...A couple of YouTube observations this afternoon. First of all, if you look at today's most viewed list, it's almost totally dominated by non-English content. That charge is clearly being led by excerpts of a Turkish TV drama called "Yaprak Dökümü," which occupies a whopping 7 of the top 20 most viewed spots. I can tell you little about this show, except that it has a cool website. Would any of Web Scout's legion of Turkish-speaking readers care to illuminate us?
...Also, the feature on YouTube that allowed you to sort search results by date added, number of views, and relevance -- has disappeared. Meaning you cannot, as of now, search the brand-newest videos coming in anymore. This may not be headline news, but since I just wrote about it, it's sticking in my craw. Why would YouTube weaken its search tools so much? Could be a glitch, I guess ... but it has been this way for at least 24 hours now.
...Mark Glaser at PBS' MediaShift has an article up about the converging arts of blogging and reporting -- and how any respectable media outlet should probably be doing both. I made a small contribution to the article -- but what's more: for the six or seven thousand of you who write me every day asking me to post a picture of myself (you know who you are) -- now you need look no further.
...FaceReviews found a Facebook word game they like called Funny Farm, where you have to guess your way through a web of related words. Like what 4-letter word connects to both "barn" and "farm"? Don't ask me, I guessed like 15 different things and still couldn't get it.
There's a new anti-Scientology website up called "ExScientologyKids.com," which looks to have been started by three young women who left the church, one of whom is Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of church head David Miscavige. Here's part of what they say in their intro:
Most of the people that write for this site have had extremely negative experiences in Scientology. Some of us have lost our families due to Scientology's Disconnection Policy, some of us have experienced physical abuse, and some of us were denied a proper education.
The admin page lists Miscavige Hill, Kendra Wiseman ("Kendra's parents and most of her family disconnected from her in 2005 when she refused to stop speaking to anti-Scientologists online") and Astra Woodcraft, whose bio says she "left Scientology for good when the church tried to pressure her to have an abortion."
"For what it's worth," says the welcome page,"we offer non-judgemental support for those who are still in Scientology, discussion and debate for those who've already left, and a plethora of easy-to-understand references for the curious."
YouTube is about to hit 75 million videos. At the beginning of
February, it had 70 million. YouTube told me recently that 10 hours of
new video are uploaded every minute. And that every day, the site gets
-- their words -- "hundreds of thousands" of new videos.
On a real red letter day I'll watch maybe 25 videos (and remember, it's
my job). But if you figure 200,000 a day get put up on YouTube --
that's about one-hundredth of 1%.
The videos most of us watch are the ones that have tipped into the
mainstream -- the bizarre, hilarious or sensational most-viewed clips
that have become today's preferred water-cooler fodder.
But those videos are really just a pinch of sand from a mile-long beach
-- the tiniest, least representative fraction of what gets uploaded
every day. What YouTube is truly made of is the stuff no one ever sees
-- stuff not meant for, or wanted by, the public.
"This Youtube account is just to do video blogs for my best friend . .
. who lives all the way across the country. If your not her, then don't
watch them. You wont understand them." After an hour or so of fishing
in YouTube's mighty stream of new uploads -- mostly throwing back the
video equivalent of old tires -- I found a video by a young woman from
the East. It was just 10 seconds, but it caught my attention. The girl
was snorting a line of white powder off her desk.
Who would put that on the Internet? I looked at the rest of her videos
-- nine others, all messages to one girl. I'd stumbled onto a "private"
correspondence between friends, one on the West Coast and the other on
the East.
In a series of 15 videos between Anna and Dana -- those are the
pseudonyms I'll use -- the best friends kept each other up to date
about boy problems, their mental states and the trip Dana was planning
to the West.
Dana was the rebellious one, with multiple piercings, heavy eyeliner
and dyed hair. She talked a lot about the drugs she was doing -- not
the prescription kind. Anna was the straight one -- tamer, more
deadpan, no makeup. But both had a kind of fierceness to them -- and a
sweetness. You could tell why they were friends.
After a lackluster performance in its NBC debut on Tuesday night, "quarterlife's'" impressively durable hype bubble has finally popped. The show scored 3.1 million viewers and finished last in its time slot, marking, according to Reuters, NBC's "worst time-slot performance in at least 17 years."
And so, after weeks of trumpeting his groundbreaking sale of the show to NBC, creator Marshall Herskovitz has changed his tune.
"It never should have been a network show. It's too specific," Herskovitz told a group at the Harvard Business School on Wednesday. "From the first three minutes," he said of the feeling he got from seeing the show on air, "I knew it wasn't right."
Perhaps, if it wasn't right for ABC, or the Internet, or NBC, it may be right for Bravo. NewTeeVee is reporting today that the cable network will be the show's last stop.
So yet a fourth (and hopefully final) chapter opens on this peculiar saga, which first set out to prove that failed television ideas can succeed on the Internet, and then, failing that, that failed Internet ideas can work on television. Since that didn't work either, we're now being offered yet another hypothesis: that a show no one liked in its first three incarnations can still make a few bucks on cable. Sounds totally possible.
...because according to this Slate analysis, reading newspapers online could actually be worse for the environment than reading the dead tree version. The math they use is a little fuzzy, but it's a good reality check for us computer hippies.
...Facebook pulled a profile called "Kill with Me", where users were showed an image of a man being tortured with the text: "This
guy is going to die. You want to see his stinking flesh burn and bleed
and blacken?...The more fans I get, the more
I'll show ..." Turned out the profile was set up by a company running the UK ad campaign for the torture porn thriller "Untraceable."
