Friday, March 30, 2007

You are now watching me tuck a t-shirt into my underwear

This has been generating more buzz than ol' sparky! It's Web 2.0 in your face...all the time: Justin.tv. Justin is Justin Kan, formerly known as the guy who sold an online calendaring tool on ebay (the winning bid was $258,000).

The site's crazy stupid busy, and only allows so many connections to the server, so this embedded video may not help you out right now. (Note to VP of Tech, Kyle Vogt: need more bandwidth please). Depending on when you look, you might only see a bedroom with someone with the covers pulled over his head. That's Justin Kan sleeping.



Who'd thunk that your average Justin 20-something wearing a headcam, and connecting it to a mobile wireless transmitter to stream video would make such a splash. He's even made his mobile number available for those that wish to call him while he's out and about filming a day in a life: 415-948-3219.

I would imagine that online advertisers are slitting each other's throats to put some clever flash/rollover banners on the site. Justin.tv not only allows you to watch the riveting drama of him sleeping (depending on when you watch), but also to chat with other folks who come to the site.
You can just see advertisers salivating over this. Who's going to be the first to pay to have their product or service plastered on the viewing portal of someone's life? Now, to maintain the viewer base what kinds of activities will they need to do? I'm assuming the traffic to the site is considerable, but at some point it might get stale.

They should stage a car-jacking or stick-up, then go to prison where they find Allah, then Tom Cruise comes in as a visitor, and gets the Governator to pardon them, then Tom packs them all in a spaceship and flies them to meet Xenu...and we could watch the whole thing.

Still, I like the idea. I'd like for Karl Rove to sport streaming video when he's gettin' jiggy around the White House. I know he's not always the cool M.C. Rove he appears to be. I wonder what kind of riveting material we'd get out of him.

To go off on a seemingly unrelated Web 2.0 tangent: I was having a discussion with my father-in-law the other night about an interview he saw. The topic of the interview was the current White House administration and the subtopic was casualties of war. One of the interviewees...I forgot who it was...said something to the effect that in a war a country must endure having its children slain in combat, while in this administration this loss is compounded by the fact that we have a President whose leadership facilitates the loss of truth.

Maybe this is where the intersection of these two stories lie: Justin.tv might not be exciting, but at least it's something we can trust for the most part.

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