Here are some of the results of the latest Quiksilver Cypher ad campaign. Kelly Slater, Julian Wilson, Jeremy Flores, and Dane Reynolds were flown down to that lovely little secret spot in Mexico, along with the biggest entourage ever of filmers, photographers, and general support crew to pull this off.

Super slow motion, high speed cameras, and some playful video editing make for a compelling presentation.

10. Top 10 Art Accidents “On Jan. 22, a New York Metropolitan Museum of Art visitor accidentally fell into The Actor, a 105-year-old painting by Pablo Picasso, ripping the canvas. In honor of her embarrassing stumble, TIME takes a look at other torn, smashed, and accidentally discarded works of art.”

9. Top 10 Moments from the Late-Night War “As Conan O’Brien quits The Tonight Show and Jay Leno prepares to retake his old time slot, tensions are running high at NBC — and so, surprisingly, are ratings. TIME takes a look at some of the late-night feud’s best moments.”

8. When Tough Guys Go Soft “With last week’s release of The Spy Next Door and this week’s The Tooth Fairy, IGN Movies has decided to spotlight some of the most egregious examples of “When Tough Guys Go Soft” ever to hit film.”

7. The Top 10 Worst Attempts At Cutting Down A Tree “I don’t know what it is about idiots and cutting down trees, but for some reason they never remember to expect the worst.”

6. Line-O-Rama: Homer Simpson “Springfield’s favorite father and nuclear safety technician has more quality lines than we can count.”

5. The Top 10 Most Common Internet Passwords “Are your passwords secure enough? Compare yours with the just-released list of the 10 most commonly used passwords on the Web to see whether yours are too easy to guess.”

4. Most Ridiculous Ideas For Licensed Games “A look at a few licensed games that should have never been.”

3. Top 10 treetop hotels around the world “If you want to go green this holiday, why not cut out the middle man and head straight for the treetops? These incredible treehouse hotels are located in some of the most spectacular areas of the world, meaning you can be doing your bit for the environment AND be guaranteed a room with a view!”

2. The Top Mixed and Mashed TV Theme Tunes “That’s right “One TV Show To The Tune Of Another!” Here are some of the best!”

1. Top 10 DIY Home Projects “today it’s time to check out some of the best creations modders, repurposers, and makers have rigged up at home.”

SCENE 1: The Market
INT – THE MARKET – MORNING

If you haven’t seen the video “Drunkest Guy Ever Goes for More Beer“, the quick description is: A guy walks into a market. He appears to be drunk, and has the intention to buy beer, but he can’t stay on his feet. This is all filmed on the security cameras, which is then posted on YouTube, and goes viral. The rest is history.

SCENE 2: Silent Film
INT – SF APARTMENT – NIGHT

The original video has no audio because it was filmed on the security cameras. While the video is pretty funny to watch in its original state, it’s a little long and definitely silent. I grew up being intrigued by silent films and vaudeville – I think I would have thrived in the early 1900s. In the past two years I’ve written a few scripts for silent shorts, one to the amazing song Amarcord by Nino Rota. It’s not surprising then that when I saw this silent video, my first thought was that it needed to become a silent classic. The edit was easy; speed it up, make it black and white, throw down some music, make the film look old, post it on YouTube.

SCENE 3: Share your content
INT – LIVING ROOM – DAY

I create a lot of content that is put on the internet, mostly for Seesmic – the company I work for – but also some of my own personal work. Most of this I silently put online, and you either stumble upon it, or you are one of the 25 people subscribed to my blog, flickr account, or YouTube page ( I have 2). Twitter, and my friends, are my next to allies (Me on Twitter). On Twitter I’ll give my videos a little push, simply asking people to check them out. I prefer not to ask people to RT (Re-Tweet) because I know that if the content is any good, they’ll RT it on their own. I’ll post a link on Facebook and leave a message to give it a personal touch because I know my friends are going to see it. The last step is friends. Basically, I send the link to the people that I know will most enjoy the content and ask them specifically to help me spread the video. It helps when you have friends who have large online followings – whether it be through blog, Facebook or Twitter. These are the people who help you reach out to the world, they are your super-connectors.

