Wanting Sumptuous Heavens

I don’t know who still reads poetry these days, in this age of shorter,faster and ever more slapstick online video clips.

I still do. God knows I need to, in order to tolerate the snappy online videos.

Here is a nice one by Robert Bly’s in the New Yorker

Wanting Sumptuous Heavens: Poetry: The New Yorker

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A YouTube Experiment

I stumbled upon an experiment by the creative team at a San Francisco interactive marketing agency. They set themselves the task of creating a video that will go viral on YouTube.

Here is what they found out:

Making the Mundane Viral: A YouTube Experiment

And you can see the video they made here —
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1CBXGp9s9Y

By the way, the video is called, “Dog Attacks Polar Bear.” The video-title, as it turns out, is all-important. It top the list of tips on making the mundane viral:

* a catchy, impossible-to-avoid video title

* tags that cast a wide net for content seekers

* arguably controversial (taboo) content

* a video featuring an animal

This is a sobering statement about our times. Will our media universe be filled with animal videos with catchy and controversial titles? What will happen to all those stories that take longer than 5 minutes to tell?

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Death of TV as We Know It

Have you noticed that people don’t really watch TV on TV anymore?

It is little surprise that TV networks are scrambling to re-invent themselves. More often than not, they burn a lot of cash and get themselves entangled in knots.

Throwing money at the problem is not the solution. Starting from scratch could be. Check out what Al Gore and his Current TV team has pulled off with the launch of the new current.com website.

Al Gore’s Current: Re-defining TV, Using the Web

Personalization and contextual engagement are the keys to the new TV experience on the web, on TV, on your mobile phone, in fact on just about any screen near you.

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