Geek Gestalt

In the small hours of a summer night when I was in college, I heard a song play on San Francisco's famous Live 105 that seemed, at the time, one of the most profound, melodic, and catchy tunes I'd ever come across.

It was called Dancing on the Planet, and even back then--in the late 80s or early 90s--a rare track I never again heard on the radio.

For years, it was jammed in the back of my memory, always there as this incredible song that I just had to find.

Some time after the Google era kicked in, I began looking for it, finding it listed here or there on some random music site, the artist identified as Dave Storrs. But there were few clues as to how I could get a copy.

Once, I found a European site offering a compilation that included Dancing on the Planet. I tried buying it, but it didn't pan out. I also scanned various file-sharing sites and caught the occasional whiff of it. But still, the song was no more than an unimpeachable memory.

But a couple of weeks ago I had the inspiration to search for the song on YouTube. A quick, 21-character search string. Suddenly, with no fanfare, nothing to herald the conclusion of what had been at least a 15-year hunt, it popped up (see video below): the elusive song itself, accompanied by an obviously unofficial 1980s-era space-themed digital video.

Suffice it to say, it's hard to live up to the profundity of college-era memories, and Dancing on the Planet turned out to be a fun, if not great, dance track. But this sudden, unexpected end to a very long-standing personal mystery left me startled.

In the comments section, I discovered I was hardly the only one who had used YouTube to reunite themselves with Dancing on the Planet.

"Damn," wrote someone calling themselves gforcekaras. "(I) never thought I live (long) enough to hear this song again. Thank you so much for uploading this!"

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been so surprised that YouTube would prove to be the terminus for the search. In fact, after finding Dancing on the Planet, I immediately checked off another decade-plus hunt on the site as well: Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick's original studio version of The Show, one of the first great rap songs.

And it turns out that YouTube, a service that was never really supposed to be about music, is many people's choice for tracking down the songs they've longed to hear for years, but couldn't find.

"Probably 15 years ago, I remember seeing The Wedding Present perform (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah) on the Conan O'Brien show," said Kevin Lien, who runs the music blog, The Sound of Indie. "I put a video tape in to try and record it, but...I missed it and have been on the lookout for it for nearly 15 years. Then all (of a) sudden, it pops up on YouTube one day."

Lien said he'd actually tried finding it on the service several times before, to no avail. But then one day, someone posted it.

"After searching for so long for that recording," Lien said, "I was thrilled to finally see it again. This four-minute piece of footage was my Moby Dick. I knew it was out there, but it had always eluded me."

For Molly Steenson, a Ph.D. student at Princeton, YouTube has provided her and her boyfriend a way to DJ at home. They can track down songs they previously had no other way to find.

"It started when I was in Bangalore, India (in) 2006," Steenson said. "My friend Udai...wanted to show me a Raj Kumar song (and YouTube) was the best way to find it. It's only increased since then. And now it's a few times a week that (her boyfriend) and I end up DJing back and forth on YouTube....It helps to find specific live performances we remember from TV shows, things that once upon a time I had on bootleg VHS."

And YouTube is also helping Steenson rediscover songs that she remembers from spending her high school years in Germany.

"It's been great fun," Steenson said, "to dig up songs I've had in my head since 1990 and that I've not heard since."

Serial song searching
For some people, tracking down missing songs is a serious pastime, since music is so important to so many and we all have those tunes we heard one time when on vacation or danced to with a certain special someone.

To Chris Taylor, a San Francisco journalist, the meeting of the Palm V and Napster, circa 2000, was a "perfect storm" for being able to easily write down the names of songs to hunt for later and then to actually try to find them.

But Taylor said one song he'd been seeking for at least eight years--5 Minutes (Uncle Eric), by Mainframe (see video below)--had eluded even his most assiduous attempts to find it.

"I had been looking on every file-sharing service in existence, from Napster on," Taylor said. "I found a 12-inch remix on BitTorrent, but like most 12-inch remixes of the day, it's a bit crap. I remember the song as being a bit spooky and surreal and time-travel-like."

