Film

Here at Native we do allow occasional time for The Coolest Thing We’ve Yet Seen Today.

Today’s is thru-you.com which showcases the work of Kutiman. It’s fairly self-explanatory, he’s creating original tunes by splicing together YouTube videos of people jamming with solo instruments.

The execution is the kind for which we’d reserve the word “awesome”. If you click the credits button to navigate the source material, you’ll realise he’s:

• not cheating here
• probably an amazingly patient person

None of this is by permission of the source creators it would seem. But these are mostly hobbyist musicians who’ve posted up their material for the joy of it. And I don’t think they’d mind being subject to such a splendid treatment. I mean, would you?

(For the link, cheers to Lessig and Colin Consterdine – it appears this has been online for a few weeks now. Techcrunch think he’s the first music “star” to be born on Twitter. Hard to disagree.)

[ UPDATE 06/02/09: Comments have been enabled on Alastair Campbell's site, albeit in an unusual place. At the moment it's unclear whether they apply to the whole site or each individual post. Nevertheless, you can disregard some of my criticism below as Campbell is also responding personally. He explains that the original lack of comments was down to "first day teething troubles". ]

Alastair Campbell has somewhat belatedly launched his own text blog and video blog.

For someone so strongly linked with political communications in the UK, he’s a little late to the game. But I for one am a little intrigued about how he will choose to use it.

He’s also on Twitter now as @campbellclaret – presumably a reference to his chosen football team, Burnley.

First impressions? He talks about having discussions, but there is no comment facility on the blog. Why do high profile bloggers shy from this? People will talk about you, so you might as well encourage and “own” some of the discussion. A busy comments area brings people back, especially if there’s controversy. And Campbell is not unfamiliar with that.

He’d even retain the power to moderate comments, which is again something at which he’s had plenty of practice.

Otherwise they’ll use a system like Diigo to maintain annotations about your site elsewhere, as we saw with Whitehouse.gov recently.

Incidentally, call me picky but the convention is that the whole thing is referred to as a “blog” and one article is referred to as a “blog post”.

There’s also a video blog and the first entry (I mean post) is a very slickly-edited piece with some footage from the glory years with Tony Blair and the upbeat sounds of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” on the soundtrack (I wonder if they sought permission for this).

It’s entertaining.

I generally think people’s expectations of online video have lowered these days. Just shoot a quick and frank piece to camera from your living room – it’s cheap, it’s immediate and it feels more open and honest. With such high production values from the outset, I’ll be surprised if he can sustain this regularly.

We are blog and news junkies here at Native. (We need to be.)

One thing that amuses me is when commentators emerge from the woodwork to direct their earnest advice towards the business and technology strategies of Google.

Google’s huge success in building an empire on search advertising is very well known. It’s enabled them to launch an entire suite of web-based applications.

(It’s likely you might be reading this blog post in Google Reader or Google Mail, for instance. If not, maybe you’re using their Google Chrome browser.)

But daily, hourly even, there is no shortage of people with some nugget of insight. Or withering putdown.

When you’re the best, you are at your most visible and you are the biggest target for ill-conceived challenges. Just ask any boxing champion who has to walk into a bar.

Admittedly Google’s recent 4th quarter financial results were down. But considering a tough market for advertising in general, they continue to do comparatively well – beating analysts’ forecasts with net profits of $382 million.

Media commentator Jeff Jarvis’ overall premise is different. While not without his own critics, Jarvis is not foolish enough to take cheap shots at the fastest growing company of recent times.

Jarvis has some good insights on his blog and Guardian newspaper pieces. I for one am looking forward to reading his new book What Would Google Do?.

His subject scope is large, judging from this book teaser:

It seems as if no company, executive, or institution truly understands how to survive and prosper in the internet age.

Except Google.

So, faced with most any challenge today, it makes sense to ask: WWGD? What would Google do? In management, commerce, news, media, manufacturing, marketing, service industries, investing, politics, government, and even education and religion, answering that question is a key to navigating a world that has changed radically and forever.

So, WWGD? (I’m looking forward to the bracelet and sandal franchises.)

Jarvis’ background is old school print journalism, so it helps to view his commentary as coming from that perspective. You might remember him from his Dell Hell online campaign in 2005 when he openly criticised the PC manufacturer via his blog and became responsible, in part, for the subsequent improvements to their customer service.

If you’re looking for more detail from Jarvis, read The Google Economy and The Imperatives of the Link Economy.

The book is out next week on Collins. (I wonder if News Corporation, their parent company, have anything to say about it.)

This is an extract from a recent interview with the US band Animal Collective, or rather one of their members, Geologist.

With the whole downloading thing I suppose it’s easier for people to have an opinion immediately after they’ve heard, like, half of a 128kbps vinyl rip or something like that. What are your views on leaks?

We take whatever minimal steps we can to prevent it, but we know records are going to leak. It’s not even about whether it’s free or not free, I mean the day you release it it’s free to the world anyway, what with the technology these days…

I have a lot of strong personal feelings about how people consume music these days, even myself. That’s why I have these feelings; because I can see how my own listening habits have degraded over the years with the advent of the internet.

Like, when people tell me about a new band that I should check out, before I would have gone and bought the record but now I go to Myspace and listen to 20 seconds of their song through my laptop speakers and I’m like ‘whatever’ – I think that’s disgusting on my part to form an opinion that way. I’m trying to break myself out of the habit. People ask, ‘why do you give a shit about a leak, it’s going to leak anyway, it’s such an outdated, antiquated way of approaching music’ and I guess that’s true, but I’m unapologetic about it, in a way, growing up in a time when the internet wasn’t around.

I always think back to when I discovered Will Oldham’s music… at first I bought the record because it was on Drag City and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t get this, is it country music or is it Americana music? It doesn’t sound like Pavement, I don’t get it’. Y’know, I was like 15 years old and if it had just been MP3s on my computer that I didn’t buy or have a physical copy of I’d probably just have deleted it and never listened again. But because it stayed on my shelf I put in effort to get into it, I kept going back to it. And there’s just one day, I don’t know if it’s because the weather is right or you’re just in a different mood, but it suddenly clicks for you.

Personally, I don’t have that many experiences like that anymore because I’ve been taken in by the accessibility of music and I’m disappointed by what that’s done to _my_ music. That’s why I’m not into the whole leak culture or digital music in general. I don’t want to take part in it by being, like, ‘Leak our record’ or whatever. Even streaming it before it’s released, that goes against my views on how music should be listened to. Doing that or putting it on iTunes first, it’s giving people another option from which they can hear your music for the first time. That’s my feeling, it’s very personal and it has nothing to do with the industry war that’s going on right now or anything like that.

Full interview at drownedinsound.com

If you’re unfamiliar with them, Animal Collective are perhaps best described as an avant garde psychedelic folk band. Although they are sounding a bit more polished these days. What does it matter? Hardcore fans will probably disagree with my descriptions.

You can judge for yourself by listening to their official Myspace page, presumably maintained by one of the other members, judging by Geologist’s views on music streaming.

I’m inclined to see his point here, but I disagree that this view holds in every case.

Certainly though, the fan’s experience is important.

What do you think?

You could also explore this debate in a video context. Which reminds me – Monty Python have a view on this issue. They recently launched a free and official streaming channel for Monty Python highlights on YouTube, partly out of disappointment with the poor quality of unofficial uploads. In their case, official DVD sales through their official site increased by 6,800 percent over the first three days, as a result.