Now, to jump on the bandwagon a full year late: The Show with zeFrank is one of the greatest Net creations I have ever seen. I first started checking out zeFrank’s daily video blog after reading about the Colbert Donut Debacle. I was both transfixed, and confused (check out this New York Times Profile of zeFrank; that seem like that’s the feeling most people get while watching. Check out this awesome episode, where zeFrank does the show from one of his viewer’s perspectives, and proves he’s very much aware of how unexplainable his unique appeal is; actually, you had better watch a couple of ‘regular’ episodes before delving into that bit of twisted brilliance). The guy wasn’t that funny. His facial expression freaked me out. And his production value was shite.

I did admire his stated goal, however: to upload a new video blog post every weekday, 5 days a week, for an entire year. And I’m not talking about a static, 3-minute clip of some jerk spitting junk at his miniDV cam for 3 minutes everyday. zeFrank’s shows are heavily, heavily (did I mention heavily?) edited, and often extensively researched and referenced. The show may look like crap, but a lot goes into each (takes zeFrank about 6-hours to produce each show, according to a Newsweek article).

If you somehow haven’t checked out zeFrank before, let me guide you to a week of 5 vids that I think best exemplify the genius of the show.

Start here. After you watch this video (Sept. 18, 2006, the beginning of Happy Week!) click on the next link above the video to go to the Sept. 19, 2006 video. Continue watching each video of this week until you arrive at the end of the week. 5 short videos. That’s all I’m asking you to watch. This amazing group of video posts contains virtually every element that gets me so excited about internet videos, podcasts, and new media in general.

Watched them? Good. Here are 3 reasons why Internet Video will continue to rock the world.

1. It’s too smart for TV.
   
• ZeFrank’s take on the book Stumbling On Happiness. I can’t think of a single old media broadcast outlet for this kind of intelligent rant. TV? No way. The only place you could see a clip approximating this anywhere before the internet would probably be somewhere like NPR, except that would would be a laborious, 15-minute discussion with the no doubt charmless psychiatrist author of the tome. zeFrank’s summary of the ideas in the book is enlightening, pithy, and often quite funny (”they’re not bullshitting!”). More amazing, the clip fits perfectly into what may have seemed like an arbitrary theme for this week of his show (’Happy Week’).
2. It’s Too Quick, Too Clued In, Too Hip
   
• Throughout the week, zeFrank makes mention of an impossibly random internet phenomenon, the 45-second WhipAss audio clip. Forget the movies, Internet is the real ‘lightning in a bottle.’ Fads zoom through the Interweb so quickly, so improbably that old media can’t possibly hope to stay hip (Over 9000, anyone?). zeFrank’s legion of fans siphon him, throughout the week, the best re-mixes and mash-ups the collective Net is churning out, and zeFrank works the best clips into his show. Can you imagine ‘the kids’ possibly sending their favorite remixes of a random audio clip that is being forwarded around the web this week to some talking head on the television? Ain’t gonna happen. And that’s just fine, because important TV folks don’t give a damn about that audio clip anyway… But we do. And with each micro-generation, ‘we’ is getting exponentially bigger.
3. Freedom and Turnaround
1. zeFrank spends 3-seconds saying that a non-existent rule book states his viewers (those would be the ‘Sports Racers’) must dress up their vacuum cleaners. A quick example pic is flashed, and that’s it. No other instruction. No narrator droning on about the rules and regulations. It’s not at all clear. And yet, the very next video is flashing pics of his viewers’ dressed up vacuum cleaners. And they keep coming and coming. I’d wager he received hundreds of pics. Why did people do this? There is no good answer, and that’s the beauty of it. There’s something amazing about how quickly the internet video world can react, can change, how quickly viewership can grow, how devoted fans can be. There’s no money involved. There’s no greater interest. There’s only entertainment, passion, and camaraderie. Perhaps most importantly, the camaraderie.

zeFrank ended his show recently, after successfully completing his year of constant posting. I guess it was as good a time as any for this post, though, after getting sucked into that Happy Week, I’m willing to wager you won’t be happy about the fact that you can’t watch a new episode everyday.

