Loic filmed a bit of the announcement this morning on seesmic only to end up with a huge response from the seesmic and twitter community. He ended up championing the cause with great applause from leaders of the launch – In end it looks like the response was rapid and robust so we were able to secure a personal interview with Mr. Annan that we will be doing in about an hour from now. I’ll have more to report later (hopefully tonight yet unlikely – I have no internet in my flat).

I’ve been on Etsy for about a year now but it wasn’t until two weeks ago that I first found out who it’s CEO was. Yesterday I was walking through the halls and happen to recognize Robert Kalin. I introduced myself and after a short conversation introduced him to Loic. Robert has been following the launch of Seesmic thus he knew who Loic was. We got a pretty great interview with Robert which I’ll link here.

I have two parties, an Ultimate Frisbee game, the super bowl and a wedding to plan all on my calender this week – I will not be attending, watching or planning any of them, instead I will be at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland.

1: What is WEF? It’s a place where the top players in every field from around the world get together to figure out how to make the world a better place. (Those are my words) Proof <- I filmed that.

2: Why am I going? Good question, the answer is simple: to film, silly! I'll be following Loic while he attends the forum. As a blogger, Loic has a unique opportunity to be inside with a camera person at the forum – this is a privilege that most do not have. So, every day 1:30min of what we film will be on CNN, and Loic will be on air as the “blogger on location.” In addition, we will continue with our daily show which was running last year. Video with Emma Thompson, Bill Gates, Gavin Newsom, and DNA!

3: What will I commit to you? I commit to take as many photos, post as many videos, and eat as much cheese as humanly possible this year! And this year if I see Bono, I’ll say hi.

I leave you with a video from last year, HERE!

I shot John Cleese—I’m a camera man, that’s what I do.

Recently I was fortunate enough to travel down to Santa Barbara with Vinvin and Dean Whitbread to interview John Cleese. I was immediately excited, after all my mom raised me on Monty Python. Growing up, if I stayed home sick from school, she would rent me Marx Brothers or Monty Python, which eventually led me to love Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I digress. After a nice road trip down from San Francisco, during which I slept in the backseat most of the way, we ended up in Santa Barbara, and eventually at John Cleese’s cottage. This visit was just to scout what we would be shooting the next day.

Day 2, the day I shot John Cleese, we spent about 4 hours at his house on an interview, a tour of the house, and finally a conversation on Seesmic. By far my favorite part was the interview, in which John spent most of his time bashing Sarah Palin and endorsing Obama.

When I heard Mr. Cleese talking about politics, and found myself both laughing and thinking hard about what he was saying, it immediately dawned on me that this footage of him had to get online as quickly as possible. Not because I think John Cleese is going to make anyone change their mind about who to vote for, but because I think it will help inspire other people to be more active in the campaign. The thing that struck me most about what he said is that the US has made itself look so bad in the last eight years, particularly in re-electing George Bush. He said the international world looks at us completely different than it used to but that in a single day, with a snap of the finger and a single vote, we can change how the world perceives us.

To me this is one of the most important points of the upcoming election: the perception of the outside world. We live in a modern global society, and if you don’t think how we are perceived by the rest of the world matters to nearly everything that has to do with us internally, I think you may need a reality check.

I’ll move on.

So the first thing that we made when we got back to San Francisco was a short clip of John Cleese talking about Sarah Palin. In 24 hours the had received more than 10,000 hits on YouTube—this is when we decided it was time to start editing a longer version of John Cleese on US politics. I knew full well that the longer version would have a harder time taking off—first people would think it was the video they had already seen and second it seemed like the moment had passed. Nonetheless, the video went up and about a week later has a little over 24,000 hits.

Being a part of a video that goes viral online is pretty fun. I saw the Diggs Climb (Digg is a place where you can vote if you like a video, blog post, photo, or just about anything online), I saw it on people’s blogs, and my favorite was seeing it on the Huffington Post and Comedy Central’s blog. I think the reason it’s fun to see it get big is knowing that a ton of eyeballs are watching an interview that I shot, Jeremey edited, and Vinvin hosted.

Here is a quick rundown of some of the web pages on which the video was mentioned, or where you could see it posted.

1. Election 2008 on Twitter: John Cleese at the top of the tag cloud.
2. The Huffington Post: an article about the video.
3. Reddit: eventually made it to the top
4. Comedy Central’s blog featured an article
5. 3rd on Digg, eventually made it to the top of Digg. Last I looked the video had 6813 Diggs.
6. YouTube: most viewed of the day and the week. Last I looked the video had 967,115 hits.
7. Boing Boing: probably gave the video it’s first boost.

Today I went up to Ashton Kutcher, asked if I could have a quick interview with him.

He said “Sure”.
I said “Thanks”
and walked away…

What I learned is that he seems to be a nice guy. I think tomorrows interview will be a little longer.

My coworker Rachael Joy gets all the credit for making this all happen, so I deffinitly thank her for the invite to both be in the video that will be presented, as well as bringing me along as “the one man camera crew”, to interview a bunch of film makers including Kevin Smith.

i’ve been pretty excited for tonight for a number of reasons. Number 1, meeting Kevin Smith could be a pretty cool experience. He’s obviously a well known writer and director, and while I may not be his #1 fan I can definitely appreciate all of his work, and his contributions to good indy films, not Hollywood crap. #2, it’s not easy being a one man, camera, lighting, and audio crew, so the pressure is on. Lastly, this video that we made was thrown together kind of last minute and will be screened in a theater full of film makers. We know it’s ridiculous, it’s supposed to be, I just hope that it’ll be well received.

Hope you can be on Seesmic for the conversation.

6pm PT Wed. Kevin Smith