Seesmic du jour (Seesmic of the day if you will) is now organized into a playlist on Youtube. You can find all of the episodes in one place at loic.tv, hizzah! For those of you who don’t know, Seesmic du jour was a show that world famous French entrepreneur and CEO of Seesmic.com Loic Le Meur and I created. The idea of the show was to present an inside look of a start-up being built from the ground up. We shot the show for 170 consecutive work days showing Seesmic from the inside out, giving incites on the tech world and Silicon Valley, and introducing the audience to interesting people from the industry.

Watching the show now would certainly make one think that Seesmic is a much different company then it is today. We have gone through many changes in the last 2 and half years, starting as a video communications platform and eventually transitioning into a communications platform currently harnessing Twitter and Facebook technologies. But the core value of the show still exists. It’s obvious from Seesmic du Jour (the fact that there even was a show) that the company has taken many risks in the past few years, I just think that the risk of the show was one that payed off.

If you ever watched the Seesmic du Jour I’d love to hear what some of your favorite episodes were. If you’ve seen every episode I apologize for the bad ones, and thank you for your engagement.

photo taken by @sizemore

Thomas and I won a Ford Fiesta for 6 months! We’re not exactly sure what that means at this point – What we do know is that we’ll be heading down to LA on the 19th in order to pick up the car. Now the question that is in your head is likely to be, what color car are you two getting? Well I’m glad I thought you might ask that. The color options for the “Ford Agents”, as they call us, were Black, Silver, Lime Green and Magenta. Because Thomas and I couldn’t have won the car without the help of so many people, we decided to leave that decision in the hands of said people.

Obviously they choose lime green…
So yes, we’ll be driving a lime green Ford Fiesta for 6 months, being agents, doing missions – Again, that is all I know.

The agent web page is up on the Fiesta Movement web site, and if you’d like to see our bio that was written by the beautiful and talented Giselle Kennedy, you should go here.

If you have no idea what i’m talking about because you’ve been hiding under a rock or have a dial-up connection, watch this (unless you have dial-up, you should just turn off your computer and read a book).

As the missions begin we’ll be posting a lot of content, probably here, on my flickr account, on facebook or friendster (j/k), youtube, and of course tweeting the bajesus out of it all on Twitter using the new Seesmic Desktop Client! <- That post to come soon.

See you on the road!

About 2 weeks ago my coworker Thomas Knoll and I were sent a forward from our boss who had received an e-mail from Julia Roy about the Fiesta Movement. (I love when my blog posts start with sentences like, “my fiance’s sisters boyfriends sister works for the Golden State Warriors” – sounds super legit.)

What is the Fiesta Movement you may be asking yourself… or asking me?
Well it looks as though it’s Fords ad campaign for the release of the Ford Fiesta schedualed to release in the US in 2011.
What it really is is a very smart ad campaign by Ford to get people to post videos on YouTube and send it to all their friends, Tweet about it and write blog posts like the one you’re reading.

What we have to do: Send in a video saying why we would be good “Ford Agents”.

What we did: We just posted a video of us driving around San Francisco and talked about how cool we are. Which is not very (cool that is)…

Also worth noting:
Ford posted our video on their site 2 days after we posted it.
We made teasers for our video, 9 in all, they’re short, but decent.

More importantly then winning the Ford Fiesta, Thomas and I think we should try to enter all the video competitions we can find online and make a show out of it. If you have any leads be sure to let one of us know.

Seesmix: November 6th 2008

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.

Any publicity is good publicity, right? Today Seesmic made it into the New York times business section. That’s a good thing for our name as a company, but the article was about downsizing—not so good of a thing. Now I don’t want to get to caught up in what the article says, I want to milk the whole “being in the New York Times” thing instead.

So here we are, smiling because the camera guy was standing on a shelf, and we were all joking about it being a photo of just Loic’s forehead. I wanted to post the photo, so you, my loyal reader, could see me, your loyal writer, on the cover of the business section of the New York Times. Check. Done. Now I would like to commit to all of you, that the next time I’m in the New York Times it’ll be the front page of the Sports section right after I streak Wimbledon.

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.

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.