Charlotte Mecklenburg Thing #20

Only three things left!

My last post was rather Youtube-heavy, and so when I read the post and listened to the podcast for Thing #20, my brain was sort of still in "video game videos" mode. So the first video I'm embedding is a Youtube-heavy appropriate video...about the "Heavy" class in Team Fortress 2, the first of many viral videos Valve used to promote The Orange Box before it was released. It is appropriately titled "Meet the Heavy."



Youtube is a great thing to use for viral marketing, for video games, movies, and all sorts of other things. They've even started to do trailers for books! How awesome would that be if we were able to do something similar for the display books in the library?

For instance, right now I'm reading the Newberry Award-winner, The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman. I've heard his voice before, as he reads his novel Stardust for the audio book version of it.

HarperKids, presumably the youth division of HarperCollins has posted this trailer for The Graveyard Book:



A friend of mine told me last night that Gaiman had been on The Colbert Report, and rather than talk about Coraline, he talked about The Graveyard Book. I don't watch much television, and I haven't watched Colbert's show for some time now, but in order to test the validity of the Thing saying how quickly things are uploaded, I decided to look for the clip. Part of me was scared at the notion that it may not be there, due to copyrights, but ho! Here it is!



The fact that Gaiman mentions Art Spiegelman is just a bonus. It is also very hard not to giggle while sitting in the back room of PS and watching this video.

Charlotte Mecklenburg Thing #19

I did my best not to click on a winner (or 2nd, 3rd, or honorable mention) on the Web 2.0 Awards List that was a site I regularly visit or one that I have played around with before. Instead, I clicked on Last.fm, the winner in the Music category. As I type up this blog post, I'm listening to the Flight of the Conchords radio station, which is playing Jonathon Coulton's "Chiron Beta Prime." Like Pandora, it seems that Last doesn't allow you to listen to specific songs (like iMeem does), but it does give you information about the artist you're listening to. I've heard Coulton's work before, but the information about him was neat, especially since it was complied, written, and edited in a wikistyle by Last.fm members.

Of course, given my fascination with Fictional Undead and Rotting Things, one of my favorite Coulton songs (other than "Still Alive"*, of course) is "Re: Your Brains." Since Youtube was on the award winner list, I'm embedding a music video for it.



Another awesome thing about Last is the music video feature. Sure, they're just embedding videos from Youtube, but it's a lot easier to find them on Last than it is on Youtube, especially with so many people using popular songs when they make their own music videos using clips from their favorite movies or television shows. There are also discussions going on on Last regarding the videos. For instance, follow the footnote to...

* Here! When I linked in the video for "Still Alive", I noticed a discussion going on on the page for the song. Not unlike a discussion or talk page on a wiki, users discussed the need for a distinction between Coulton's performance of the song and the version done for the video game, Portal.

Just for fun, here's that version:



Afterthought: part of me wishes Blogger had a way to "cut" posts, or make the bulk of them collapsible. There is apparently a way to do this that requires fiddling with the code of the settings. I've never done anything like that before, so I'm hesitant. I might try it though.

Afterthought #2: I wonder if "Re: Your Brains" will ever be on a list of Ballads of the 2000's or something.