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Yawn.  This was a thoroughly un-Google move for the innovative company, snatching up a service that offers virtually the same technology as their Google Video: user-uploaded Flash Video.  Google wasn’t buying up some new idea; they weren’t buying up a bunch of genius programmers.  No, they were, plain and simple, buying a user base.  Again, yawn…

Google, the ethos, isn’t supposed buy users.  Dammit, Google takes users.  Google builds web services that are better than the competition and, like magic, users doth follow.  Rewind back a couple of years, if you will: Google decides it wants to offer a mapping service.  At the time, the king of the hill was MapQuest, with Yahoo Maps and a smattering of others offering similar mapping programs.  MapQuest was, remember, truly something new under the sun:  you type in your address, type in where you want to go, and MapQuest spits out directions, turn by turn.  It was amazing; love that Interweb!  Sure, the site was slow, and the interface was clunky (want to scroll right on the map?  Click the map’s right arrow, the entire page (slowly) reloads, and you’ve “scrolled” Westward.  Want to scroll over more?  Reload that sucker again…), but hey, we all thought, it’s just a website; its shoddy interface is a limitation of HTML.  We accepted MapQuest, because we were so enthralled with the service.  We didn’t know something better was possible.

So the search hotshot Google decides it wants to offer up a mapping service of its own.  MapQuest must have had something like 80% of web mapping traffic at the time.  Imagine if Google did then what Google is doing now, and simply bought MapQuest?  Well, why not?  They’d be buying all those millions of MapQuest users, and they’d have MapQuest’s “great” mapping technology.  Except…  Oh yeah, MapQuest sucked, and we didn’t even know it!

It wasn’t until Google went and built a better mousetrap (mapping site) that we realized how much better web mapping (and web services in general) could be.  And then, boy, did we ever flock to Google Maps.  Again, that’s the way of doing business that has made Google the powerhouse it is today: they don’t buy customers, they woo them with superior offerings.  It’s worked well for them thus far: their search engine, Google Maps, Gmail.  Google video, in fact, is one of the few “big” services offered by Google that hasn’t caught on in a big way.  I had thought that meant Google must have had a team of crack programmers and designers working furiously on coming up with a better, more innovative web video product.  But no, instead, Google simply went and bought a website virtually identical to their own Google Video, simply because they had a larger user base.

As was the case with MapQuest, YouTube is an incredibly sloppy web offering, one that could be vastly improved upon.  Google has said its engineers will be working with YouTube’s designers to come up with new features.  But without the flame under Google’s ass (i.e., “YouTube has millions more users than us!  We need to come up with something GREAT to lure them over to our side”) I’m doubtful the new features will be all that innovative, or will arrive as quickly as they would have if Google was still in competition with YouTube.  Instead, Google is taking a page from ol’ Microsoft’s playbook and creating a kind of mini-web-video-monopoly.  There’s only one certainty when it comes to monopolies: consumers lose.

Last night I was once again pulled into the comic tragedy that is Dateline’s new series, “To Catch A Predator.” You’ve no doubt seen or heard of this show, where they have a group of concerned citizens, who’ve christened themselves “Perverted Justice” (clever, no?), hang out in online chat rooms pretending to be teenage girls, trying to lure stupidly-unsuspecting older men into coming to a house for sex. The show’s a real laugh; last night some guy even got tasered as he ran wild-eyed away from that paradigm of serious journalism, Chris Hanson. The older, and often times rather sad, men invariably claim they weren’t actually coming over to have sex with the girl, at which point Hanson reads them off a few choice lines from their explicit chat log, they recoil in shame, the cameramen pop out, and then the police make an arrest; all in all, a pretty solid TV formula.

But there are quite a few things that rub me the wrong way about this show (disregarding the obviously high levels of schadenfreude involved). First and foremost: Perverted Justice? Are you kidding me? Whenever they cut to clips of these people “at work,” we see that they’re a bunch of overweight, ugly, pitiful looking human beings sitting side-by-side in what appears to be a dark basement at one of their parent’s house. They spend their day (or night?) typing away on the computer, pretending to be pre-pubescent girls or boys, having cybersex, downloading pictures of genitals men to send to them, impersonating little girls on the phone, and on and on. Am I the only one who is nearly as put-off by people who engage in that night after night as I am by the older men looking for sex?

Next we have the fact that the men who show up at the houses are arrested. I’m certainly no lawyer and, since some of these guys are going to jail, I guess the laws are in place, but every time I watch this show I get the feeling a halfway decent defender could rip the police’s case apart:

