So he was indeed an emu. And . He hasn’t exactly been a viral sensation, but the emu I caught on tape is back with its owner. And he’s currently the 6th top-rated comedy of the day on YouTube. Which is probably more publicity than he would have gotten had stayed home.
To see video, click thumbnail below:
Camcorder Info did a profile on me recently. I like the site and its resources, except for one thing. The beautiful ads with shiny new camcorder toys that make me want to drive myself deeper and deeper into debt. So lovely. So shiny. My precious.
Stop the bidding. I mean it. Stop it. I want this painting, and you’re just going to toss me deeper in debt if you keep bidding.
Paperlilies, the YouTube artist that did the fantastic parody of Jamie Lynn Spears, is auctioning off this giant glow-in-the-dark portrait of me (Nalts) on eBay. I love it, and this “behind the scenes” music video shows all the care she put into it (the song is by the “Kick Me’s“).
If I bought it for my wife (wifeofnalts) for her March 19 birthday, does that count as a present? Or is that like getting her a bowling ball with my initials on it?
It took almost two months of deliberation, but our judges have selected the honorable mentions and winner of the “Weird Comment” contest, which boasts a grand prize of an autographed slice of American cheese.
As you won’t likely recall, back on January 5, 2008, I invited you to post the weirdest comments on this TechCrunch article about my book. There are a about 50 plus comments on my invitation post too (see them).
You took the challenge, and you delivered. That’s why we spent so long deliberating. It is not because we forgot or anything.
Click “more” below to see the 33 weirdest comments. Honorable mention also goes to Maryln and Sukatra’s back ‘n forth.
It’s a tough call, but here’s the winner. Johnny, whoever you are, send your address. We’ll send the cheese.
(Select “more” below to see some favorites).
Marketing Consultant Toby Bloomberg (Marketing Diva Blog) is hosting a radio/podcast show on the topic of YouTube as a marketing channel. It’s live tomorrow night (Tuesday, 6:30 PM EST). I’ll be a guest along with Ben Relles, creator of the wildly viral “I Got a Crush on Obama” and Barely Political.
Here are the details:
You know, if I ever questioned whether it was worth writing an eBook (“How to Become Popular on YouTube Without Any Talent“), it’s all behind me now. Songwriter Abby Simons has made the homepage of YouTube with “Let’s Make a Collab.” For those of you new to this space, a collab (collaboration) is when several online-video creators combine their lack of talent to create a video where, in theory, the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.
I’m deeply honored that Abby (aka “Songs from a Hat”) credits my eBook in her description. Says the strangely addictive guitar player:
So I just finished Nalts’ eBook about getting popular on YouTube, and he says that the best way to increase your profile is to do collabs. But I got one tiny problem…
The song is addictive, emotional, self-depricating and mentions me. That makes it a 5-star. You have to hand it to a singer that can make a solo-collaboration that’s funny, touching and, well, mentions me.
Online video collaborations are probably my favorite part of online video. Probably the first online-video creator with whom I developed a parasocial relation was the affable homeless guy from Texas known as Marquisdejolie. He has a blog. Google it (anyone catch that reference?).
Via JibJab, here’s him break dancing with me, and songwriter-nurse-YouTuber, ChristopherMast.
Before online video, it’s unlikely that we’d have ever met, much less appear break dancing together. And you might argue that would have been a good thing, but I beg to differ.
Well I think The Daily Reel has finally flatlined. For a while, it was old news and old ads. Now I can’t get a signal. A moment of silence for the website that was The Industry Standard of Online Video. Well at least some of its daily videos still exist, even if the last one was October 20.
Based on this Google News Archive, one might say it “jumped the shark” September last year, so it’s probably best that we bury the body before it begins to smell.
Per my post in December, I finally received and approved my proof of the “Best of Nalts: Volume 1” DVD. So now you can buy 71 minutes of Nalts videos (with 29 videos) on CreateSpace.com by clicking here.
I have nearly “comedic” 600 videos online for free, but I think these are the best ones (although a few of you pointed out a few that need to be high on the list for volume two). I avoided videos that were too YouTube centric like Renetto shaving my head, or other inside jokes. So most of these are family-friendly and don’t require any context to appreciate.
So buy your copy now for the low, low price of $19.94. Yey. My kids and their friends just gathered around to watch the proof DVD tonight, and it’s frightening how clear the quality is since most of them are high definition… especially when you’re used to seeing them in horribly compressed format on YouTube. You can actually read little things in the background, so I’m sure I’ve inadvertently left a credit card number visible. But unless I sell about 30,000 of these DVDs (and something tells me I’m lucky if I sell 50), those credit card numbers won’t be much worth to you.
