We went to see the fascinating We Live in Public at the BFI Film Festival. We live in Public won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and is made by Ondi Timoner. It is the story of the internet pioneer Josh Harris, artist, futurist, visionary (and complete lunatic), and his groundbreaking work with online video, broadcast and reality formats, which made him his fortune, but eventually left him bankrupt and living in Vietnam. as the website says:
Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web”, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also curated and funded the ground breaking project “Quiet” in an underground bunker in NYC where over 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days at the turn of the millennium. With Quiet, Harris proved how we willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire, but with every technological advancement such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, becomes more elusive. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour electronic surveillance which led to his mental collapse, Harris demonstrated the price we pay for living in public.
Go and see it if you get the chance - Josh Harris saw the future before anyone else and lost it all trying to deliver it 10 years too soon.
This is a great presentation from Dave Gillespie on Slideshare where he talks about the intention / attention economy, how media is inherently social, and what this means for brands and marketing.
This slide shows how rapidly the internet has grown compared to other mass media in the last 100 years.
How long the internet took to reach 50million users
Roughcut Presents is Roughcut TV’s new venture to promote new comedy online. On the site you’ll see a mixture of Roughcut’s own Showcase short comedy clips and other funny clips drawn from around the web.
The site allows Roughcut staff to embed videos from around the web, encouraging comments from visitors. Users can also submit their own videos to the site. As well as the design and build, we also produced the Roughcut Presents endcard, featuring the axe-wielding ‘Mr Roughcut’, star of http://www.roughcut-tv.com.
Last minute tickets are great. Actually it has only happened once before that I remember - 9 years ago for David Bowie. Having spent some time in vain looking on Ebay for a last minute deal on Thursday, on Friday I received a call and found out I was going.
It was an amazing experience. The audience was a mix of people who were there the first time around and people who weren’t (amazingly, Doolittle, the album being celebrated, is 20 years old). The band’s popularity is such that they allegedly sold out the tour in 20 minutes. I had forgotten the lessons of my teenage years and turned up with a thick jumper and a coat. That was comfortable!
The effect of tracks like Debaser was incredible - the entire crowd went totally mental. In addition to the entire album, they opened with the B-sides (great B-sides they were too) and finished with some classics in an encore including Gigantic and Where is my Mind.
Here’s hoping they keep going. It can’t be too bad going on stage and being adored like that! You can hear excerpts from the gig here.