1. This police base their arrest of the predators, when they show up at the house, off of the chat transcripts provided by the Perverted Justice weirdoes. But is the Perverted Justice League of America a reliable sources of incriminating evidence? These people aren’t law enforcement. They’ve obviously got an axe to grind, as they volunteer their free time to do the, erm, sexy chatting. It’s of course laughably easy to alter a chat log– is it beyond the realm of possibility that one of these people could chat up a man online, the man could stop just short of talkin’-the-sexy-talk it takes to reach the level of a crime, and then a Perverted Justice Hero In Our Midst would add in a few extra-raunchy lines text so as to ensure the conviction of a man they know is no good, but who hasn’t yet gone far enough to commit a crime? Sounds downright likely to me. Who watches the watchmen? (OK, I’ll drop the superhero metaphors now)
2. Uh, entrapment?
3. The most troubling aspect of this whole procedure to me is the fact that, try as the might, these bumbling predatory men haven’t actually committed a crime. They’re usually charged with something along the lines of “Attempting to obtain sex from a minor online,” laws vary from state to state. But here’s the thing: when they were chatting online, these men weren’t actually talking to a minor; they were talking to adults pretending to be minors. A small distinction, perhaps, but I think it’s an important one. Did they intend to commit a crime? Surely. But they didn’t actually commit one, because they weren’t actually propositioning a minor for sex, they were talking with an adult. One could compare police tactics to John’s who try to get sex from a police officer undercover as a hooker; they arrest the man before he actually has sex with the hooker, i.e., before he commits the crime. But again, that’s different: that law states it is illegal to offer money for sex. So that’s the law they’re breaking, the actual sex act doesn’t need to occur, and the police officer doesn’t need to be an actual hooker (it’s not illegal to offer a hooker money for sex, it’s illegal to offer money for sex, period). But the men online never broke the law of trying to get sex from a minor, because they never even talked to a minor; they were chatting with an adult pretending to be a minor.

This reminds me a bit of a misguided law passed (and, I believe, repealed) a few years back that made it illegal to possess child porn, or to posses “simulated child porn.” I guess the simulated part was intended to make it illegal to posses pictures or video labeled as underage smut, even if the individuals in the video were actually over 18. But it had some (probably) unintended repercussions: bizarrely, this made it illegal to possess any artwork (think 3D-images) of naked children, which of course threw the Libertarians up in arms because the sole-purpose of outlawing child porn (aside from the fact that it’s quite creepy) is to prevent the child from being traumatized. In the case of 3D simulated child porn, no child was being harmed, and so why should it be illegal? Another side affect of the “no simulated naked minors” law, with much larger ramifications, was that it made it illegal to own any movie in which an actress playing a character under the age of 18 is naked or engaged in a sex act. So, uh, that copy of American Pie in your DVD collection, or Academy Award winner American Beauty? That’s right, bub, your ass is going to jail (correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the law was eventually changed so that it was only illegal to possess a movie if the actress in the movie actually was under the age of 18, but then people began producing hundreds of examples of classic movies already on the market with bare-chested 16-and-17-year old girls acting in them, thus making the law essentially un-enforceable). The reason I bring up this ill-fated law (aside from the fact that it’s hilarious) is that it seems to me very similar to the situation of the guys getting arrested on Dateline: the “simulated minor” law made it illegal for people to look at nude of-age girls if the perpetrator thought the girl was underage. That never sat right with me.

4. There are other monkey wrenches thrown into this equation that hurts a prosecutor’s case. When these men chat with adults pretending to be children, they often ask the “child” to send a picture. What Perverted Justice usually does is send a picture of the 19-year-old young-looking actress who will be at the house when the Dateline cameras are rolling. This way, the guy will see the girl he expects to see when he shows up at the house. But is it fair that the picture sent to entice the guy into coming to the house isn’t some 14-year-old with braces, but rather a sexy 19-year-old that one could reasonably expect any man to be attracted to? They’re arresting him for trying to shack up with a 14-year-old girl, but the girl he was attracted to is actually 19-years-old; of-age. If the guy went all the way and had sex with 19-year-old actress, would police still be able to charge him? With what? Having sex with a 19-year-old he thought was 14? Can you say “thought-crime?”

My belabored point is this: people should be charged with actual crimes they commit, not with crimes they may have thought they were committing. Don’t get me wrong, I surely symphonize with the intent of the law (not so much with the intent of Dateline, who I can be fairly certain are only in it for the ratings): why not get these sick guys before they can hurt a child. But, unfortunately, to live in a just society, I believe that’s a price that must be paid: a crime has to be committed (yes, someone has to be hurt) before you can punish someone for “doing” it. Nobody wants to stick up for these harmful guys, and so unjust tactics/laws such as these wiggle their way into our system. Well, I don’t want to stick up for these guys either, but I’ll certainly give a hand to our system of justice when it’s under attack by sloppy solutions such as this.

iTunes doesn’t work. There, I said. In this era of planned-obsolescence, iTunes is doing things your local refrigerator manufacturer can only dream of.

I have a handful of iTunes-bought music littering my mostly-illegal iTunes music library. About ten or so were downloaded via Pepsi’s free song promotions, and, it seems, I even downloaded a few $10 albums over the past 3-years. I’m aware of this not because I ever listen to the songs, oh no, but rather because I get an annoying error message every time I synch my iPod: “iTunes could not sync certain songs because they are not authorized to play on this computer.” Ah, yes, those damn iTunes-bought songs. Since I inevitably sync my iPod as I run out the door, these days more to grab the latest podcasts than to update my song collection, I simply cancel the message, pop out the podicle, and race to my car. And thus the cycle continues.