Taylor said his eagerness and persistence about tracking down 5 Minutes was due to the song's quick rise and fall.

"It sank without a trace shortly after making an impression in the charts," Taylor said. "It's so funny how that happens. You hear a song on the radio every day for two weeks, then nothing at all ever. Like it went into the memory hole. It never existed."

But exist it did. And because it was one of the very few songs on the list on his Palm he couldn't find, "its mystique increased."

For Taylor, the resolution came one day when he decided to Google the song.

"Presto," he said. "The YouTube version."

Like my experience with Dancing on the Planet, though, Taylor said finally uncovering 5 Minutes was somewhat bittersweet.

"Not only is the track rarely as good as you remember," he said, "but also, you hear it on YouTube, but you can't download it to iTunes...Like, why did you post it (there) and not on LimeWire?"

But one friend I contacted for this story pointed out that there is a solution for some feeling Taylor's frustration.

He noted that one YouTube user, known as herecomesmongo79, rips old vinyl and posts the songs on YouTube along with purchasing information online. The idea is that this user is trying to promote the purchase of rare, out-of-print vinyl that would otherwise go completely unheard.

Another friend who heard that I was looking for people who had used YouTube to find rare music, asked if there wasn't some risk that by writing this article, many of the songs I identified in it would be removed, since many of them were posted by people other than the legitimate rights-holders.

In response, a YouTube spokesperson told me that, "We offer copyright holders choice as to what they want done with their videos: Whether to block, promote, or create revenue from them, in a way that is simple and straightforward. We cooperate with all copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content as soon as we are notified."

Reading between the lines of that comment, my sense is that since the songs I'm writing about are all way, way below most people's radar, it's unlikely anyone is going to complain. Plus, some of the songs were posted by the record labels themselves.

Then there are the songs that still, inexplicably, haven't turned up on YouTube.

Lien, of The Sound of Indie blog, said he'd set up Google RSS feeds that automatically alert him if, for example, a song he'd been looking for turned up on YouTube.

And Steenson suggested that it's just a matter of biding one's time.

"Is there anything I'm looking for that I can't find?" Steenson said. "Some, yes: Indie bands from Minneapolis and elsewhere in Minnesota that are long forgotten. But someone will put them on YouTube, I'm sure."

Note: If you've used YouTube to find a song you'd been long searching for, please leave a comment with the name of the song and a link to it.

'Breathe' is a new style of entertainment that mixes film, alternate-reality games and Web 2.0 media into a single, multi-installment experience.

(Credit: Expanding Universe)

If you think you know what a movie is, get ready to have your assumptions dashed to pieces.

That's because of Breathe, a multimedia, multipart film project that is in the works from the London-based social entertainment company, Expanding Universe.

Equal parts cinema, alternate-reality game (ARG), dance club, and social network, Breathe is Expanding Universe's attempt at both redefining existing entertainment genres and inventing entirely new ones.

At its most basic level, the project is a multistage, interactive murder mystery with a time line, said Yomi Ayeni, Expanding Universe's creative director.

But Breathe, which the company hopes will see the light of day some time in 2009, is expected to be much more.

To begin with, Ayeni explained by phone from London, the project opens as a traditional ARG that will be promoted by a series of dance club-oriented Web sites. The idea is that the sites will pull people in who are interested in finding out what's behind a series of mysterious and unusual deaths.

The sites will lead people to watching a 15-minute film which will delve into the police's murder investigation, introducing Breathe participants to the lead detective and letting viewers in, to some extent, on his crime-solving methods.

Where things take a turn for the innovative is what happens next.

What happens next
After watching the film installment and reading more about what's going on with the murders on the club music Web sites, some will begin to get invitations to exclusive nightclubs in the London area.

The idea with this, said Ayeni, is to remove people from their passive positions at their computers and bring them close to the action.

For those who avail themselves of the invites, they'll find themselves at nightclubs where they may end up mingling with various characters from the developing drama.

Some who attend will then find themselves offered further real-life experiences--and what happens after that leads to the second installment of the film.