SCENE 4: Magic
INT – INTERNET SUPER HIGHWAY – MORNING

At this point the video starts getting passed around. I’m not certain how specific blogs come across videos or articles, but I’d assume its because of the nature of their business – therefore they receive a lot of material without having to look very hard. What I do is go to a place like Technorati where they search blogs around the internet, and in this case searched “Drunkest guy ever, silent film” and see all the blogs that come up. Most notable in this particular case is boingboing.com

Yesterday it was pointed out to me that the Huffington Post had the video up, and from there you can see that (as of right now) 1,431 people shared it on Facebook and 117 people re-tweeted it. (To be honest I have no idea what Buzz Up is, but I’ve been told it’s by Yahoo!)

Using Twitter search I can see that 255 people have tweeted the words “drunkest guy ever” and “silent film”.

Finally, I can check with Bit.ly (a URL shortner that keeps statistics on links) to see how many people have clicked through a particular link. Basically I get the original URL of my video, put it through bit.ly and tweet that out. Bit.ly then keeps track of how many people go through my link to see the video, which is about 377 right now. But it also tells me how many other people using bit.ly have made a link using the original URL – In total I can see that 2,529 people have gotten to my YouTube via a bit.ly link. Cooler than that, I can see who took that link and posted it somewhere else. Oh, the glory of the internet…

Here is an interesting thought on the psyche of it all. The reason this video works is because it makes a video that is actually pretty sad, pretty funny. When I first watched the video of the alleged “drunkest guy ever”, I didn’t really laugh as much as I pitied him. The thing is, the guy looks hilarious when he tries to stand up, and you want to laugh. Really all everyone needed was an out. I changed the story from “Drunkest guy ever goes to get more beer” to “Larry goes to the market, and gets hoodwinked.” It’s okay to laugh now.

I know you didn’t do it for me, I didn’t plan any of this, it just kind of happened, but thanks to everyone who posted the video.
The Bored Ninja, Filmed Drunk, Bits and Pieces, Miss Cellania, NeatOrama, and Geeks are Sexy.

p.s. The title of this blog post is pretty obscure. “What! No Beer?” is the title of a film starring Buster Keaton, made in 1933. Buster plays Elmer J. Butts who is trying to get rich quick by brewing beer during Prohibition, thinking that Prohibition is just about to end. Hilarity ensues.

As I write this I realize how much my life is like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and how Google is my ultimate lifeline. Not sad – amazing.

I will now leave you with some great tweets from people I follow about Gmail being down.

@nick “No results for Gmail,” Twitter Search tells me. Yeah, THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
@caniba Gmail is down. #fail
@InterAwesome Gmail is Down. 502 Server Error. [pic] http://ff.im/-7v8ze
@geraldine how many tweets about gmail down ?
@dariusdunlap Gmail is down? Good excuse to focus on creating something…
@jyamasaki cool… gmail’s down #failmail #whatdoIdonow? #gpocalypsenow
@davewiner What do you do when GMail is down? Go to lunch in Berkeley with Doug Kaye!
@evanhamilton What do you do when Gmail is down? Look at your to do list, get organized, clean up. Use this to your advantage, don’t freak out.
@Stacina I think the whole Interweb is down. EXCEPT twitter. #irony

Not related but funny.
@Traphik of course i have to poo 5 minutes before my class starts

I digress, the whole point of this post is that I’m not the only person in my family writing political commentary. Here is my aunt’s article in the Orlando Sentinel.
The main gist – Vote Obama for the kids. Always a good tactic, everyone wants to save the kids. The kids and the seals. I think I’ll write another article about how Obama wants to save the baby seals.

What I know…
50 startups have been chosen to show off their product over 3 days.
150 startups have paid to show their product on a separate floor.
3 Nights of parties.
Some Celebrities.
Lots of Weblebrities (like celebrities, but a lot less people care who they are).

