If you follow me on Twitter, or FriendFeed, you know I have a penchant for posting up stupid Internet videos. Memes, animals, it’s all there. Over the last few months, I’ve discovered a true love in Parry Gripp. The frontman of the group Nerf Herder (named from an insult by Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back) and the man who composed the theme song for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gripp puts out songs weekly for download and use as ringtones on his website.
Gripp came to my attention for the fantastic song “Do You Like Waffles?”, which is my current ringtone.
Hilarious.
The short songs Parry Gripp writes around memes which fly around the Internet are especially hilarious. One of my favorites is “Cat Flushing a Toilet”. Because the Internet LOVES cats.
I highly suggest you check out more of Parry Gripp’s work at his site, download some songs and ringtones, and revel in the comedy. I sure as heck am!
Hey they, Geek Troika denizens! It’s been a little while, but we’re back for your listening pleasure! A bunch of crazy news has happened, and your loyal traversers of the geek realm have come and brought back the slabs of goodness. We’ve also brought along a guest. Well, more like dragged him into the mix. But he came willingly! (that’s what she said) Anypoo..
Hey there, folks! Another Wednesday has rolled around so you know what that means: another episode of Geek Troika! This week, our hero Jon has stepped up to the plate to fulfill his moderating destinty and to lead us all to podcast victory…or something along those lines.
CNET and practically the whole damn world has reported, that, yes, YouTube has finally decided to go HD. Check out this source clip from CNET’s Josh Lowensohn’s on personal experiment.
It’s all pretty straight forward: You go onto YouTube, choose to upload a clip in HD (Obviously, an HD clip - yes, it’s redundant, but some people think you can upscale any old clip) and when it’s done, viewers will have the option of seeing your clip in HD.
I have to say, if the clip which Lowensohn provided is any indication, web video should be getting a lot more interesting. Sure, services like Vimeo have offered HD before, but YouTube is obviously the king of web video right now. If this becomes the new paradigm, it means I can watch awesome clips on how to make bread in HD from now on.
I may be revealing how behind the times I am, but when I think YouTube talent, I still think of TheWineKone and paytotheorderofofof2. They were two of my first subscriptions on the website way back in late 2005/early 2006.
Tony’s videos have evolved from his 9 minute rants to clever sketches with pretty darn good effects. He’s very thoughtful about his videos and has a fun disdain for his little bit of cewebrity. Emily’s videos have kept their confessional nature and, to me, her videos really define what I feel vloggers should be about on Youtube. Both Tony and Emily’s videos have slowly become less frequent and with that my frequency in visits to Youtube has dwindled.
Youtube has really moved away from the vlogging phenomenon and those who haven’t kept with the times have been pretty much left in the dust. There is still a niche vlogging community there, but as the general population of Youtube has grown, vlogging has been pushed aside by pirated video clips and spam.
I still appreciate a lot of the content that is put out on Youtube, though. There are a lot of great independent content producers who can still thrive on the tubes, but their content isn’t vlogging as much as it is scripted comedy. I miss the Youtube of old, it’s true.
There were still jerks and trolls on the old Youtube, but they were much smaller in numbers. The smaller community was very supportive of each other and not only the most popular users could get several replies to their videos. The gunslinging wild west early days of Youtube seemed a lot more civilized than the current Youtube.
Hey folks! It’s that time again! Another Geek Troika podcast is in the can and ready for your enjoyment! We’ve got a wicked rad show for you today so let’s get started:
There’s been talk around the net about MGM and Youtube partnering up to provide full length films and tv shows on the massively popular internet site for free. Well, not quite free. They’ll be add supported, of course. A few sites seem to tout this as something to cause Hulu concern, but I’m not entirely convinced yet. In fact, I hear this piece of news and am fairly dismissive about it.
First of all, Hulu is a one stop shop for tv and film. It’s probably the most centralized place to find what you need. The list of films in it’s library is constantly expanding, and more and more tv shows are being hosted through them. What they get is that people like us don’t like to hunt down a dozen sites to try and find the latest episode of our favorite shows. Granted, it’s not too terrible an inconvenience to type in cbs.com when I want to watch the latest How I Met Your Mother, but there’s something to be said about the centralized aspect to Hulu. I don’t really want to add another site to my bookmarks just for MGM content, and I don’t really want to have to deal with a different player either.
Which brings me to another point of discussion: the Hulu player itself. It’s probably the best out of the ones I’ve used and I when I’m watching an episode of Chuck or It’s Always Sunny, I’m not aware that I’m using a player on the web. It’s not to say that the other sites are bad when it comes to their players, but Hulu keeps it simple and unobtrusive. Youtube, while a decent player, doesn’t seem like it’s equipped to handle feature length films in it’s current iteration. Are they going to change the player GUI to fit this partnership? Are they going to make it easy to skip forward to the best part of the film before it’s been buffered? Are their ads going to be the pop up ads like they have now, or are they going to actually interrupt the content? Can we vote “down” the ads we don’t like, and conversely vote “up” the ads we do? Will all ads be 30 seconds in length, or will they vary?
Yeah, I’m skeptical. And yeah, I’ve become a bit biased toward Hulu. But I think this is an interesting topic to discuss. Is having to sift through a dozen different sites and adapting to different ad rules for each site the future we want for watching television online? By dividing the web into channels like this, aren’t we defeating the purpose of having tv shows online? Let’s talk, folks. I want to hear what you think.
Youtube has really moved away from the vlogging phenomenon and those who haven’t kept with the times have been pretty much left in the dust. There is still a niche vlogging community there, but as the general population of Youtube has grown, vlogging has been pushed aside by pirated video clips and spam. 
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