Walt at Random

There’s a five-minute YouTube video that’s all the rage with libloggers over the past couple of days. It’s so hot, it’s scorching–and no, it has nothing to do with ninjas, StarWars fanflicks, music videos, any of that.

This one’s serious, apparently. Heck, it’s by a professor. It’s about “Web 2.0.” I think.

And it’s so meaningful and important that people are suggesting it should be used to open meetings…

I’m not linking to it. If you read any range of liblogs, you’ve already seen it or will when yet others link to it and praise its wonderfulness.

I’m not linking to it for the same reason I’m not going to criticize it.

I. Just. Don’t. Get. It.

I tried. I watched it twice.

To me, criticizing it would be like punching a big mound of mud: Not harmful but not terribly enlightening either.

I’m certainly not willing to assert that all of those who think this is hot stuff are wrong; some of those links come from people I admire. (Admittedly, the list of “people I admire” is long and growing, but still…) (And yes, people I admire can be wrong. I’m planning a post on “being wrong”–when I have the evening/weekend time that isn’t spent writing and reading. Any day now.)

So if they’re not wrong, then it must be me. Maybe I’m insufficiently visually literate.

Yep, that must be it. (I don’t get Jackson Pollock either. And I’ve tried.)

I won’t say “we all have our limits.” That’s a generalization, and likely to be false. I’ll just say I have my limits (”Well, duh,” I hear those of you who know me saying). And this video didn’t expand them–which is also something I try to do fairly frequently.

As always, your mileage may vary. If you really believe said video is hot stuff, don’t let me discourage you. Just don’t ask me to watch it a third time. I do have my limits.

Update: Quite apart from the fascinating and informative discussion in the comments, here’s a video that’s stunning in its clarity and production values. (via Betsy Bird, thus the indirect link)

I wouldn’t normally point to this sort of thing, but–well, it’s my local newspaper, it’s an interesting testament to people taking things just a little too seriously, and–as translated into a YouTube video and, better yet, sampled music video, it’s hilarious. (YMMV). [OK, there's another appropriate word before "hilarious," but I don't use that kind of language in my blog, and anyway the tears have stopped streaming...]

You may have seen this six times already. It was on one of the A-list blogs. I saw it on Copyfight and maybe elsewhere, but for some reason I didn’t go look at it until David Free mentioned it.

The setup: The San Francisco Chronicle records reader complaints. Some of them, it puts up as podcasts on SFGate, the Chron’s website. [Yeah, they have podcasts, Blogs, too.]

They had a story about uses for drones–aircrafts that don’t have pilots on board. A subhead used the phrase “pilotless drones.” A reader thought that was redundant. And called to say so.

The reader nicely mentioned his problem. And others thought his way of stating it so magnificent that, first, someone put together a set of photos, set the podcast to music, and put it on YouTube. The killer, though, is the second YouTube video, where someone turns it into a proper music video. Links to the two YouTube videos are on the SFGate site. There’s already a ringtone…

And, as another (very brief) reader call notes, “pilotless drone” isn’t necessarily redundant: Many (most?) drones are actually piloted remotely.

For some reason, I happened to be perusing past posts at the Other AL and ran across a comment cluster connected to the OCLC Bloggers Salon [one o, not two!] at Midwinter. You’ll find it down the page, right around here. Open the comments.

Now, having been at the Bloggers Salon (hey, there’s photographic evidence), I would comment:

• What would possibly lead AL to believe that AL’s presence at the Salon would be frowned upon? Don’t say “politics”–I heard precious few political discussions, and most libloggers don’t let politics dominate their posts. AL falls into that “most” category, near as I can tell.
• How would we know if AL was there, since AL’s been exceptionally good at pseudonymity?

Others who were there might respond to part of that first bullet by noting that I might not have heard most of what was being said. For a few minutes after the Laugh Heard ‘Round the World, I couldn’t hear anything out of the nearest ear…and the noise level in general, up until 10 pmish, was pretty ferocious.

A good time was had by all, or at least all I’m aware of. No fisticuffs. No stark confrontations (that I could hear). Given the competition (offering more free food and more scenic surroundings) Saturday night, a pretty good crowd.

Running out of, that is. At least as far as non-reflexive posts hereabouts is concerned.

It’s been two weeks since the last post that wasn’t either about Cites & Insights or Walt at Random. I guess this post doesn’t break that fast. (Today? Nature Valley apple cinnamon crunch bars, half a toasted multigrain bagel, calcium-enriched “lots of pulp” Tropicana orange juice, Kauai coffee [Trader Joe's]. Why do you ask?)

Why? Partly Midwinter. (In case there’s anyone out there who didn’t figure this out already, all but one word of Cites & Insights 7:2 was written and edited before Midwinter, and that word was actually a number.) I don’t blog during a conference (”I travel without technology”–didn’t even take my portable CD player this time around) and didn’t have all that much to say when I got back.

Partly job-related. Partly a cold (no sympathy desired: it just slowed me down for a few days and resulted in two half-days at home sleeping). Partly writing some stuff for C&I 7:3. Partly that, depending on various eventualities, some of the things I might be posting about might turn into other kinds of output, possibly at work. [Parse that sentence and win the right to say you're a better grammarian than I am.]

And a whole bunch writing draft chapters for an increasingly-probable book. Twelve down, three to go.

Thanks for all the kind words on the two rough-draft chapters some of you have read, even though you didn’t know they were rough-draft chapters when you read them.

In other words, I just haven’t had sufficiently interesting randomness to note here.

Hmm. Exactly two months to the two-year anniversary. Will I 500 posts or two years first? At this rate, probably the latter.