Monty’s Afterword

You know you want to learn how to do it. So watch!

Read all abou the Strida 5 folding bike at Wired.com.

We’ve got a new blogger on our site (from our very own marketing department), blogging on the techniques of search optimizing your videos. Online video is growing exponentially and now is the time to learn a few tricks to get web visitors to your videos. So, with out further ado, here’s the new SEO for Video blog. Go there and you will be rewarded.

Brian Regan does a funny stand-up where he breaks down Pop Tarts and their ridiculous cooking instructions.

Watch it on Comedy Central Videos

You know you’ve been craving to watch those classic music videos and stuff your brain with arcane pop culture facts. Thanks VH1 for bringing it back to us. Watch VH1’s Pop Up Video Collection Online.

Oprah Winfrey featured Ugg Boots on her Favorite Things episode in 2005. Two years later, I can’t walk a downtown block without crossing a young woman blandishing a pair. It’s true. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that on any given day in Fall, one out of every five chicks will be rocking the Uggs. This time of year, when the temperature starts to drop, they’re a dime a dozen. But, I had not realized the full potential of the marketing power of the Uggs nor Oprah until yesterday, when I saw a dude wearing them. I kid you not. He was Ugg’n it big time. I would like to tip my hat and give him a nod for his bravery and bold sense of fashion. This music video is for you, my Ugg wearing brother:
(Oh, and in case anybody is thinking of giving me a Christmas present, I’m a size 12.)

NBC has hammered in the final nail, pulling all its TV content from Apple iTunes. If you been following this feud between Steve Jobs and NBC you know that this has been in the works for some time now. In fact, I remember being in Newark, NJ shortly after the decision was reached to stop providing iTunes with new episodes. I was desperately trying to find the latest The Office episode via iTunes. Of course, I couldn’t find it, so I turned to NBC’s website, which on the hotel’s connection was too slow to view. I then turned to Amazon’s UnBox, which had started selling new NBC TV shows in place of iTunes, but I was on a Mac. Incompatible. So after about a half an hour of jumping around from site to site trying to watch TV on a laptop, I gave up. I was defeated.

Fast forward to today, nearly two months later and I’m reading this blog about the final moment of NBC’s removal from iTunes. What’s changed since my experience in Newark? Not much. If you’re a Mac user you still can’t download NBC’s TV content; not by NBC Direct nor Amazon UnBox. You’re stuck right now with viewing their content by streaming it over the Internet through NBC’s website or their hulu.com site which is still in beta. But, NBC Direct is promising to be Mac compatible soon. In the meantime, you better enjoy getting your content streamed to you, as that’s the only way your going to get it. As for me, that’s fine and dandy, but I lot people like the downloads so they can manage their content, perhaps viewing it on an iPod or Apple TV, etc. For those folks, they’re going to have to be patient. But, we’ve all got time to kill, right? When do you expect you’ll have new content to view with the ongoing Writers Strike? Seriously, TV viewing sucks right now– it’s like Nick At Night every night with re-run after re-run. So what’s the point?

I give up on you TV.

The good news is that even with NBC’s departure from Apple iTunes, TV Networks are realizing their full Online potential. That will eventually mean that viewing TV online will be a painless process. There’s just a few road blocks ahead, the writers who are demanding a cut in Online revenue and Digital Rights Management (DRM). Once those things are ironed out, I’ll be throwing out my 19″ RCA and crowning my Mac computer the King of my living room.

Matt York, our Publisher, has declared December 3rd National Groin Injury Day. Here’s the low-down on the subject:

Not too long ago, Andrew Burke (who I’ve previously mentioned on this blog and who I have a movie-sized poster of in my cube– well kind of) showed me this funky online video site, VBS.tv. Content wise, VBS.tv has made a lot of progress, but it hasn’t been until now, when the NY Times picked them up for this article, that I noticed. It was definitely worth a revisit for me and very satisfying seeing that an independent online media outlet can not only survive, but thrive and create content that is very compelling. So if you have some free time this week and you’re not fighting off the tryptofan watch some shows. It will blow your mind.

I love Spout Blog. There I said it. And, I especially love this entry:

Alan at Burbanked answered this challenge by inserting the Chipmunk into a lesson on Lev Kuleshov’s Montage Effect. Kuleshov, a contemporary of Eisenstein, argued that shot order matters because each image in a film is imbued with meaning by the image that comes before it. So suddenly, the chipmunk’s drama makes sense–-”It’s as if that piping hot soup is just outside his reach.”

Read more on Spot blog to find out how this hamster (below) can teach you a valuable Film Theory lesson.