The hottest Internet meme of 2008 is the "rickroll". A "rickroll" is when someone puts a link on website to a related article, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley's hit 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up".

More info on the phenomenon can be found here.

Two noteworthy post to start this week, on video producers are turning to reliable third-party hosting options, in tandem with utilizing the bittorrent protocol, to streamline high-resolution video distribution and saving money in bandwidth costs along the way. One example comes from this Norwegian videomaker:

Eirikso sez, "NRK, the Norwegian state broadcaster, just made one of their most popular TV shows available for free through bittorrent. Without any DRM or restrictions. Free for the planet to watch. Because this is a completely legal download people seems to seed it happily. Making the bittorrent technology work exceptionally well, giving the audience very high download speeds. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation will keep on with experiments like these and try to make more content available through this technology in addition to the more traditional channels of streaming, podcasts and DVD sales."
-- via BoingBoing

The guys at Miro have put together a short but informative post comparing bittorrent distribution and regular web serving, as well as a fun graphic to show the difference between the two:



Bittorrent distribution image courtesy of getmiro.com

A friend passed this along to me: A YouTuber named Santeri Ojala--or StSanders--takes actual performance footage of famous rock guitarists and lays in his own, awful guitar playing in place of the virtuosic original soundtrack. The result is an eerily believable mash-up of sub-par solos:



A link to a full collection of these clips are available on the WIRED weblog.

(link: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/02/watch-the-parod.html)

Big news this morning as Toshiba announced what had been widely expected for a few months, rumors that reached a fever pitch in only the last week: the company would discontinue manufacturing and marketing the HD-DVD format. The dubiously titled "format war" of the next generation of optical video disc has been won by Sony's Blu-Ray, which cleverly banked their their Playstation 3 game system with the format and in the end persuaded all major movie studios to exclusively adopt the format.

However, although this generation's "format war" looks to be drawing to a close, I would wager that it is only the halfway point in a long tail-like transition in how consumers will watch video on their televisions (and beyond) over the next ten years. The availability and delivery of digital video downloads, in both standard and high definition formats, is still in its toddler years as a viable consumer format--one that consists of a niche market and no one company has seemed to get it right yet. However, digital video downloads, like digital music formats before it, offer more competitive and convenient options for consumers as they decide on how they should replace both their DVD players and the DVD media libraries that they have collected over the last decade.

Here are just a few things to watch in the near future, some factors that might make Blu-Ray's victory this week uneventful in the long run:

* DVD media discs are supported by Blu-Ray players, but the signal is "upscaled" - Existing hardware players would have to be upgraded. Existing DVDs are upscaled to work on Blu-Ray players, so the quality can be hit or miss, and not true high definition. This means one might have to build their video library from scratch to get true high definition. Also, the DVD drives on your Mac or PC will need an upgrade, too.

So if I am a consumer worried about how I'm going to be able to own or watch my favorite movies and TV shows, and I have to start buying my favorite movies again, what's my best option? Well, at this time, not necessarily Blu-Ray:

* Blu-Ray is expensive - Players start at $350, though Blu-ray discs themselves run just a few dollars higher than regular DVDs.

and

* Blu-Ray caters to a high-end niche market itself - 480p or 1080i or 1080p or true high-definition? Dolby Digital Plus or TrueHD? This is all tech-speak to some, and most folks don't even have the optimal home theater hardware to support what Blu-Ray promotes and offers.

Ok, so let's say I don't want to drop all this money on a new format, and I'd rather just stick to Netflix-ing my movies. That might still be your best bet, mostly because:

* Subscription-based video services offer Blu-Ray rentals - The most popular, Netflix, offers Blu-Ray, which is great if you already have the hardware.

But...

* More services, Netflix included, are rapidly moving into the digital download market - This would require some sort of set-top device that has yet to be seen, but this would probably follow the Apple TV model, which just recently diversified their approach to digital video downloads. Subscriptions would probably run at about the same service rate as current DVD rentals. Amazon is also still feeling their way around this option, too.

* Subscription and "on demand" prices are cheaper - At $9.99 a month for unlimited renting, or around $3-4 for a download rental ain't that bad at all. Buying a digital file is cheaper than a disc through most shopping outlets.

* Online video, streaming and download, and podcasting is still on the rise - Slowly but surely, more and more people are watching their favorite television shows via their computers, or syncing up to audio and video shows via their iPods.

And downloading all this video over broadband is not such a crazy idea because

* Folks are already doing it over BitTorrent, albeit illegally - Recently, data indicated that TV shows are the most downloaded items via the BitTorrent Protocol, topping movies and music. Most of these files are subscribed to vis RSS to media center solutions or desktop software applications like Miro.

So although today the Blu-ray disc may have bested HD-DVD, it might not necessarily be the successor to the DVD format. When all is said and done, it all depends on how the major players play their cards in the digital download market.

I'm always on the lookout for inventive video copycatting, and here is another fun batch of YouTube remixes, this time based off of an awful scene from the "Silent Night, Deadly Night 2".

First, here's the original. A few months ago, I saw this clip in a hack-edited collection of "Funniest Movie Death Scenes":



It has since sparked a wealth of imitations:
Laundry Day, St. Patty's Day!,
Talk Like A Pirate Day!,
Judgment Day!, Vetran's Day!

and the more bizarre ones:

Cinco De Mayo, 420

The whole "Don't Tase Me, Bro" phenomenon has produced one of the better YTMND fads of the year:

* Punch-Out Version

* Mortal Kombat version

* Ghostbusters version

For those unfamiliar with the site, more information on YTMND can be found here.

"The Cult of the Amateur", a recently released book by web entrepreneur Andrew Keen, is a harsh scolding of the "Web 2.0" Internet and amateur content creation. Due to it's tone and perspective on today's Web, it has recently been the subject of many colorful responses. If you have not heard of the book or it's author, Mr. Keen was recently featured on The Colbert Report, available via Comedy Central, where he oozed the icy tone in which his book is written – and by the looks of it, he loves being icy:

"The Cult of the Amateur" was lent to me by a colleague, as I had expressed interest after hearing rumblings of displeasure from various blogs. In the book, Mr. Keen denounces the non-expert at every turn of the page. The author maintains that without scholars and authorities of knowledge, amateurs, and the content they create or contribute to on the web, would have no basis for their platforms. Among many, many other things, Keen argues that the resulting high levels of amateur content is thus invalidating expert opinions – and the earnings that they stand to make, as well.

Halfway through reading this book, I decided to hold off on finishing it. It is not that I furiously disagreed with Keen's points, as I do think he brought up some important arguments that few are raising on the subject. But the language in the book is overtly condescending at points. Even when I tried to read his views objectively, I felt Mr. Keen to be either a little uninformed or just ignorant of certain aspects of what he was arguing against – and I could not make up my mind as to which it was.

I don't have a lot of room to be critical of the book as a whole, so I will say that I do think that it is important that "The Cult of the Amateur" has been published. Arguments can lead to productive changes, and challenging thoughts are important to diversify ideas. Web 2.0 technologies have gained many vocal supporters, and it has been on only rare occasions that someone has taken an aggressive public stance using a differing perspective. This book will surely encourage healthy debate on the subject of user-generated content, and out of that one can only hope that this encourages the medium to evolve.