Sounds like it could be a pretty cool summer job. Who’s in?

I won’t be making it out to SXSW this week – It just didn’t work out this year. But I have a simple request to my friends who will be there. I’d like you to help me be a SXSW meme amongst each other. The idea of a meme simply put by wikipedia is a “unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures”. This can be done a few ways.

Writing: When you’re out this week, and I would have been out with you hashtag #sxsw #ws – The #ws for Whit Scott. The search looks like this.
Speach: When you’re heading out to parties you should remember as a group to invite me. Please invite invisible me verbally. Here is a picture of Thomas, Rachael and invisible me at SXSW last year.
Gestures: You’re all creative, I assume you’ll be able to come up with some Whit style gestures. If I was there it’d probably look like this.

At this point I can’t really get much out of South By South West unless I become a meme. Maybe I’ll even meet people this way… Imagine Thomas Knoll tweeting my hashtag and Ethan noticing it. Ethan asks Thomas what he’s doing, thinks about me, then tags me up for the rest of the conference. This meme can be endless. By the end of the conference, people who don’t know me will think I was there.

In the mean time i’ll be participating in #SXSWSF (south by south west san francisco) – SXSWSF happening now all around us.
I’ve heard you can go to: Temper Trap Expression College 12:30pm, Violent Soho Amoeba records 6pm today (Friday) if you’re actually looking to be around people who are participating in #sxswsf. You can follow the SXSWSF hashtag here.

The people who can help me out that I’ll be missing this year include but are not limited to:
Thomas Knoll
Ethan
Sean
Dan Martell
Ben
Yama
Violet
Alicia
Adam Duffy
Jonathan Nafarrete
Natasha Wescoat
Willo
Sarah Vela
Derek Overbey who did this interview of me last year.
Tracy Apps
Rachael Joy
Sarah C
Phill Campbell
Paul Stamatiou

I hope you all have a great time, and I look forward to following you all vicariously.

OK Go – WTF? from OK Go on Vimeo.

The second video is “This Too Shall Pass”.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

These videos remind me of high school. Low budget, choreographed by someone who loves ridiculous dance moves, and a long single shot. This isn’t to say that they don’t have some “higher quality” videos – they do, but still my favorite are the simple ones.

What I love about OK GO is their entrance into the music scene. I had never heard any of their music until I saw “A Million Ways” on YouTube. These guys are total stars now with their 2006 performance of “Here it Goes Again” at the MTV music awards.

Making a viral video can only kind of make you famous. You could forever be known as the kid who trips out after going to the dentist, but that’s not really going to get you anywhere. These guys have a skill; making music. But they know that Youtube, and other viral sites are going to help get their music out.

I’ll keep saying it. If you’re a musician, videographer, writer, artist – figure out how to show your stuff online. You have nothing to lose except the chance of being discovered. Get on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Learn how to communicate with your growing fan base.

The reason I am writing to you today is in hopes that I can find an iPhone 3G to purchase from you, your friend, or your mom (moms usually have extra iPhones – I asked my mom, but she had already given it to my sister, so will you please ask your mom for me? Thank you.), or your neighbor. It seems to me with the iPhone 3GS available now there must be drawers full iPhone 3G’s out there. We both know that they are just declining in value, and you’re just waiting for the next iPhone to come out.

The truth is I’d rather give you, your friend, or your mom money than Apple and AT&T. I went through the rebate brewhaha at Apple yesterday and laughed my way straight out of the store.

I don’t want to pay $299 for the 3G and have to sign another two year contract, when in six months I could get the 3GS upgrade for like $199. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry, all that needs to make sense is that I would like to buy your phone from you.

Thank you in advance, please send this post to your friends (ReTweet). They may have friends that have an iPhone that they have been trying to sell for the last four months.

It looks like Darth Vader is standing next to (who I can only assume is) Mark Zuckerberg in the Friends icon in the upper right corner of the new Facebook app on the iPhone. Super weird. Is this a hint that Lucas Arts is thinking about buying Facebook – or the other way around?

And how did they make the guy above the Profile look just like me? Does the icon above your Profile look just like you too?

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

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).

The reason I’m telling you this is to make sure you understand that I don’t think Silicon Valley is going to change the entertainment industry. There are plenty of productions houses up here that were thought to do amazing things, but just aren’t. (Revision3).

For those of us who are writers, directors, camera operators, editors: our jobs are staying in LA for the most part. Shows will be made the same way they have been for years. One difference is that now the internet provides us with random video clips —it’s like America’s funniest home videos except with no commercials and no censorship.

There is an exception to all of this: Joss Whedon of Buffy and Firefly. It’s not that I think he is the exception, but rather that he has realized the potential in making an online show the “old fashioned way,” which is the “current” way in LA. My understanding is that when Whedon created “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” he made the show how he wanted, then put it online how he envisioned it rather than through all the politics that generally ruins a good script. I think college humor is another great example of this.

If you have the funding, you can make something and put it online for people to see. Who knows how many people will watch it? If you have the funding and someone’s name, like Whedon, you can make something how you want, and maybe make a profit. If you have a show that is gimmicky, you might be able to get people to watch it, and may be able to make a little money. (See Ask A Ninja, Homestar Runner, or LG15.)

Television is breaking into the web-o-sphere. People like high quality video, and are willing to watch commercials for it. They just want to be able to choose when they watch it—not much of a change, think TiVo.

So is there an industry being built here for people who work in film? I’m not sure.
Seesmic is making it easier for the audience to communicate with one another, but possibly more importantly it’s making it easier for the audience to communicate to the media. That’s what is totally revolutionary as far as I’m concerned.

My co-worker Giselle and I just put this video together.

I think it helps show how people are starting to communicate with each other online, as well as how the media is becoming engaged with the audience.

The audience experience is changing as we speak but the way we produce our content is only slightly. High quality content will still be made by ABC, and all the other channels, but now you can make a show and say ‘Fuck’ in it 100 times, stick it online, and not have to worry about a thing (except for hate mail and death threats from crazy parents who don’t pay close enough attention to what their kids are watching).

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.