Three Great Videos

As we get ready for the Brand Manager’s Summit, there are three great videos to start off the conversation.

Epic 2015
This tongue-in-cheek look at how Web 2.0 came to be is the granddaddy of “video histories” of the Internet. It was created by journalists Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with original music by Aaron McLeran, and was based on a presentation they gave to the Poynter Institute in 2004. The 9-minute Flash movie, now viewed by more than a million people, is a “history” from the viewpoint of a fictional “Museum of Media History” in the year 2015. It explores the convergence of popular news aggregators, such as Google News, with other Web 2.0 technologies like blogging and social networking will have on journalism and society at large in a hypothetical future. The film is factual up until 2007, then launches into fanciful conjecture. It popularized the term Googlezon and touches on major privacy and copyright issues raised in this scenario.

Did You Know?
Did You Know? is one of the best compendiums of “wow!” factoids on Web usage and stats in existence. It originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation for a faculty meeting in August 2006 at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. The presentation “went viral” on the Web in February 2007 and, as of June 2007, had been seen by at least 5 million online viewers. Today the old and new versions of the online presentation have been seen by at least 11 million people, not including the countless others who have seen it at conferences, workshops, training institutes, and other venues.

The Machine is Us(sing) Us
Like the others listed here, this Flash video is a great example in itself of the power and the possibility of new media. It was created by Professor Michael Wesch, Kansas State University, in 2007 for a class in cultural anthropology. And because it was viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube in six weeks, it earned Professor Wesch a coveted spot in Wired Magazine’s “2007 Rave Awards”, a list of 22 “innovators, instigators, and inventors.” Dr. Wesch, had been working for months on an academic paper that would explain new Web tools, but as he struggled to define concepts like hypertext, tagging, mashups, and wikis, he had an epiphany: He was working in the wrong medium. He needed to use the tools of Web 2.0 to explain Web 2.0, marking Web sites with del.icio.us, creating a blog with Blogger, and posting pictures on Flickr. This mesmerizing class video is the result.