archive, so here it is, a week too late to get BoingBoinged, and yet again, foiled.
By the way, here’s the original video on scanning money.
After a five year break, we’re bringing back our old radio show A Walk in the Black Forest, and what better way to have a preproduction meeting than in front of a bowl of butter chicken and cheese naan.
There was a black out in Newtown this night, which was the night after I got back from Vloggercon 2006. Never found out why, maybe the Newtown Jihad…