Saturday Distraction

Sure the movie looks like it'll be total trash but the microsite isn't that bad, and the game is pretty addictive. Check out Death Race for an easy way to kill some time on another rainy weekend!

YouTube Top Spot

The crowning achievement of any viral marketing, advertising or internet based video campaign is it's total number of views. Obviously this isn't very different from tv or movies, but with the internet everything is very, very trackable. For some time now, the incredible “Evolution of Dance” video has held the top spot as the most watched video ever on YouTube. Produced by Judson Laipply, it is a 6 minute video in which Laipply performs a dance routine through cuts of 35 songs. Through a blend of dance, humor and physical effort, we are given something completely original and innovative.

Sitting in second place for a long time has been Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend video. It's not very original or innovative but it is quite provocative, and anything featuring a dressed down teenage girl is, unfortunately, going to do well on the internet. The videos initial viewing figures on YouTube quickly soared to 50 million+ views.

So what? I hear you ask. Well fans of Lavigne launched there own unofficial campaign to propel the singer to the top. Currently, it has 97,462,978 compared to Laipply’s 96,188,641. But how? AvrilBandAids.com created a way to “cheat” the YouTube system by refreshing the video every 15 seconds. Fans who opened her video would be able to “viewing” it over 5,000 times per day.

Unsurprisingly many major online publications picked up on this and started pointing the finger. What no one seemed to be aware of, was that YouTube caps views per IP to 200 per day. So the "cheat" couldn't have done it, not by itself. AvrilBandAids real goal wasn’t actually to cheat at all. Instead they allowed their "cheating" to slip into the public domain and the viral effect kicked in.

In other words, they used the reporting of the cheating to do the cheating for them. The publicity was enough to push it closer to 100,000,000 and passed the champ.

Interestingly, all postings of Lavigne's Girlfriend video on YouTube have now had their embedding code disabled.

Let's Mash it up!

I was talking to a friend yesterday about a post I wrote on Cybercom about Memes. I used the term Mash-up, which they had never heard before. I wondered what the best way to explain it was, and I did a little Googling.

The best definition of a Mash-up which I found was from Mitch Joel on Six Pixels of Separation, who defines a Mash-up as "Two individually awesome things that make up one even more amazingly awesome thing". I couldn't have put it better myself.

Facebook to Buy ConnectU

The BBC has reported that Facebook have set ConnectU as an acquisition target. More interesting perhaps, is the fact that ConnectU previously sued Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for stealing its code.

Basically, prior to becoming the face of Facebook, Zuckerberg worked as a programmer for the founders of ConnectU. Later, in 2004, he launched Facebook as an Ivy university-only network, which kickstarted the lawsuit by his former employers. The case was based on the accusation that Zuckerberg had stolen their code. At the time they asserted that Facebook should be shut down and all profits transfered to ConnectU. The suit was settled in 2008, but an appeal was later lodged by ConnectU under claims that Facebook had misrepresented it's real value.

Facebook lead ConnectU to believe its actual value was approx. $3-4 billion, when in reality it has a filed value of $15 billion. Based on the former figure, Facebook gave the ConnectU owners an undisclosed sum of money and stock. However, in return ConnectU's principal shareholders agreed to sell their ConnectU stock to Facebook.

Rome Reborn

From 1997 to 2007, the UCLA CVRlab (Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory), UCLA ECT (Experiential Technology), the Reverse Engineering Lab at the Politecnico di Milano and the IATH (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities of the University of Virginia came together to participate on a project to recreate Rome.

Rome Reborn is a 15m across minutely detailed scale model of the city of Rome as it was in 320AD. More recently the model was laser-scanned and digitised by an international team of researchers led by Bernard Frischer and Rome Reborn 2.0 was born. Unveiled at the SIGGRAPH conference in LA last week, the VR version of Rome 320AD is spectacular, and thanks to this visitors to Rome can experience the same detail as they walk the ancient monuments of the city. TimeMachine is a new handheld gadget produced by Ducati Myers and the University of Bologna, which, utilising the Rome Reborn 2.0 system, automatically displays 3D reconstructions of ancient building.

As well as this you can also fly over the ancient city and zoom in on specific buildings. Another major plus is that unlike many 'tourist toys' the device is relatively cheap - hire costs around 5 Euros per hour.