Viral Video Chart

1. President Barack Obama 2009 Inauguration and Address
   Popularity over last week : YouTube 465 new posts / 3,230,278 views
2. The T-Mobile Dance
   Popularity over last week : Dailymotion 340 new posts / 3,117,612 views
3. Cadbury Eyebrows
   Popularity over last week : Dailymotion 264 new posts / 1,082,034 views
   and so on… (Live RSS)

Now, when tracking trends such as this – there are some obvious challenges like uniqueness of views, duplication of the same video/content by different users, lack of being able to clearly see where the content is sourced etc. …. the interesting thing in this context is, that it’s a reflection of what we humans are up to…

Watching the current second placed T-Mobile Dance … I wish I was at Liverpool street station to see this flash mob burst into dance… merging boundaries of an offline world with broadcast (recording) and online (YouTube channel)… thanks to a phone company, selling the G1 smartphone and the starting point being something as boring as a morning commute … (See more about the campaign)

While the rest of the content listed does have certain interest, another beautifully wrapped story of an everyday morning from Oren Lavie‘s new release “Her Morning Elegance” is creating a buzz…

The Music category listing (RSS) will be interesting to follow and see how the video fares, where established names such as Madonna, Beyonce, Britney are pitted against community content… the current number one is a spoof of Beyonce’s Single Ladies … which puts us firmly back into the (post) inauguration spirit

So in conclusion…”Change has come” and “Life’s for sharing” !

The video quality is definitely watchable, running in the standard CNN.com Live player, that I prefer having in the background, on a secondary screen. The audio quality could be better and crackles occasionally. The stream rarely stuttered – twice over the span of a few hours, when it appeared that the player was making a call to CNN’s metrics server. The interruption lasted 2-3 seconds and the stream recovered fully without image distortion/blocking. It’s professionally produced and presented – even with occasional breaks with music as a filler ;o)

The shape of a plugin
The installation of the Ocotoshape plugin for Flash went very smoothly and I’m quite impressed, though I’m missing a more user friendly control interface, if say I’d want to easily disable or uninstall this P2P / grid-distributed streaming add-on.
I also tried their client to watch some listed channels. Again in this case, the installation went smoothly, and I could start streams in my VLC player. I was happy to see a friendlier control interface through the menu bar. A few things that are still lacking is easy uninstall and a bit more verbose help. Zapping channels in the playlist was responsive. I’m looking forward to more!

Flashmagazine’s post on this is a good read too – especially if you’re interested in un-installing the plugin:

According to the License Agreement you have to accept, the Octoshape software will auto-update itself. This is probably cool, but how do you remove it? On a PC, you can simply uninstall it using the control panel’s add/remove programs feature. On a Mac, the average user won’t be able to locate the software, so it is impossible to uninstall it. This is a serious problem and should be solved right away by Octoshape or it could backfire. Simply putting the uninstall instructions in the FAQ would be an improvement. According to Octoshape’s support department, “You unfortunately have to do it manually at the moment, by deleting the folder called ‘octoshape’ which can be located in ‘\Users\\Library\Preferences\Macromedia\Flash Player \www.macromedia.com\bin\”

Update: Watching Barack Obama’s inauguration through the day, has certainly been interesting. “Live streaming” is growing up – no longer just linear tv in a browser window, Lifehacker’s post goes to show where the convergence of platforms and community participation is going. Techcrunch’s post on the CNN Live + Facebook “link-up”, has some numbers worth re-reading and it will be very interesting to follow more about how the various providers and CDN’s fared through the day. Some emerging stats available through NewTeeVee

I headed off to CNN to check out the latest. Launched their player, it triggered a download of a plugin (Octoshape) and in about 30 seconds I was watching the live coverage. It’s clear that the situation is under control and most importantly passengers and crew are safe!

“I got soul, but I’m not a soldier” … fabulously sung by The Killers in this ad for Nike by Weiden + Kennedy