This is a heart rendering phone call between Kevin Cosgrove and the 911 operators. It appears from the audio that he was on the phone as the tower collapsed. The video is also referenced by wikipedia which gives a little more background.

These girls always seem to involve farts in their bits, and I’m all for it

On YouTube

Apparently from a private preview at E3, that game looks like KOTOR on steroids

The old adage of there is no bad publicity is shown in the alexa rankings for Rocketboom, and for Amanda’s blog Unboomed, both of them in the top three “movers and shakers”

On top of that Rocketboom had a brilliant episode today that was original, creative, and fun, by featuring some YouTube stars really showed itself to a steward of the vlogosphere.

current.tv is is like youtube in the way that flickr is like photobucket. It may not ever compete on volume, but will surely compete on quality, revenue and recruiting Social Media Talent.

Current.tv is like “project greenlight”, it encourages video submissions that the community votes on. In fact the community can “greenlight” projects as part of the voting mechanism, and because current.tv is actually a TV channel, it has an avenue to broadcast the best and the brightest. Oh and guess what, people get paid.

What current.tv has done is probably the model that every channel, that creates original content could benefit from, in addition to it’s normal development process. I can’t imagine a more cost effective sandbox for television content. I wouldn’t be surprised if the concept of a broadcast TV pilot just moves to a social video platform. IMHO this would have been a much better model for Fox Atomic

Current.tv is not a free for all, and it provides guidelines around what it’s looking for from the community. It asks for short stories called “pods”, Mobile video, Viewer Created Ads, and Promo Spots.

As i’ve said before the content will follow the money, but how about the talent will follow the opportunity? Sure some folks will manage to make a career out of youtube, with it’s massive audience, but with 65,000 videos uploaded a day, how do you rise above the noise? If you are creating something artistic, thoughtful, thought provoking, where is the outlet for that? Maybe not YouTube?

Current.tv seems to be more of a patron of the arts, a steward if you like, sure they get great content for their TV channel, but they are also encouraging story telling.

Tip of the Hat: Myphonerocks.com

BTW Jaffe has an interesting conversation going on on JaffeJuice called Why YouTube Imitators will fail. My response is, youtube imitators will fail as long as the continue to “imitate” and not innovate. YouTube has pioneered a model of social media that no-one has figured out how to capitalize on, not even YouTube.

Great video from Japan of some real drifter cars, great stuff.

Tip of the Hat

This is an amazing clip that takes the classic monty python song from the Quest for the Holy Grail and puts it to classic Star Trek clips.

Tip of the Hat

Enjoy!

This guy is apparently “dropping the kids off at the pool”, which is included in a little viral video that Charmin is using to promote it’s co-creative web site AlittleBitRude.co.uk.

The main site A little bit rude is created by Charmin in the UK that asks people to contribute what they use as a euphemism for, shall we say, Poop, touching cotton, or even Releasing the chocolate hostages, squeezing one out, or the wonderful cockney ryme Richard the Third (rhymes with turd).

I think I’ll give this an A+ for Viral because it is surprising enough that a decent sized company would put its name to this, or produce the video which is also pretty funny. Interestingly the video actually uses some visual euphemisms, maybe their visual puns, not sure, pretty funny. In fact this is only funny because it’s being released by a toilet paper company, I don’t think you would crack a smile if you saw it on youtube.

The other thing to note is “viral” has no boundaries, so something that might be “targeted” for the British public that generally enjoy a good poop joke, might not go down so well in the US.

I love Lewis Black and this is classic, where he tell CNN to remove the news ticker. “There are people talking here, this is who’s talking, why do we need these extra words”

That’s right Lewis, why.