To see the full list of videos, click “more” below. To see the sleeve in higher resolution, click the image on the right.
Click here to buy one for $19.94. Click here to watch ’em for free in low resolution and with annoying ads. 🙂
P.S. I priced mine exactly one penny below HappySlip‘s, and I make big $6.02 per copy sold.
Continue reading Buy “Best of Nalts” Video Shorts on High Definition DVD
As I mentioned in my recent eBook (“How to Become Popular on YouTube Without Any Talent“), Obama-Girl creator Ben Relles taught me about the power of blogs to get a viral video to a tipping point. Candidly, I’m usually too lazy to go searching for blogs that might like a video, and kinda hope they’ll find it on their own. But Gizmodo (a very popular blog) recently posted about my “MacBook Air Obsessed With Thin.”
Back story: this short parody of a Mac ad (see original post) took about 20 minutes — from idea to upload. So I decided to invest another 5 Googling a few Mac blogs, and sending them the video’s URL. I had to move quick because the Ambien, at this point, was bringing me down like a tranquilized elephant with a dart hanging from his neck.
This paid off. I would have forgotten about my little self-promotion binge (I’m prone to “black outs” after my post-Ambien activities). But this morning I noticed the Mac parody had 40K views already, which far exceed my 
number of subscribers (27K) and what I’d normally get by being the 3rd-highest rated comedy of the day. Paranthetically, my antecdotal feebdack suggests the video has some innate viral elements because a) my wife liked it (rare), b) I got a call from my advertising agency about it, and c) the CEO from Xlntads sent me an e-mail about it.
Still, a little “blog gasoline” on the “viral spark” is well worth its time.
Is it working? Google your video’s unique title to see if there’s uptake. Also, 0n YouTube, you can select “links” under a video (it’s easy to miss), and see if any individual site is tossing a lot of traffic your way. I don’t usually notice a lot of activity here, but I do recall finding an Asian porn site throwing my “HappySlip on eBay” video a lot of views).
Today it shows that 12K of the 39k views were coming from Gizmodo. I couldn’t recall sending them the URL, but it appears they posted about the video and credited Cult of Mac (I suppose I had sent the video to Cult of Mac before Ambien shut me down completely). Oddly, Gizmodo reports 6000 people reading that post, but I’m seeing 12,000 coming to my video via Gizmodo. Huh? YouTube usually drastically under reports the inbound links.
Are you paying attention or glazing over this in an ADHD fog? Let me summarize with the “least you need to know”: if you do a video that has viral potential, find some bloggers who might be interested in the story.
Don’t spam bloggers, but send them a personalized, relevant note and connect the video to their readership so it doesn’t look too self pimpin’. And I wouldn’t advise this tactic unless you’re fairly confident they’ll get a chuckle over the clip. It also makes a big difference if you’re a regular reader of their blog and can demonstrate that. I’ll confess I wasn’t a regular reader of Cult of Mac, but now I’m hooked.
WARNING I DID NOT START THIS SPAM ok susie was going to a river where she watched the school of dogs dissecting cats that could fly because of their lung cancer thus enabling the time portal to pull down the trigger that made the lever go down into Narnia which was currently in a war against the Summer Queen who made eternal summer, when the summer queen was vanquished Fred came to save the day transporting all living babies in the world to travel first class to Funkytown singing Funkytowwwwwn the whole way there the babies enjoyed their sparkling white grape juice which made them all fart Beethovens Ninth backwards making them change each others pampers for a milenium until two magical beavers came and started to shop at wal-mart because of it having the lowest prices they bought firewood to burn the Ohio River therefore making Lisa Nova drinking an 8 ounce glass of water flexing her liver making it break thus powering all of new york city for the rest of the year making arnold schwargentator happy to be alive until the terminator kills him everyone is living happily except George Bush since lisa novas liver broke and two squirrels from sydney come in to kidnap president lincoln holding him as ransom for 70 nuts or walnuts making the world fall in the Great Depression 2 thus starting war against switzerland because of all of the obese people in america wanting it’s magical chocolate mines causing them to get more obese and starting weight watchers to gain even more weight causing the worlds rotation to end effecting into the sun being blocked by an enormous bottle sun tan lotion sold by an eskimo in iceland causing a humonguos meteor to fall into austrailia and killing all of the worlds opera singers thus making everyone happy again and then everyone died except nalts, he lived. (run-on consider revising)