What I will be doing…
-Seesmic is a media partner, this means that we’ll be reporting from TechCrunch 50 for all 3 days.
-The cool thing about Seesmic is that we can show you things as they are happening, you can respond, and we can respond back to you (Wha?). Basically if you were to ask anything to us by video, we can go hunt down the answer.
-What makes us even cooler than that, and why the Seesmic production team is going to TC50 is that we have some skilled employees who will be providing hours of informative and entertaining information on the conference. This includes me of course, and for the most part I’ll be operating a camera and editing at the end of the day.

I’ll Host too!…
In addition to filming and editing, I have 1 show that is scheduled to be up next Wednesday. I didn’t want to do all of the normal interviews, “who are you, what is your company?”, instead I decided to spice it up a bit Whit style and do 50, 50 second interviews in 50 min.

What I expect…
I expect to be updating my blog a few times a day, mainly with video. On the right side I will try to put mainly me, and my thoughts about the conference. This will be from my own point of view, which is arguably still an outsider trying to learn this crazy industry of ours.
In addition to my own content, I will be sifting through the teams material and posting it here as well.
Seesmic will have it’s blog rolling, and an additional site to host all of our TC50 Material. Of course you’ll be able to find all the videos on Seesmic as well.

My Goals…
-As a blogger I’d like my blog to have as much info on it about TC50 as some of the top bloggers that will be there. I have a unique opportunity by being on a team of press partners, having a lot of content in my hands, and an inside view. I’ll be working for Seesmic all day, and I’ll be pushing our content all across our sites, but I should have the 30 seconds it takes to toss up my favorite stuff here in order to pass it along to those of you who would like to see the conference from my perspective.
-As a production team member I’m looking to shoot as much footage as possible, and make our hosts look and sound as good as possible. I’ve been working with this team for a while now, and we have really been planning well for this event.
-Over Time… Like Davos I expect TC50 to be one of those events that takes from 7am to 2am the next day. I’ll be editing daily wrap ups, on top of everything else. My body can’t handle doing this all the time, but a few times a year I really get a kick out of pumping out a ton of media as quickly as possible, this will be one of those times.

To answer the question that the title asks… TechCrunch 50: Kind of a big deal? To me, yes, a very big deal.

Is their anything you would like to see? Any more info I can provide? Any other way of presenting media on my blog to you? Let me know.

p.s. 50 interviews in 50 minutes, that just sounds amazing. I can’t wait.

The iPhone functions perfectly for me. It’s made for the person who wants to be able to connect to the internet and surf easily (like me). I can listen to music through Pandora instead of the radio, use GChat, Twitter, and keep up on RSS/ Blogs I like to read. I can also listen to NPR through their site, as well as check in on when my bus is coming to pick me up (I like to think it’s coming for me personally)

These were all things I could do before, but not on my phone while I was on the bus. This has been the greatest upgrade in my life since the purchase, my commute is awesome.

I find myself taking photos and posting them online just because I can, and why not, I don’t have to store the data; twitter, flickr and all the other sites I use will do that for me.

A couple observations:
-I have noticed that I sit on the toilet for longer, just so I can check messages, and do some blog reading.
-I’ve been listening to “This American Life” via podcast while i’m out on a run once a week, but what I’d really like is an application that will map my run from start to finish and tell me how far i’ve gone. The GPS is already there, someone who knows what they’re doing just needs to build it. Go!

More to come on the iPhone i’m sure.

1. I am not a writer. I speak much better than I write. If you think my writing is good at all, it’s because I have a few friends who do bits of editing for me.
2. I’m a video producer and photographer.
3. I post on flickr, and twitter often.
4. I upload a video a day for Loic Le Meur, post it on his blog, facebook, YouTube and blip.tv, making me a full-time Video Blogger.

So the question is this. Is my blog layout a good layout? If I don’t see myself as being a writer should the center of my blog be a place for writing? Also, if I’m producing a video a day should I be posting those videos on my blog even if they’re not about me? They are my day’s work after all.

I’d like my blog to be more interactive with my lifestyle and my internet use. If I’m online all day long creating content why does my blog feel so static at times? I’m open to suggestions, critiques, comments, and design ideas.

By the way, I have video commenting in the comments section. If you have a webcam, join the video conversation.