un airbus a380 en 7 minutes

Apparently, you can actually build an airplane in 7 minutes--in French. Here's the video of Airbus's new monstrosity that made its debut in North America this week. The behemoth is "as tall as a seven-story building, roomy enough to fit 70 vehicles on its wings, as heavy as 500 Volkswagen Golfs and big enough to carry 35 million ping pong balls." Yeah, but Boeing 747s are big enough to take out a 110 story building. Too soon?



[via Gridskipper, The Lede]

al gore's still pissed

In a long string of rhetorical questions, Al Gore pretty much told it like it is to Congress yesterday. Equiped with 519,414 signatures, Gore spoke about how "our children and grandchildren will look back and...ask one of two questions..." You bet they're rhetorical:



Also, Gore, in a bout of enthusiasm, scheduled a Bono-wannabe music festival/hippie convention/douchebag meetup for 7/7/07. It's called Live Earth and...well...don't go. But at least it's for a good cause?

iWhack

I'm not usually one for MadTV because it generally sucks, but this sketch is awesome but sadly too accurate:

presidential candidates on youtube

Some of these guys (and gals) get it, and some of them just don't. Clearly candidates are trying to appeal to the internet generation--that would be us--by making YouTube videos so we can blog and MySpace and FaceBook about them and do whatever it is kids do these days. Message to campaign media managers: new media is all about user generated content and posting the same video that you're going to run at your party's national convention is not going to sell to a generation that is more media savvy than you are.

Take, for instance, Mitt Romney's video, titled "Unplugged". First of all, this is one of the only videos on all of YouTube that uses quotation marks in the title, and I know that's hypercritical of me, but it's an early sign that the video is going to be detached from YouTube's audience. Second of all, it's called "Unplugged", which might have been a cool pop culture reference in 1995 when that show was still on MTV, but now it sounds tired. Then there's the video itself: a slick, well-edited montage of Romney (using the word Jihadist, no less) and his wife, narrated by someone who sounds like he's from the National Geographic channel. This video might impress a 50-year-old, but word on the street is that they're not so hip to YouTube. There is, in fact, nothing "unplugged" about it.



Let's contrast this with the videos coming out of Barack Obama's campaign. Obama has hired Joe Rospars, a young, cool guy who co-founded Blue State Digital, as his New Media Director, and Rospars' team has produced a series of videos that I actually enjoy watching. They don't seem scripted, they're edited like other YouTube videos, and a good majority of them build on Obama's "I'm the grassroots candidate" theme by relying heavily on interviews with people off the street. The videos are effective because they don't bore the audiences with Obama's stump speeches--rather they play up the buzz surrounding Obama. In this next video, Obama is comes off as a rock star surrounded by his adoring fans. Talk about hitting the target audience nail on the head:

more on (RED)

Sorry to bombard you with video (I do assume someone looks at this blog), but just wanted to leave a quick note to show our loyal readers that Slob beat CNN to this punch:



CNN confirms that (RED) partner companies spent somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million to market (RED) products, while they only raised a scant $18 million for the Global Fund--less than the figure (RED) gave to PSFK. Is (RED) successful? Comments?

By the way, I could listen to Susan Lisovicz say "Buy less crap" all day. I can't wait until that gets cut into some leftie YouTube diatribe.

solving crime with youtube

ABC News reports on the growing number of law enforcement agencies using YouTube to solve crimes. Recently, police have been uploading surveillance tape clips to the video-sharing website in hopes of generating leads based on the tapes. From ABC:

"When we normally forward a video to mainstream media, it'll be shown two, three, four times, and that'll be it," said Sgt. Jorge Lasso of the Hamilton Police Department. "The advantage of it on YouTube, of course, is not only that it costs nothing, but it remained on YouTube as long as we wanted it to."

So when Time made "you" their Person of the Year, they must have meant "you robbing a 7-Eleven wearing women's nylons on your head."

arcade fire

I don't know how much you follow the release of the Arcade Fire's new album Neon Bible, but there has been a lot of unconventional press surrounding its March 6th release.

First came an awkward e-mail to the music blogs and the music press. It appeared to be spam promoting the Neon Bible which originally only showed a phone number, 1-800-NEON-BIBLE. After pressing extention 7777, phone callers could hear the new song Intervention.

Then, the "wrong" song was allegedly posted on iTunes due to a slip-up at their record label, Merge.

After which came an apology on Win Butler's personal blog.

Arcade Fire also released a pretty goofy YouTube video:


Now you can hear Black Mirror at www.neonbible.com as well as the hear the phone clip from 1-800-NEON-BIBLE, watch the video, and see some cool looking flash.