What's interesting about Expanding Universe's technique is that they expect to turn the second film installment around in a week and incorporate footage shot in the nightclubs, meaning that participants may find themselves ensnared in the drama.

Then, as Breathe continues to evolve, as some people have become directly involved, and as more people spend time online reading about the drama, looking for clues to the developments and at the same time, enjoying what they're finding on the various dance club community Web sites, as well as a host of other online destinations, select participants will be presented with invitations to delve further in.

"And that is how we then move people on to the next stage," Ayeni said. "They become actual parts of the narrative itself, with interactions with people in the (fictional) drama."

"Set over a four-week period, viewers watch (four 15) minute shorts, and try to help Detective (John) Franks solve the case by working through puzzles, infiltrating the underground club scene, trying to locate the venue, and save the next victim from running out of air," an official Breathe summary explains. Using blogs, YouTube, GPS, telephone, secret meetings, IM, auditions, immersive role-play, cinema, and music, Breathe stands to be one of the most audacious multi-media experiences to leap from a cinema screen--'all you have to do is breathe...'"

How big can it get?
While the carrying out of the drama depends on the real-life participation of individuals, Ayeni said he thinks Breathe can scale to fairly large size.

That's in part because Expanding Universe is hoping to partner with nightclubs that can hold thousands of people, and also because the company hopes to carry out different versions of the project in different cities--each of which would be based on local DJs, local actors and other regional talent that could make each version similar, but would also vary enough to attract a new audience that would be kept in suspense, waiting for a unique cliffhanger ending.

Further, Ayeni said that at the conclusion of each city's edition, Expanding Universe could put out complete versions, perhaps on DVD, or online, that could both let everyone see how it played out, and also raise money.

It's not totally clear yet what the business model for Breathe is, though Ayeni suggested that it would bring in revenue through a series of sponsorships and partnerships, product placement deals and direct financing.

But with some time before Breathe becomes a reality, Expanding Universe still has time to work out the financial details.

In the interim, Ayeni and his partners are working on the structure of the project and hoping they can create something that turns entertainment--and the concept of how audiences interact with entertainment--on its head.

The murder mystery "has to become wrapped up in what is the alternate reality existence of the drama," Ayeni said. "We want the viewers and the people following this to step into the (installments), to be the bridge between what they're watching online and what they're watching in the cinema. We want people to step in and embody these experiences."

Creating new audiences
One person who thinks Expanding Universe could well succeed in its mission is Liz Rosenthal, the director of Power to the Pixel, a spin-off of the London Film Festival that focused on digital advances and resources in film.

Recently, Rosenthal invited Expanding Universe to make a presentation about Breathe to a gathering at Power of the Pixel and she said that the crowd of a couple of hundred movers and shakers in the media industry were impressed by what they saw.

"It created new audiences," she said of Breathe, "people watching things in new ways and in new places, and (it's) a way to reach audiences in more direct ways online."

Rosenthal said she thinks that Breathe utilizes one of the most impressive story-telling mechanisms she's seen, largely because the film itself isn't the starting point, but rather the story is the starting point.

"The way he's involving audiences is very extreme," she said of Ayeni. "He's involving audiences by getting them involved in a game (and that's) a totally new concept. (He's) one of the people at the forefront of this" new methodology.

In particular, Rosenthal said she appreciates the way Breathe is likely to get participants involved in shaping the media itself.

"They don't just sit back, they get involved," she said. "I think (Ayeni) is taking them a step further...They're kind of the protagonist."

You may have heard me say this before, but it's worth repeating: I love the Internet.

From my first forays onto Yahoo in the mid-1990s, to my slow, methodical construction of a perfect rating on eBay to the dozens of times I use Google every day, there is simply no question about it: I am head over heels gaga for the medium.

But no matter how many times I laugh at a YouTube video, read something interesting on NYTimes.com or consult Wikipedia, I think my true favorite online hangout is the Internet Movie Database, or IMDB.

What can I say? I love movies, watch them all the time and I find myself constantly doing searches on the site to find out where I recognize that actor in the third lead from or to see what other films or TV shows a director has made.