I couldn’t tell you what email address(es) the said iTunes songs were bought under. Since, I would guess, I bought and downloaded the songs shortly after iTunes began selling music, probably for sheer novelty factor, they’re most likely under my old college email address, an account I, of course, have no access to now that I’ve graduated. I’m sure iTunes has some kind of system set up whereas I can go in, answer “safety” questions, fill out a new account, put in a new credit card number (since I’ve switched banks, I’m sure they’ve got an old debit card on file as well), etc., etc., etc… Haven’t done that yet, pretty sure I won’t be doing it later, not when I could have the whole album downloaded illegally and without DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions in less time than it would take to reauthorize my songs for my new iPod and computer (heck, since I already paid for the songs, I won’t even feel guilty about it).

This post could go in many directions at this point: I could ponder the logic in using temporary-by-their-very-nature email addresses as user account names with something you supposedly “own” forever (10-years ago I had an AOL email address, for chrissake), or how the heck my grandmother is supposed to figure out how to re-authorize her latest Frank Sinatra tracks when she moves to a new iMac. But let’s just keep it simple: iTunes (more specifically, DRM) doesn’t work for the following reason: I’m not at all confident that 10-years from now, on whatever flying-spaceship computer I happen to be using, I’ll be able to play the iTunes songs I bought in 2006. I think the format will either be totally discontinued, or at some point over in the decade, I will have failed to have jumped through one of the maddening hoops Apple and the music labels erected, and I will have lost my chance to “update” the song status to play on my new computer(s). Because I’m not confident I’ll be able to use the songs I bought 10-years hence, I simply don’t buy them. To me, that means iTunes and DRM is broken.

Yahoo! is now trying to start its own music download service. The service will sell MP3’s without any restrictions, just like you used to be able to download on old illegal Napster. Since they have no restrictions, they’ll never expire or need to be re-authorized. They’ll be able to play on any portable music player that can play MP3’s (virtually all of them). They’ll just be the music you bought, nothing more. But, you guessed it, music co.’s aren’t too keen on giving consumers this much freedom. Fine. Keep putting up false walls, music industry, I’ll keep downloading music for free, and you won’t see a dime.

I nearly guarantee that ABC’s marketing machine had something to do with getting those early script drafts of their new docu-drama The Path To 9/11 out to various Clinton Administration officials.  I knew nothing of this mini-series prior to the endless complaints of the Clinton staff, but when I started reading the details reporters wrote about the show in between quotes of Clinton officials screaming at ABC, I became intrigued.  $40 million to produce.  Over 350 speaking parts.  On and on.  It sounded like quite the production.

So, I watched the first 2-and-a-half hours of the movie last night in my Las Vegas hotel room, and I was engaged throughout.  I think they’ve done a very, very good job on this movie.  It looks great, and while the director has perhaps watched City of God a few dozen times too many, it is both an aesthetic and educational success.

Yes, I said educational.  All last week we heard ABC harp that its viewers surely understood that the production was a fictionalization of real events.  Clinton officials publicly worried that the words some screenwriter put in their character’s mouths, words the real people never uttered, would become entwined with their personas in the public psyche.  Well, it was all kind of for naught, as most viewers spent their time watching those annoying Manning bros. play catch all night.  But, after watching the film myself (after watching Colts/Giants game (oh, the joys of being on the West Coast)), I began to see things from the former official’s perspectives.

The fact is I did learn from the show last night.  I learned exactly how the bomber of the World Trade Center in ’93 was connected to Bin Laden.  I learned how the US Government hung the Northern Alliance out to dry after the first Bin Laden assassination attempt in the late 90’s.  I learned how badass those CIA field guys really are!  I think ABC’s film does a real public service by putting events in a digestible and entertaining context.

But I can certainly see how, a few weeks or months from now, my memory could blur together factual events the movie depicted (re: Bin Laden’s funding of the original WTC bombing) with speculative scenes from the film (re: George Tenet’s unwillingness to put his neck on the line to get Bin Laden pre-9/11).  So it’s a tricky business, these historical docu-dramas.  But I’m proud of ABC for not caving into the Clinton administration’s badgering.  The exact words spoken in the backrooms of the CIA and FBI can’t be known, but there’s no reason the film’s interpretation of those words should be pro-Clinton administration, just because they happened to complain.  I’ll be watching Part II tonight; here’s hoping many Americans do.