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

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.

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!

By the way – the guy next to me is a writer, I’m not sure for what – but I was surprised to see that he types with two fingers.

I don’t have much to say other than I was in the right place at the right time. I mannaged to sneak a few seconds without sound of Kofi Annan. Loic tried to get an interview with him using his flip cam but I think Kofi thought the camera was to small. I’m sure that video will be online sometime.

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!

You know those photos of your dad with a thick beard taken 4 years before you were born. They’re grainy, and the color is filled with amazing oranges and yellows, either because photo technology was still working out some kinks, the colors actually looked like that back then, or they were trying to match the colors of the wallpaper and couches of the time. Whichever it might be… LOVE IT!

I hope that 27 years from now, when I look back on the photos of me and my friends today, they are grainy, lost of color, and we have beards.

I think what i’m getting at is that my new D90 is “way” exciting to me right now. I don’t know where to begin with it, but apparently I like making the photos look like old photos.
This particular photo is of Drew, it was taken in 1937. Here is another photo that I’ve played with that was taken in the late 60’s maybe early 70’s, I can’t really remember.

If you know of any decades of photography I should try to create please let me know. Also, you should know I do portraits for $150. What you get is a photo of yourself. I’ll even make it look like an old photo for an additional charge of $20 or a wheel of smoked Gouda.

We had Christmas in Claremont, Christmas in Pasadena, and today we will have Christmas in Portland Oregon, if we had 5 more we could just call it Hanukkah this year. Spending time with the family has been a real treat, everyone is growing up quite well, and some of the gifts have been quite creative and artistic. Today’s Christmas in Portland should bring some success as well, as long as the rest of the crew can make it here in the snow. The top photo is at my dad’s house in Claremont, and the bottom photo is of my mom in Pasadena.

The next set of photos may have a lot more snow.

Another photo of Claire shopping!

For Claire and I, Christmas #1 is tomorrow. We’re celebrating our first Christmas at my moms house in Pasadena, I’m sure it’ll look a lot like the traditional Christmas – Snow on the ground, wind rattling the windows, kids sledding outside.

Probably not, maybe more like our Christmas in Australia 2 years ago.

Hopefully we’ll have some photos of our LA Christmas in the next day or two. Then up to Portland where the scenery may be more “its a Wonderful Life” like – not that it’s not a wonderful life down in LA, you know what I mean though.

This blog post is impossible to write. We were in Paris, we got engaged, then we came home and told the story about 45 times.

If I told the the story here it would never be able to change – We would have a place to look back at and say “that’s exactly how it was”. That’s no good. The thing about proposal stories is it gets better over the years. I even hesitate to post photos because 10 years from now we can’t claim that it was a nice, sunny, blue day out.

I’ll give you some details that will always stay the same:
We were at the Sacré Cœur in Paris, France.
Claire looked beautiful.
I had butterflies.
She said yes.

If you want the full story, you should probably call one of us. If you want the full story told with amazing detail, full of romance, and beautiful imagery, ask me to tell the story 25 years from now while our young adult children are listening.