Yet even I was surprised when I discovered today that IMDB just turned 18 years old. Seriously. Eighteen.

Now, like me, you may not have thought it was possible for a Web site to be older than 14, since the Web didn't even come along until 1994. But there it was in my inbox today: an e-mail touting the fact that IMDB first launched on October 17, 1990, the creation of then-teenager Col Needham.

According to Wikipedia, the database got its start on Usenet newsgroups and later morphed into a proper Web site.

Regardless, this e-mail, sadly, also burst one of my bubbles of naivete (and sure, I have plenty of others left): the idea that IMDB was, despite its ever more polished look and feel, an independent site run by a small but dedicated team who just could not let a minute pass where someone like me can't find out whether Better off Dead or The Sure Thing came first (according to IMDB, they were both from 1985, but the latter preceded the former).

In fact, according to the release in my inbox, Amazon.com bought IMDB in 1998. Sigh.

No matter, though, because over the years, the site has stayed remarkably true to its original mission and to this day is the undisputed champion of movie and TV-related cross-referencing. Sure, it has a few bugs here and there, but in almost every test I've ever put the site through, it's given me exactly what I wanted, and settled more than a few arguments over whether this actor was in that film or not. He was. Or wasn't. I can't remember.

So, here's a big happy birthday to you, IMDB, on the occasion of your turning 18. Now, if only you could go vote on November 4.

For my video shooting needs on Road Trip 2008, I used Qik's software on a Nokia N95 phone and a Flip Video Mino.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

CLARKSDALE, Miss.--As I've worked my way through the South on Road Trip 2008 throughout June, I've been a one-man multimedia production team. That means that I've been writing stories, taking pictures, Twittering, shooting video, and even doing a little podcasting.

Since I'm on my own, and can only carry a backpack with me as I move from story to story, carrying a notebook, a digital SLR, and several lenses--since text and photos are the major part of this project--it's crucial that for video I have something small and light, yet flexible and somewhat powerful.

And most important of all, it's got to be easy to take video and then easily embed it in blogs.

That's what led me to Qik's streaming video service and to Flip Video's Mino.

These are entirely different products, the former a software package that runs on a series of smart phones and the latter a small, low-fi, but low-cost camcorder.

With Qik, the special sauce is its ability to take video and stream it instantly--when there's a 3G cellular or accessible Wi-Fi signal available--and live, onto a Web-based Qik channel and, if you set one up, to an embedded video player that can be put on almost any site.

Even better, if you're using it to stream live, viewers can send you instant messages that appear in your viewfinder while you're shooting. That makes the service ideal for things like one-on-one interviews, since it means that viewers can effectively interact with you while you're working, sending you questions to pass on to the interviewee.

If you happen to find yourself shooting when there's no available signal, the Qik software on the phone--in my case, a Nokia N95--archives the video until you're back in range, then sends it. That means no interactivity, but the video still posts automatically on the Internet, on your Qik channel.

So how useful is Qik?

During the first couple of weeks of Road Trip 2008, I used it frequently. I found it to be a great way to quickly grab a little piece of video from, say, a demonstration of a prototype heat shield for the Orion crew exploration vehicle at the Kennedy Space Center (see video below) or when watching Corvettes come off the end of their assembly line.

And once you've shot your video, embedding it is as easy as going to your Qik page, grabbing the embed code and pasting that into a blog entry. For a generation weaned on putting YouTube videos in their blogs, this is second nature.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. The sound quality is far from ideal, and if you move the smart phone around much, there's an audible whooshing sound as a result. Further, you have to be sure of what you're shooting before you hit record because the very first frame is what viewers see when they visit your Qik page. So if the camera's pointing at the ground, that's what they'll see in the still frame preview. That's not a very compelling image, believe me.

But all in all, Qik is great. The camera is small and light, and the service is extremely easy to use, requiring just a few intuitive button pushes to get going.

And again and again, as I explained to people what it was, that I had just streamed live to the Internet, I'd hear people say, "that's awesome."

