Germany '06: A different world cup moment?

It is that time that we see every four years just days before the World Cup. Many warmup matches happen and in many cases there are few surprises.

Anyway, it wasn't much of a surprise to see Colombia (which didn't qualify for the tournament) beating Poland 2-1 yesterday.. but what was really surprising was finding today that the goals of that mostly uneventful match were #1 and #5 of the most viewed video segments in youtube.

I heard Yahoo paid a quite a bunch to FIFA for having the exclusive rights for online media related to the Germany 2006 World Cup... but does that "Media Goliath" have any chance against the "Army of Davids" that will be posting highlights of every valuable piece of video action, video commentary, or gossip in video? I doubt it.

They should get the feeling that the librarians had of power. Having the power to control information that people want. The bad news for librarians was Google (as much as wikipedia has been quite a hit for Britannica and similars)... but I don't really think they have a change.

I'm reading "An Army of Davids" nowadays, from Glenn Reynolds (bloggers extraordinaire, a.k.a. instapundit).

Un génie par lui-même : Dali

y más del mismo tema:

ahora es posible escuchar a Dalí siendo entrevistado en 1965 (en francés), en una de las múltiples secciones de video que L'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel de Francia ha puesto en la red.

En video tienen tal vez pueden verse con más facilidad partes del Dalí humano. Aquel que revela el motivo de aquel fuerte deseo de sobrasalir que lo marcó toda su vida.

Aquí Salvador Dalí cuenta entre otras cosas la dificultad que vivió en su infancia y adolescencia después de saber que le dieron el nombre de su hermano (el cual había muerto de meningitis antes mismo del nacimiento del artista).

Learning from the masters.. of the previous generation

I never got to meet him. I wished, but I couldn't.
All I could was read a couple of books written by him, and few magazines with glossy pictures after his dead.

He was probably the most charismatic professor in his area, coming down from the pedestal of nobel-prize-winner and daring to test a different way of teaching his science to undergrad students.

I used to keep some photographs of him in my room while in college, and once bought in amazon a book+CD wanting to try to decipher from his voice how the man was.

Now I finally could see him on video. It was finally possible to get a glimpse of the man, talking about his conviction, what his father tought him.. what is it that "awards" really meant for him.

When things are in video is easier to see the excitement in somebody, the sparks in the eyes, the leaning forward when the most cherished thoughts come to mind.

And all thanks Google Video!: A 49 minutes interview to Richard P Feynman is available in Google Video.

Almost as interesting, the post came to GV from India's Nejaji Subhas Institute of Technology.

Are we starting to see in digitized video a way for the new generation to learn from our father's masters? exciting times to be born.

Eurovision... and latins more connected to the world.

I didn't know it.. but it turns out that there is a music contest on TV capable of having 1B (yes, one billion people) watching it.

Even more, it was exactly that event that catapulted the music career of Celine Dion in 1988 (representing switzerland) and ABBA in the seventies.

Every year around mid-May, representatives from 40+ european countries (and other european friends) select one representative from each country and enter the song contest.

The rules are emphatical that votes from one specific country -which happen over cell phones mostly- can NOT be for the representative of that country.

Anyway, cutting to the chase, by saturday May 19th, youtube.com had within its top 20 results the full video segments of the final performance of finland, russia, and lituana.

Some years ago, somebody in latin america would have HARDLY known about stuff like this... but if you are among the many that are being born this year.. that is just part of a normal life.

Now I can see it happening

When eBay bought Skype last year for $4B, the key word in their business justification seemed to be the potential that Skype had for strenghtening the eBay community.

I didn't get it back then. I didn't get it up until 10 minutes ago. Yeah, yeah.. sure I could think about some value added on cheap calls between members, or "call me on skype" as part of the courting involved in the commercial transaction.

IMHO, the sense of "community" was felt much stronger in the case of bloggers. If you are reading a book (like Gladwell's BLINK or THE TIPPING POINT), when you jump to his blog you get the sense of almost real time interaction with a person that you were already "talking to"(in that steady continuous pace that reading a book implies).. that that real time interaction had the sense of community building around a topic.

A more recent case came to me on wednesday, when reading "An Army of Davids" from Glenn Reynolds and finding his comments pretty much real time on the web on immigration and AMLO (aka El Peje) in Mexico: the conversation CONTINUED, the community was formed around a specific interest.

