Reel Pop

Trite the Power

Odd week for YouTube rap. First the beef between leonine gangsta rap MC Ice-T and upstart teen phenom Soulja Boy grabbed the attention of super-producer/rapper/blogger Kanye West and renewed a conversation about Soulja's place in the MC pantheon.

Then Shaq told Kobe to taste his ass.

And now Average Homeboy Danny Blaze is back on the YouTubes, "knocking on every computer" so he can become the most downloaded rapper ever.

The mind boggles.

MySpace hottie ID theft spawns video meme

[via] When MySpacers photos and pages are borrowed/copied/hijacked by would-be impersonators, the owner of the original account -- typically a young, attractive girl -- appeals to the social network's admins to shut down the fake accounts. In order to prove their identity, the MySpacer makes a video of themselves repeating their MySpace ID tag.

It's a bizarre but necessary process -- analogous to soliciting meatspace credit reporting agencies -- that's indigenous only to MySpace. YouTuber haggardtown collated a few of these videos, and the result is the eerily beguiling video Proof.

John McCain sexist slur is YouTube popular

A sexist slur that John McCain directed towards his wife back in 1992 -- in the company of reporters, no less -- has re-emerged as a YouTube hit. After a vicious lampooning on "The Daily Show" last week and innumerable blog posts, comedy troupe Public Service Administration uploaded a video that deftly and hilariously explains the cultural politics and web virality of McCain's potty mouth. Uploaded on Monday, the video has almost 200,000 views.

In the video -- easily my favorite political vid of this tortuously long campaign -- a quartet of faux TV newsmen discuss the slur itself, why it's not discussed by traditional media, and how the back channel of the Web -- which is basically culture's delirious id unbound from media's politically correct ego -- allows the news to spread regardless.

Puppy tossing YouTube Marine kicked from service

Two Marines who appeared in a YouTube video showing a puppy being hurled off a cliff have been disciplined, according to a USMC press release and several news accounts.

Hawaii-based Lance Cpl. David Motari, the Marine shown tossing the yelping puppy, is to be pushed from service. The original video has been removed from most sites, but is still available in some abbreviated forms.

Interestingly enough, the response and reaction videos to the marine puppy tossing video still remain, and they form an eerie sewing circle around a subject we're no longer allowed to see. While the Marine Corps made the right decision in ejecting Cpl. Motari, I fear the lesson most learned here is not to create digital evidence of your wrongdoing.

Motherhood going to ABC, Rogen's YouTube vid to be feature film

After garnering 137,000 views on YouTube, a mock trailer for a nonexistent film starring Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel is being turned into a feature film by Mandate Pictures, which is looking to duplicate its success with surprise comedy flick Juno. Smacks of turning successful SNL shorts into movies. The clip is here.

Also leaping to a bigger screen: In the Motherhood, a semi-comic, semi-funny web series "conceived by Suave and Sprint" starring Leah Remini, who's wacky scientologist, and Jenny McCarthy, who has big boobs. Motherhood's going to ABC, which is developing the show as a mid-season comedy.

LisaNova avows 'Twitter Whore' status

Popular YouTuber and Mad.tv comedian LisaNova, in the news recently for battling the "pageview-hogging, cleavage-heavy thumbnails" that rank among YouTube's most popular vids, has released another tit-tastic vid that's rapidly climbing the view charts.

"Twitter Whore", a sassy intro to the popular IM-ish status app (and to Nova's own Twitter channel), shows Nova in a variety of sexy poses mocking the inane tween-speak maundering of Twitter users. Basically, it's an advertisement. Pretty smart, too, to advertise one's self by denigrating the very mechanism of your popularity.

More on Nova's rise from internet to Hollywood fame by the Hollywood Reporter's own Andy Wallenstein here.

The surreal entertainment of elevator pitches

Among the more stultifying ubiquities of corporate life, the business presentation is perhaps most reviled -- an eerie combination of a dryly-delivered grade school book report, the faux-enthusiasm of a campaign speech, and the practiced, neutered cadence of a local newscaster. Not just boring, but unnatural. Delivered in halogen-bright rooms by poor public speakers who've somehow found the uncanny valley of their own existence.

In an attempt to fun up the presentation routine, some inveterate gabbers have converted their Powerpoints into info-chocked song and dance routines, e.g., Larry Lessig's minimalist slides, and the near-mythic, Micro Machine Man-esque visual rapidity of Dick Hardt's Sxip lecture. Corporate presentation culture even has its own devoted blog in Presentation Zen -- whose author, though accomplished in the dispensation of business maxims, is perhaps unaware of the tension between the concepts of Buddha-like asceticism and effective corporate sales techniques.