Not only that, but Qik is still only in alpha. So when it launches properly, I suspect it will be even better.

Many more people, meanwhile, are familiar with Flip Video and its line of small, dedicated camcorders. And just before I left on this trip, a package arrived with the just-off-the-production-line Flip Mino.

Like its predecessors, this little device plugs into your computer via USB, but it's smaller, and instead of using AA batteries, it powers up via that USB connection. It's also more streamlined and just a little niftier.

And does it work?

Well, as with Qik, it's very easy to use, perhaps even easier. You turn it on, and it's ready to go. It shoots up to 60 minutes of video and has a tool for simply zooming in and out.

And as with Qik, I was able, several times, to keep the camera in my shirt pocket when visiting someplace, pull it out and easily shoot video of, say, UPS' gigantic Worldport air-distribution center in Louisville (see video below) or of space shuttle training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Uploading the video is a fairly simple matter of plugging the camera in, running the Flip software, and then sending it to your chosen online video-sharing site, which in my case was YouTube. Then, embedding the video in a blog is done using the same process as Qik, simply copying the embed code into a post.

But it's got problems, too. When you're shooting the video, it looks really crisp on the camera's viewfinder. But on playback, the quality is far lower, particularly the sound. Several times, I found that I had real trouble hearing what someone standing right next to the camera was saying.

Perhaps the bigger problem, though, is how long it takes to upload. It is very slow, especially when you're on the road, dealing with less than ideal Internet connections. I would say that a 3-minute video would take more than 30 or 40 minutes to upload.

And that is truly frustrating, watching the upload progress status bar inching along, moving extremely slow, particularly when you're in a hurry.

And I think, ultimately, that's why, if I had to choose between Qik and Flip, I would take the former: There's literally no waiting. If you've got a signal, Qik video posts immediately. If not, it posts as soon as you're back in range. With Flip, you have to manually upload the video and as I said above, it's slow.

Still, either is a good choice for easy video, despite their problems.

To be sure, neither of these products is very high-fidelity. This is not professional video. But if what you need is a way to grab video on the run, in my case, sometimes literally, I think you would do fine with either of these.

And to see what I'm up to on Road Trip 2008, please stay tuned to this blog, to my Twitter feed, my Qik channel, or my YouTube channel of Flip videos.

An R.E.M. video posted to YouTube was an obvious take-off of the 'Frozen Grand Central' video from culture-jamming group Improv Everywhere and originally didn't give proper credit. The band has taken the video down and told Improv Everywhere it is re-editing it.

(Credit: YouTube)

Update (3:52 pm): This story got the name of the R.E.M. video wrong. It's fixed in the text below. Additionally, there's new comments from Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd below.

After reading Tuesday night on Laughing Squid that a new R.E.M. video had been posted by the band's publicity firm on YouTube that seemed to blatantly rip off Improv Everywhere's now-famous "freezes," I wrote to the culture jamming collective's founder to get his take.

"I did not know they were making this video and was not involved in any way," Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere's founder, told me by e-mail late last night. "They edited the YouTube description to give us credit, which is enough to satisfy me."

In fact, the publicity firm later removed the video from the YouTube remhq channel, and wrote Todd a note saying, "Sincere apologies and do note us on team R.E.M. love the stuff you guys do."

The note also said that the video would be re-edited to give Improv Everywhere credit.

The video, R.E.M.'s "The Big Still," was an obvious take-off on Improv Everywhere's now-famous Grand Central Station freeze event, in which hundreds of participants showed up in the Manhattan train station and suddenly froze in place for five minutes. Improv Everywhere's YouTube video of the event has been seen nearly 9.9 million times.

In a posting on the Improv Everywhere site, Todd wrote, "It's sort of shocking to see this video which gives absolutely no credit to us and presents the concept of 'getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area' as their own original idea."

But all seems well now. And it's nice to see a band like R.E.M., or its publicity people, be so reactive and responsive to this kind of calling out.

Of course, one issue seems to be the question of what's original. As a commenter on this story posted earlier today, a TV sketch comedy show had done a bit with freezes years before Improv Everywhere came along.

