Hilarious piece in the New York Times…

“MySpace: The Movie” first appeared on YouTube on Jan. 31 and since then has had millions of hits, enough viewers to rival big-budget films or TV shows. Mr. Lehre, who is 21 and lived at his parents’ home in Washington, Mich., when he created the video, shot it there with friends. He scored the music himself so he wouldn’t have to deal with copyright issues, designed the graphics and Googled any technical questions he had. This development and distribution process makes even independent films, with their retinue of maxed-out credit cards and frenzied film festivals, look positively mainstream in comparison….

The movie can be found here. It’s vaguely amusing IMHO, but cleverly made. Rather like an art-school project. When I looked it had been viewed 526,878 times.

Wonder what YouTube’s bandwidth costs are.

This morning’s Observer column…

Mr Sifry reckons that about 75,000 new blogs are created every day, ie about one new blog a second. And just to address the gibe that blogs are like Christmas toys – to be played with once and then discarded – he estimates that 13.7 million blogs are still being updated three months after their creation and about 2.7 million people update their blogs at least once a week.

Professional media folk are predictably incredulous about this. Why would anyone write without being paid for doing so? And, besides, who do these people think they are, gaily airing their so-called ‘opinions’? Jean-Remy von Matt, the CEO of a German advertising agency, spoke for many in the media industry when he fired off an enraged email after bloggers had effectively sabotaged one of his advertising campaigns. In the email he called blogs ‘the toilet walls of the internet’. ‘What on earth’, he asked, ‘gives every computer-owner the right to express his opinion, unasked for?’