Tag Archives: convention

Biggest Online-Video Community Gathering Ever: July 9-11, LA

Some of the most-viewed YouTube “weblebrities” will gather with hundreds of people in the YouTube community, including video creators and viewers, professionals and stalkers.

phil defranco at vidcon 2010
Phil DeFranco Will Attend July's VidCon, a gathering of hundreds (maybe thousands) of YouTube community people.

The event — called VidCon 2010 and scheduled for July 9-11 — includes rapid-fire stage performances by some of YouTube’s biggest “stars,” including comedy duo Anthony Pedilla and Ian Hecox (“Smosh“), “What The Buck” host Michael Buckley, Phil DeFranco, “SxePhil” and “Like Totally Awesome” host, and Justine Ezarik, YouTube’s token popular hot girl who hails as iJustine (and author of Tasty Blog Snack). Those 5 people alone, mind you, have been seen collectively 1 billion times (if you count both videos on their individual channels, as well as on group channels like TheStation). For those of you not good at math, that’s “an assload” and more views than most television shows.

To put it in perspect, 106 million people watched the last episode of MASH and the 2010 Superbowl. Paranthetically, my stupid videos have been seen 130 million times, and my siblings still refer to it “as your little YouTube videos.” But if I’m on the local Fox news channel I’m suddenly hot.

Back to VidCon: What’s got me most excited are performanced by some of the most talented musicians on YouTube, including the advertainment song duo of Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal (Rhett and Link), the ukulele-playing singer Julia Nunes (know as j and seven a’s), and the cerebral guitarist Hank Green, who is the event’s mastermind. I’m also looking forward to seeing Joe Penna (TheMysteryGuitarMan aka MGM), who wrote the “Nalts, Nalts, It’s Not His Fault” theme song. He’s been on a magical high lately, and he’s eye and ear candy for the whole family (see his recent “Looping Around,” a song that’s almost passing 1 million views, and what my family calls “The Happy Song”).

Although I haven’t hit all of the major YouTube grassroots events, I have gathered with fellow YouTube fanatics in NYC (twice), London, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. A nude female doll with my face has attended other events, and was no doubt far more interesting to meet. The only formal event YouTube has thrown, to my knowledge, was November 2008’s YouTube Live… a show the San Bruno company doesn’t appear to be reviving.

We’ll also see the omnipresent Charles Trippy and Alli Speed, who have documented their each day for a year. Trippy somehow doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, which I find highly suspicious. ZeFrank is also going, and will appear on a panel with other Internet has-beens like me.

Bottom Posting Must “Die”

Web-standards advocate, Molly Holzchlag (molly.com) proposes, in a recent post, abolishing “bottom-posting.” I was disappointed to read that headline, until I realized she was not referring to blog posts about our bottom. In my case, I’ve been constipated for three days and I’ve consumed 3 bowls of cereal in the past 20 minutes hoping Mother Nature shall work her magic tomorrow morning.

big butt

Indeed, Molly may or may not be okay with us posting about our bottom or bowl movements (how about the chunks of undigested corn or the colors that result from flavored water-ice, Slurpies, Icees or snowballs?

No. Molly is talking about the style conventions for e-mails or forums, where new comments appear on the bottom.

  1. First, she says, we’re becoming extremely used to backward sequencing. Blogs do this automatically. Twitter does too. Second we have many tools now so as to retrieve and save threads. IMAP, for one. Gmail provides archives. All current, popular mail clients allow some sort of filtering and thread views.
  2. Third, bottom-posting needs to die a fast death (because of the) increasing access of email on small devices. It becomes absolutely senseless to have an entire novel sent when the message is simply “yup, I’m on the task” or what have you.
  3. The final reason that bottom-posting sucks is that long emails that require a user to scroll through what is sometimes pages and pages of information is physically damaging and actually very difficult to do for those of us whose wrists and fingers tire easily.

No word yet on how Molly feels about the whole toilet-paper “under” or “over” debate.

giant roll of toilet paper