But now I get in on eBay and Skype!!. I found out few minutes ago aboug Skypecasts.
All you need in Skype in your PC/Mac and be connected and:
- 4 hours and 23 minutes from now you can attend the Skypecast on "Network neutrality"
- 5 hours from now "European Citizen's Band Federation Congress Warsawa 21 October 2006"

that is really a community use (around a specific interest). kudos to eBay on that!

zeitgeisting for the masses?...

live on www.google.com/trends , the trends on searches (in google for a start.. but what-a-heck!, they are the de facto standard) over the last couple of years.

a small list of suggested stops in the itinerary:
- try "katrina"
- try "natal, reiveillon, pascoa" when filtering Brasil
- try "verano, invierno" when filtering Argentina
- try "libertadores"and see the contrast between Brasil and Colombia (Once Caldas won on Libertadores '04 and generated a peak of interest on the topic coming from Colombia), when São Paulo won (then you get a peak on Brasil)
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this has an amazing voyeuristic appeal (but right now is having a peek into the collective minds of our countries and communities)... in a way that wasn't possible in the past...

dando a volta por cima (the comeback)...

so many stories have told about Apple (and Steve Job's) comeback.. but this is probably one of the best I've seen so far. I'll pass it at face value from MacDailyNews :

Apple passes Dell in market value
Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 10:21 AM EDT

On October 6, 1997, in response to the question of what he'd do if he was in charge of Apple Computer, Dell founder and then CEO Michael Dell stood before a crowd of several thousand IT executives and answered flippantly, "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

A little more than a month later, on November 10, 1997, new Apple iCEO Steve Jobs responded, speaking in front of an image of Michael Dell's bulls-eye covered face, "We're coming after you, you're in our sights."

On January 13, 2006, after a little more than eight years of hard work, Apple Computer, Inc. passed Dell, Inc. in market value, $72,132,428,843 vs. $71,970,702,760 at market close respectively. After trading places, Apple promptly fell behind Dell as shares of the Cupertino Mac maker were subject to a multi-week bear raid. Today, however, Apple's share price continued its rise while Dell's continued to slip. The result, once again, is that Apple Computer ($60,166,590,800) is now worth more than Dell ($60,061,881,440) in a race whose leadership is likely to oscillate a bit in the near term (before Apple pulls away for good).


ain't it even better (for a comeback) when it goes along an "I told you so... "? wow..

great! (they are podcasting now).. but why not doing it well done once and for all?...

la noticia sonaba excelente. Caracol radio en Colombia poniendo su contenido en podcasts.

La suscripción en iTunes requirió menos de un minuto... ver llegar en menos de un minuto 6 o 7 noticias diferentes, bajando a mi disco duro, pudiendo ser seleccionadas asincrónicamente.. todo iba bien.

Pero... la forma en que rotularon las noticias es bastante disfuncional, una noticia de 12 minutos acerca de Uribe y Chavez a reunirse en Costa Rica pasa mas de 10 minutos hablando de otra cosa, y el retraso entre la noticia en radio y cuando entra en iTunes es de un dia completo. También es bastante frustrante ver que tan largos son cada uno de los segmentos. Si le apuntaran a que cada segmento tuviera <5 minutos esto podría funcionar bastante mejor.

en resumen, una iniciativa interesante, qué bien que lo estan haciendo. Pero por qué no hacerlo bien hecho de una vez por todas?

Colbert roasts Bush, NYT omits it, youtube gives it a boost...

Different edits of the same C-Span video made it today (by 11pm est) into the top #20 most viewed segments in youtube, ranked as #1, #4, #6, #10, #17 and totaling >1 million views so far.

On April 29th, comedian Stephen Colbert was the invited speaker for the White House Correspondents dinner, and while standing <10 feet from president Bush he went on for ~30 mins worth of jokes ranging from Iraq to Global Warming... in what has been probably the most daring performance of a comedian in front of a US president ever. The type of performance that (whether or not you approve the strength of his remarks) you can NOT miss.

But The New York Times didn't even bother to mention Colbert's performance on its monday coverage... and many of the mainstream media (MSM) vehicles decide to down-play what happenned... but not the bloggers, and certainly not youtube.

If he wanted to make a point about MSM vs liberal media, he couldn't have planned it better...