To Todd, that's not necessarily the point.

"We never claimed to invent the idea of freezing in place," Todd wrote to me in an email Wednesday. "I'm sure a caveman froze in place as a gag. What I said in the post (on Improv Everywhere's site) was that we started the current worldwide phenomenon of 'getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area.' It's happened in over 27 countries and it's all been inspired by our Frozen Grand Central video which has almost 10 million views on YouTube. So sure, Just For Laughs had 1 to 3 people freeze in place at a time in a grocery store many years ago for their television show, but I don't really think that's relevant to what happened here with R.E.M."

Multiverse's new virtual Times Square demo showcases the company's latest technology, including the ability to pipe YouTube videos directly into a virtual world.

(Credit: Multiverse Network)

I spent part of Friday afternoon in New York's Times Square, but something wasn't quite right.

On the one hand, things looked very realistic, with the many digital video screens blaring high-fidelity but inane content out at me. On the other, there was only one person in evidence.

So, OK, this wasn't really Times Square. Rather, it was a new technology demo from Multiverse Network, a leading virtual-world platform developer.

In general, Multiverse just makes its platform available to any development team that wants to use it to create a new virtual world. But in this case, the company created the Times Square demo itself as a way to showcase some of its newest innovations.

In point of fact, the demo is pretty impressive, as evidenced by the video (click here for Windows Media format) Multiverse put up on its site.

Even though there's only one avatar in the demo, Multiverse's technology can support up to 1,000 on a single server.

(Credit: Multiverse Network)

A couple of things make this special.

First, if you're familiar with virtual worlds like Second Life, this takes the graphics to another level of realism, and that's a nice thing. Second, even though there's only one avatar in the demo, it would be possible using its technology, Multiverse says, to populate the Times Square scene--or any using their platform--with up to 1,000 avatars, all off a single server.

But there are some other little bits of magic going on here.

One is that all the video boards in the virtual Times Square are running different pieces of content, including at least a couple piping in video directly, and seamlessly, from YouTube. That's not something I think we've seen before using any other platform.

Another nice element is what Multiverse calls its high-dynamic range lighting system, which can display the best possible lighting effects on a high-end gamer machine or lesser effects on a lower-end machine. The system determines the CPU and GPU power and adjusts the effects accordingly.

All in all, this is just a demo, and certainly not anything regular users can yet play around with. But to Multiverse, it's indicative of what's possible with its platform and therefore what any virtual-world developer using that platform can do with it.

Of course, I'm not really that big a fan of Times Square anyway. Now, if we can adjust that demo so I can bop over to Eighth Avenue and catch a bus from Port Authority to New Jersey, that would be impressive.

Got a great idea for a TV show but don't want to deal with going through the traditional Hollywood studio system vetting and production process?

Or maybe you don't even want your show on TV at all, what with the Internet offering so many different distribution opportunities?

Then a Los Angeles start-up called 60Frames Entertainment may well be your ticket to the director's chair.

The company, founded with $3.5 million from investors United Talent Agency (UTA) and Spot Runner, is geared toward providing a wide variety of content creators with the financing and resources they need to produce and distribute original programming across the sites of Internet partners like YouTube, MySpace.com, Bebo, and soon, Joost.

To begin with, 60Frames is supporting two projects, Cockpit, a comedy which "explores what really happens inside the cockpit of a commercial airline." The series is by Big Fantastic, the team of Douglas Cheney, Chris Hampel, Chris McCaleb, and Ryan Wise, which produced Prom Queen for Michael Eisner's start-up, Vuguru.

The new series Cockpit, by the producers of the online show Prom Queen, is one of the first series that 60Frames will distribute to partners like YouTube, Bebo, and others.

(Credit: 60Frames)

"It's an incredible opportunity for creators to get their work out there," McCaleb said of 60Frames. "It's a whole new vision of what an entertainment company can be. It puts the power in the hands of the creators. It's an artist's dream."

That's because, McCaleb said, 60Frames is putting the creative power in the hands of the people creating the content. He said that while his team went through some production meetings with 60Frames, he didn't recall having to submit a budget.