But, we want to be entertained. And so it was somehow inevitable that Techcrunch, that infamous arbiter of techie 2.0-ness, would develop a site devoted exclusively to videos of corporate presentations.

70s Show alums' comedy or no, Cinsay's biz plan confuses

Despite the uncertain business models surrounding online video's future, the industry's collectively learned a few things about how to garner (and then please) a web-centric audience: eschew pre-rolls and sign-up forms, allow embeds, and don't hide your content behind layers of pixels and mouse clicks. Be open, invite everybody, share.

With this in mind, I headed over to Cinsay.com, a relatively new video destination site that recently announced the debut of "Dan's Detour of Life", a comedy produced by two alums from That 70s Show. Though the site has some high-quality, original cinematography available, it's all nestled inside a pseudo social network, which can only be accessed after a long registration process. It took me 10 minutes just to find out that "Detour", despite advertisements to the contrary, wasn't actually available to watch yet.

So instead I poked around the site, and this is what I found:

• Trailers for movies in theatres
• Showtime lookup information
• A "community" of profiles that offers you the option to search, though I'm not certain what I'm supposed to search for.
• A "member media" section, where you can upload music, videos, and images.
• Original episodes of four shows, which you can "stream now free" or download in HD for $6 per. The videos aren't embeddable (presumably to maintain the contextual beauty of showing on Cinsay.com?), and there's no information about how many episodes are included or how long the video is.

The result is a confusing mish-mash of a site that, apparently, is trying to be everything to everyone. Perhaps it's interesting to a small niche audience of film producers. But the interface is so haphazardly designed -- where are the video details? why's the logout button as big as the community button? -- and the value proposition so tenuous (another social network? Really?) that I'm immediately turned off from using it.

At the very least, I'd recommend surfacing the original entertainment and make that the draw for joining the site. Don't hide it. And don't make me sign up for a social network to watch it.

Kimbo Slice ups CBS ratings, dominates YouTube

Seven of the 20 top viewed videos on YouTube this morning -- with combined views of about 1.4M -- feature Kimbo Slice's controversial fight against James "The Colossus" Thompson on CBS' Elite XC heavyweight mixed martial arts show Saturday night.

National ratings for the event won't be available until Tuesday, but the show performed well for KCBS-TV Channel 2, boasting a local overnight rating of 4.7 and a 9 share. The rating peaked at 7.2 the final 15 minutes.

The fight itself was a farce: stopped half a minute into round 3 when Thompson's cauliflower ear popped and he started bleeding. And while CBS may receive a momentary bump from this fight, I doubt they'll find much continuing success with MMA fights unless they book colorful figures like Kimbo -- and unless they stop sanitizing the fights for a mass audience.

For my time, I'd prefer watching Kimbo's unedited fights on YouTube.

One other point, for which I'll defer to my journo pal Jesse Sunenblick: "critics have pointed out that the script didn't go as planned, since Slice struggled so mightily against an average opponent. but i actually think it did go as planned: it's incorrect to think that MMA markets Slice due to his bravado, dominance, etc. the reason he's such a successful marketing gimmick--and, i think, even more so when he wins a close match and comes out looking like the least of the two fighters--is because of the pathos and unlikeliness of his internet stardom: porn bouncer turned backyard brawler turned MMA salvation. in a weird way, i think we want and expect him to be the underdog."

To which I'd add: The next Kimbo Slice fight will be bigger than this one, no matter who Kimbo fights. The reason: His entire reputation rides on him being unbeaten. As soon as he loses a match, the house of cards that is his marketing/personality falls apart.

RedLasso responds to networks, won't shut down

Redlasso, the startup vid site that allows users to find and embed video snippets of news broadcasts on their blogs, is refusing to cease operations in response to a cease and desist order from CBS, NBC, and Fox. From an email from Redlasso's vp content:

In a letter to be delivered today at 5:00 PM ET to legal counsel for five broadcast content providers, Redlasso (www.redlasso.com) has said it will continue to make its site available for use by bloggers providing social commentary on newsworthy events as it continues to work towards cooperative, mutually beneficial arrangements with those and other content providers.

Full disclosure: I'm a member of Redlasso's blogger advisory board.

Redlasso also announced that Michael Jordan, the late Westinghouse Corp.'s final chairman from 1993-97 and former CBS exec, has joined the company as senior adviser and will liaise with the networks.

It's evident from the response that Redlasso thinks it's in a bargaining position with the networks. Their release reads a bit on the disingenuous side: "Clip usage by bloggers is an exercise of first amendment rights to provide social commentary on newsworthy events.  Other uses of the clips by bloggers are prohibited contractually by Redlasso." But they've convinced Jordan they have a viable bargaining position -- and Jordan agrees -- so perhaps there's some there there. I have it on good authority the company views the cease and desist as the beginning of negotiations.