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after watching SNL last night, my wife wondered what would have happened if the writers strike hadn’t happened…

in years past i don’t think it would have made much difference as the audience for SNL, letterman, leno, etc. isn’t huge. but, this election is all about youtube - possibly even more so amongst independent and young voters. most of the key debate scenes and campaign sanctioned videos have been top YT vids - many with MMs of views. so, imagine if we’d had two months of virally-spread videos like the ones below…i don’t know if anything would have changed, but….i wonder :)

video #1: weekend update with tina fey

video #2: opening sketch - the democratic debate

ps - i was too sick to stay up and watch SNL, so i caught these on YT this morning :)

great npr story about luis da silva….he’s 19 and now famous. and, btw, this is entertaining advertising :)

just playing with slide’s skinflix offering…yes, it’s simple and easy to replicate, but it’s all in the implementation…here’s the first 10 minutes of my wife’s doc - “the weather underground” - nice old skool tv…just perfect…my only request -> max, please change the name!

go here if you can’t see it in your rss reader, etc.

fred wrote a post today on viacom, youtube, and expiring videos. i wrote something similar about a month ago and obviously completely agree with him…and, in fact, if you go to my post from february (”the daily show, youtube and expiring videos“), you’ll see that the video i embedded is no longer available…just as advertised….ughhh!

what a lousy experience for the publisher and the user…and, ultimately for viacom. i know that rights issues make this problematic, but figure it out…

obivously, this is just one example of the types of things that the new nbc/news corp, etc. company needs to get right if it hopes to compete with youtube. the content is important, but the experience and community drive adoption and engagement…

btw, expiring videos reminds me of expiring newspaper links…i.,e links that are valid today, but after 15 or 30 days go behind an archive wall and force users to pay to read a story that someone linked to. well, the nytimes got it right years ago - dave winer convinced them to leave the door open for users coming from special rss links…forever. that means that when someone references a nytimes story using the url in the rss feed, users get to view that content w/o registration or payment. of course, it’s just that one page and if a user goes anywhere else, they need to register and perhaps pay. simply brilliant -> as a result, bloggers started to use them more and more as the media company of record when they linked to stories…sort of like amazon for videos and cds…

file under “how to engage the blogosphere/web” and “how to be distributed” :)

scott karp at publishing2 (who i respect immensely) wrote a post the other day about viacom, comedy central and competing with youtube…

his basic point was that if viacom creates a decent video destination and enables embedding, users will migrate over as…it’s all about the content, stupid :)

while i agree with him to some extent, a lot has to go right for viacom…

youtube has the best experience, period…it just isn’t that easy to copy - it’s all about the little things, and no matter what, you can’t duplicate their very real and vibrant community. network effects are kicking in…

plus, i don’t know if others noticed this, but viacom is expiring videos.

What does the “expired” date mean?
Due to licensing agreements we’re unable to keep this clip available on the site past the expiration date. We hope you enjoy it while we have it up.

while this may be ok for destination sites, it doesn’t work for video embeds. thirty days later, content doesn’t work on your site? or it changes to another video? that just won’t fly…

click on the embed link in this video below (see my “update” as well) and you get the following message…“this video expires on: 03/08/2007″

hmmm…perhaps i’m wrong. when you click on the embed link in this video when it’s on comedycentral.com you get the warning that the video expires march 8th, 2007..but, when you click on the embed link here you don’t get that same warning. what gives?

UPDATE (mar. 26, 2007): see my post from today about this and newspapers…btw, as you can see above - i was right, the videos do expire…

another pretty funny youtube (yes…google) video…a reebok commercial from 2004….somewhat inappropriate, but funny nonetheless…

great video on rss, publishing, community, the web in general, etc…

a friend of ours, sachi, submitted a video to youtube a full 7 months ago. it’s a trailer she created to help raise money for a feature length documentary. while it’s fantastic and professionally produced (sachi recently graduated from the graduate school of journalism at berkeley and is a producer at frontline), it didn’t get many views…then, the day chad and steve released their famous “kings of video” piece about the google acquisition, she was selected as a featured video and put on the homepage. she found out because good morning america gave her a call…interestingly, it was also then promoted on yahoo’s homepage…wow…

now the youtube video stats (as of 10/29/06) are a bit different - 407k views, favorited 2418 times, 1882 ratings (nearly a 5 star average), and 734 comments…

hmmm….timing….did youtube deliberately feature her movie (and others) to make sure that the homepage was filled with quality content the day after the acquisition?

no matter - it shows how companies like youtube can be kingmakers. what’s interesting is that this is only the second google service which uses editorial to direct attention (google.com/ig provides default rss feeds). of course, yahoo has been doing this for years - they started by publishing ““yahoo picks of the day/week”” in 1994 (i believe)…

i wonder how google is going to manage this going forward…it’s very different than just relying on algorithms…btw, i wish yahoo would use the homepage more to help people discover the best of the web (blogs, rss feeds, videos, etc.).

lastly, watch the trailer - “crutch!”…it’s great. and, if you want to help fund the movie, shoot me a note and i’ll get you in touch with sachi… :)