Another early 60Frames project is Erik the Librarian Mysteries, which "follows a reclusive librarian who falls in love with a mysterious stranger." It is from Brent Forrester, a consulting producer for The Office.

Another future effort will be an as-yet unspecified project by well-known filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, otherwise known as the Coen Brothers.

60Frames is not talking much about its business model, though it does depend on advertising relationships with its distribution partners. And the company plans to share revenue from the projects with the artists, once they're profitable.

"The basic spirit of the agreement (with artists) is that we're going to spend money and resources getting (projects) to market," said Brent Weinstein, CEO of 60Frames. "And as soon as we're profitable, we become financial partners with our artists and collaborators."

To one Hollywood observer, however, 60Frames' model is a little suspect.

"The problem is monetizing it," said Mark Litvack, an intellectual-property attorney who has worked for Sony, Time Warner, and Disney. "(That's the) difficulty with any project such as this."

Litvack, who has not been briefed by 60Frames, said that while projects such as LonelyGirl15 have managed to be successful financially online, it is extremely rare. More common, he said, are Internet hits that breed large fan bases, but few dollars.

"One of the classic cases is (Eepy Bird), the Diet Coke and Mentos guys," Litvack said. "Those guys were a huge hit. Many, many people saw (their videos) but the people who made them didn't become rich off it."

However, the 60Frames model does afford artists some significant advantages, Litvack allowed.

"For those that think that the studios control all methods of distribution, they don't," he said. "The Internet provides a very low-cost way of distributing content to literally billions of people."

And McCaleb agreed that for him and the Cockpit team, working with 60Frames and having the opportunity to have their work showcased on sites like YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, and others, is extremely valuable.

"As a creator, having all those different distribution platforms, it's so key," McCaleb said. "Having your content be so ubiquitous, it's just awesome for us."

And that's what 60Frames is hoping to leverage. The company is not yet talking in detail about its financial arrangements with its strategic partners, but it does say that in arranging to have its artists' content distributed on sites like YouTube, 60Frames worked with the advertising divisions of each distributor.

To Weinstein, the opportunity such sites offer is massive and wide-spread distribution for content that could bring in money from a variety of different advertising methods. Among them are product placement, as well as placing ads before or after the content.

For his part, Litvack said he is optimistic about product placement deals, but suspicious of putting ads either before or after content.

"It tends to discourage people from watching," Litvack said. "If you have an option of watching something with an ad in it or not an ad in it," you're likely to choose the latter.

YouTube was having problems Thursday afternoon, either not loading at all or loading extremely sluggishly.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

It appeared that YouTube was having problems Thursday afternoon, with the site either not loading and producing an error message that said "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable," or loading extremely slow.

The problem seemed to have resolved itself after a few minutes, but for those of us intent on looking at videos of talking cats--I admit it--it was seriously inconvenient.

A few minutes later, YouTube itself updated the site with a message that said, "We are currently performing site maintenance. Be cool - we'll be back 100% in a bit."

A request for comment from YouTube was not immediately returned.

I'm lusting after a material thing, and I'm a bit ashamed.

Still, this is just about the coolest hat I've ever seen: A top hat with a built-in set of LEDs (seen here from the artist's YouTube video) that plays sequenced animations, including images from Space Invaders and Pac-Man. It also displays bouncing hearts, the alphabet and all kinds of other images.

A YouTube video showcases a top hat featuring sequenced LEDs that play animations from 'Space Invaders' and 'Pac-Man', among others.

(Credit: YouTube user fyfyt)

I'm not sure how comfortable this hat would be, but hey, who cares? You can walk around with wonderful animations scrolling on your head, and that obviates simple comfort.

This reminds me of things I've seen at Burning Man, like Mark Lottor's Big Round Cubatron, a huge sculpture that plays beautiful sequenced animations on thousands of LED-filled ping-pong balls strung out from a center pole.

But this, you wear it on your head and can bring it around with you. Now, all I need is some electrical engineering skills, so that I can build one myself.