Video

Walker Thompson, enthusiast-in-chief of my company’s first website, YourMTB.com, travels light when he heads out on his mountain bike. Even on long epic rides, he takes along just a small Camelback for water and stuffs his rear jersey pockets with a few necessities.

With his new responsibilities for YourMTB, he’s now shooting video of his rides. So how’s he going to fit a video camera on board? Well, I did a bunch of research on small digital video cameras and helmet cams, and we decided on the Samsung SC X210L Sports Camcorder.

This thing is amazingly cool. It’s about the size of an iPod and has a separate helmet cam that you strap on and plug into the main unit (tucked into a jersey pocket). I’m excited about this product because I’m hoping a lot more people will buy them and have fun videos to share of their adventures.

Walker’s still playing with his new toy and experimenting with settings. The quality of the videos is pretty good for the web. Click the photo accompanying this item to launch a short video of Walker’s latest: A friend shot him navigating the trickiest part of Fruita’s epic The Edge Loop ride this weekend.

So I’m looking at Google Video and am intrigued enough to click on this video of an apparent meteor strike caught on home video, dated February 16. If that’s legit, wow! But maybe it’s a fake. I really can’t tell, and the text description to go with the video is only this: “A meteor crashes a few hundred feet from these guys, in the desert. Amazing.”

A couple things come to mind. 1) This is a great viral video, and the kind of amateur stuff that’s even more compelling than professional work. To those who pooh-pooh Youtube.com and the viral-video trend, I point to stuff like this as evidence that this is no short-lived fad.

2) The big problem with stuff like this is that there’s not enough information. We can’t judge whether this is fake or not. We don’t even know where the video was taken, nor anything about who took the video. What desert? Where? When? Here, I long for a bit of professionalism to put what I’ve just seen in context.

Addendum: Ah, it was a fake, as a commenter noted. A (too-)quick Google and Google News search didn’t turn up any information for me. It’d be nice if this information would find its way onto Google Video, since the meteor video is fairly high up in the “popular” category.

Old-media thinking drives me nuts. Case in point: I just read an article that’ll run in Sunday’s New York Times, “Cubicle Dwellers’ Funniest Home Video.” (Here’s the link to the story, but you’ll need a TimesSelect paid account to read it before Sunday.) The piece talks about all the fun viral videos floating around the Internet, and mentions several specifically.

But guess what?! From the NYT piece, you can’t click to see the amateur videos. The article just points to sites like YouTube and iFilm. I guess you’re supposed to go there and search yourself.

Now, I respect the NYT Web operation greatly. I’ve been a judge in online journalism competitions many times, and voted for NYTimes.com content and the site as winners multiple times. But I find stuff like this to be so lame.

Yeah, I “understand” the thinking behind not linking off-site. But that’s “so 1990s” thinking. Just link directly to the YouTube or iFilm or whatever page that hosts the video on a story like this. It’s just silly not to offer readers that convenience.

Is this lonely kitty skit the next big viral video? Jon Fine thinks maybe. Could be; it’s bizarre and had me laughing out loud.

In recent days I’ve been seeing some pushback on the whole amateur-video/YouTube phenomenon. It’s mostly a bunch of crap, the argument goes; we’ll get tired of this eventually and go back to watching professionally produced video.

I don’t think so. Lonely kitty is the kind of stuff that people will be watching at their desks when the boss isn’t around, and discussing at coffee breaks and lunch. This trend is not about watching a bunch of worthless video clips, but about the very best of them climbing to the “top of the charts.”

What the critics probably don’t want to admit is that a couple creative college kids can sometimes come up with something that is just as good if not better than a professionally produced skit like “Lazy Sunday.” … Long live the viral-amateur-video trend.