...from the 'how the heck did this reach YouTube's most viewed list' files...a video called, "Contest 1 - Winner gets 100 $ - talents search," where an odd, jerkily animated woman announces that winners of an Internet fame contest will get "one hundred dollar".
...let wikileak leak! As Henry Weinstein writes, lawyers from the EFF, ACLU, Public Citizen and various news organizations asked a judge to lift his injunction against the muckracking wiki, saying it was too broad: "the only way to describe it was as if a judge had shut down a newspaper because of controversy over one article."
The story of "Quarterlife," which premieres tonight on NBC, has been more about the ambitions of the show's creators, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, than about the show itself. This drama about being young in a confusing world is in many ways the tale of two TV-makers being confused in a young person's world.
"Quarterlife" -- which Mary McNamara reviews in today's paper, and which I wrote about in November -- began as a pilot for ABC way back in 2004, when YouTube was still a far-off twinkle in some nerd's eye. For one reason or another, "1/4life" didn't make it to prime-time, forcing Zwick and Herskovitz -- who wanted to keep their idea alive -- to figure out another approach.
What they came up with sounded pretty good on paper: an "Internet show," complete with a main character who's also a video blogger -- and all wrapped in a real-live social network. If that wasn't cutting-edge television, then kiss my grits.
But despite a good deal of hype, some newfangled trimmings, and a partnership with MySpace, "Quarterlife" never quite crossed the Web's success threshold: it didn't go viral. The episodes on MySpace tended to hover around 100,000 views over their lifetime, with maybe another 50,000 or so each from each episode's YouTube incarnation. (For reference, a semi-well known YouTube blogger named KevJumba scored 450,000 views this week when he posted a video about how he broke his shin and had to "get a cast that extends up to my unmentionables.")
The strangest turn happened when, very soon after the writers strike started, Herskovitz and Zwick sold the show to a content-strapped NBC. "Quarterlife" had quickly come full circle -- imagined as a TV show and then reimagined as an Internet show, it was now being re-reimagined as an Internet show that beat the odds to make it onto TV.
Will the show work on NBC, even though it didn't really work online? In a recent essay for Slate, Herskovitz waves away the question: "We've already won the main victory, no matter what happens." In this case, the main victory is not making a hit show, but getting a network TV deal that gives him "100 percent ownership and creative control."
No one knows the exact recipe for getting a video to go viral, but here's one that ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" has exploited twice in a row:
Several heavy dollops each of sex, celebrities, and the F-word (bleeped or unbleeped, according to taste). The more of each, the richer the result. Mix thoroughly!
Last month we had "I'm [making love with] Matt Damon," in which Sarah Silverman apologizes to boyfriend Kimmel that she's been repeatedly unfaithful to him while on the road. This month, we have Kimmel's spectacular, star-studded revenge -- a tour de force called "I'm [making love with] Ben Affleck" -- in which Kimmel informs Silverman of his own transgression.
Cue Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Harrison Ford, Macy Gray, Robin Williams, Don Cheadle and about a dozen other boldface names, many of whom appear in a "We are the World"-type shot of a studio recording ensemble. There's nothing like mass self-effacement for a good laugh -- it's sort of like the good-natured big brother of mass abasement, the psychosocial crack-fuel of the gossip world.
The Affleck video has torn a hole in YouTube by racking up nearly 500,000 views in its first half-day.
Hey, ABC -- you may be onto something here! Fellas oughta take that recipe to the viral bake-off.
Pakistan crashed YouTube when it clumsily tried to block access to the site's IP address Sunday night, by essentially just routing incoming YouTube traffic to somewhere else. Which is like closing down the 405 and having everybody get off at Skirball Center Drive. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) wanted YouTube blocked "on account of showing highly blasphemous Dutch film":
PTA believes that the said footage absolutely stands against the values of religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence arousing deep anguish and distress across the Muslim world. Had not this highly profane and sacrilegious footage been banned, it has the potential to cause more unrest and possible loss of life and property across the country.
-- Also on the free-speech front, Wikileaks.org, a website that aspires to be "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis," has refused to shut itself down after a federal judge ordered its Internet service provider to disable its Web address. The blog Wikileak.org suggested several ways readers could "get around" the injunction, and reminded interested parties that many of the leaked documents are still available on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.
It looks like the underground information byways are now being used for more than just music and movies -- when it comes to online piracy, it's all about incriminating documents now. Share some with your friends today!
And if the entertainment industry hasn't figured out how to plug the leaks, can we expect that other kinds of corporations will? And let's not even think about how governments will approach this ...
I received this e-mail after my story about trying to find 90DayJane went online last week. See the story here. In the letter below, the author of the controversial, short-lived 90DayJane blog reflects on the nature of fame, vows she won't reveal her identity and muses on whether she'll ever do anything as "big" as 90DayJane. A couple of sentences from the letter have been editorially redacted.
Hi David,
Please know that if I were not paranoid about my online security and anonymity I'm sure someone would have found me. It seems to have become a fun challenge to some warez people.
The thing about fame (I think) is that no one ever gets to choose what they are "famous" for. Unlike being respected in a chosen profession or achieving some great feat, fame is a simple situation wherein someone has managed to get to the top of the "cultural dog pile" (your words). People don't get to choose how the public perceives them and they can spend a lot of time and money trying to change that perception. By keeping my identity away from 90DayJane, I get to skip all of that.
David Sarno
is the Times' Internet culture and online entertainment writer. His Web Scout print column runs in the L.A. Times Calendar section on Wednesdays.
— Follow David on Twitter.
