Portland School of Rock Pixies show w/ Frank Black from mark lewman on Vimeo.

Teenager of the year Frank Black joins Portland School of Rockers Hannah Lewman (guitar), Julian Hixson (guitar), Oscar Gayet (guitar), Nola Versfelt (bass), Max Griggs (drums), Jacob Weber (vocals), and Michelle Brayson (vocals) for Where Is My Mind.

The sold out show featured all the classics, and the energy between the kids on stage and the 500 kids in the crowd was so awesome. This was the first time performing for many of the students.

Pampelmoose, Nemo, DJ Joelskool and Lincoln MKS- Part 4 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Once again we road test the Lincoln MKS. This time, celebrated Portland DJ, DJ Joelskool gives the rig a once over testing the gadgets like Bluetooth and the navigation console as well as the pounding stereo system..

Previous episodes:

A Lincoln MKS and Von Von Von – Part 1

A Lincoln MKS with Von Von Von – part 2

Von Von Von Critiques the Lincoln MKS back seat – Part 3

David Lynch and his team have traveled 20,000 miles across the USA over 70 days and come back with interviews with hundreds of people. It is called Interview Project and you can see a preview at that link at the moment with the whole thing launching on June 1st.

Pampelmoose, Nemo, VON VON VON and a Lincoln MKS- Part 3 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

The test drive continues as Von Von Von plays his ’slow music’ as we get the Lincoln MKS down to 3 MPH on the way back from the airport en route to Nemo.

Click image to play

As Dave continues the test drive he took the Lincoln MKS out to Portland International Airport to pick up his friend, the acclaimed Belgian electronic artist, Von Von Von, who has just returned from exile in Europe. Hear what Von has to say about coming out of exile and what he thinks of the Lincoln MKS…

Click image to watch the video.

Nemo show “Beneath the Surface” 5/1/09 from Todd Templeman on Vimeo.

If you live or are visiting Portland, follow Nemo on Twitter for our event updates – @NemoHQ

From the Streetfilms site – “The first time you visit Portland, Oregon, the gaggles of cyclists streaming over the Hawthorne Bridge during rush hour is a sight you will never forget. It’s something other cities need to see and be inspired by.”

Honda Insight – Let It Shine from Honda on Vimeo.

As Rodger Bridges said today ‘page takeover is the new microsite’ and at least this Honda ad doesn’t break the nav. Click here for the full effect.

Black Lips- 4/24/09 Portland, OR from Nemo Design on Vimeo.

Click to watch…

Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Inaugural America.

“As Ice-T implies, the thing called authenticity seems self-evident: obvious in its presence, glaring in its absence. As a question of being true—to beliefs, institutions, and traditions—authenticity strikes many as worth defending, or mourning. The epitaph “Hip-hop is dead,” for instance, is almost as old as hip-hop. Typical is the reaction of Ice-T, a rapper since the heyday of beatboxing, against Soulja Boy Tell ’Em, who’s still too young to drink. Soulja Boy, who produced his breakout singles in a home studio and became famous through social-networking sites, is emblematic of a new and notably independent moment in musical promotion. But to Ice-T’s aged ears, he’s complicit in the desecration of hip-hop’s authentic essence—the raw sound, the social message—in favor of the saccharine hook.

……authenticity today, in the expanded field of media, is more deeply in crisis. This crisis does not involve mere negation, but inversion. Inauthenticity, which looks a lot like the opposite of authenticity, is actually its successor—or its mirror.”

Some bullet points from the interview:

• 53% of surveyed marketers will increase spending on social media
• He quotes John Schwartz who predicted that firewalls would be extinct in the near future
• Jeremiah maintains that crowdsourcing support, and other functions, will be a fruitful area
• Looking at Forrester itself, Jeremiah revealed that only 18% of the company is active in one project, the in house use of Yammer as a microstreaming platform. They are seeing good productivity paybacks from remaining connected, asking questions, and getting responses in real-time. Still, it will take a while to get real support from senior management.
• Regarding microstreaming (Yammer, et al), Jeremiah thinks they are more natural to business people than blogs. He very naturally transitioned from that into a discussion about mobility and presence, which I have long considered the killer aspect of IM
• The speed of social technologies adoption has been enormously fast, and will become ubiquitous in five years, and in ten years, we won’t use the term Enterprise 2.0 anymore.

Exploding Car on Broadway from Front Ave. on Vimeo.

I came across a post on the Creative Review Magazine’s CR Blog entitled U2 Linear: it’s not a music video. And indeed it is not. It is a short movie commissioned by the band and directed by Anton Corbijn.

This is a great idea. I have an aversion to the music of U2, although I have been a fan in the past, but I enjoy Corbijn’s work immensely. In the No Line On The Horizon [Box Set] [Limited Edition] [CD/Poster/Book/DVD] edition of U2’s latest album you will find the movie Linear and here’s the interesting part – “It is not an extended music video or a U2 documentary, it’s a new way to listen to a record – a new way to use film to connect to music,” claims Corbijn.

Click on image to see an excerpt from Linear.

Corbijn is right when he says it is a new way to listen to an album. His idea fits neatly alongside my idea of The Music Album as The End of The Organizing Principle. I argue that musical artists are free these days to explore the delivery of music well beyond the boundaries of the CD and its artificial restrictions. It is nice to find myself playing in the same sandbox as U2 and Anton Corbijn.

Untitled from Greg weaver on Vimeo.

I am still reeling after watching the latest amazing “news” piece from Jon Stewart. I wrap “news” in inverted commas because this man is a comedian and a great one at that. So why is he more important than any of the talking heads on cable TV news and political shows?

Here’s why – In an era where newspapers are dying and mainstream TV and cable media are flailing around trying to increase viewers by using limp content, Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News points out that “Great research trumps good access to the powerful.” In essence all Stewart’s team did was juxtapose past remarks on the economy from people like the CEO of Ford or blowhard and so called ’stocks wizard’ Jim Cramer and even bigger blowhard CNBC’s Rick Santelli [who in a magnificent performance gets traders on the floor to boo President Obama because "we shouldn't be paying for those folks who can't pay their mortgages, those losers!"] and compared them to more recent statements to show how hypocritical these people have been and continue to be. Great research all available at any journalist’s fingertips online. Stewart’s team just did the research and then they are not afraid to have Jon go out and skewer these people not lionize them.

You must watch the Stewart video.

And here’s an extract from Will Bunch’s very prescient article:

As briefly noted here earlier, the most talked-about journalism of the day wasn’t produced by the New York Times, CNN, Newsweek or NPR. It was Jon Stewart’s epic, eight-minute takedown on last night’s “Daily Show” of CNBC’s clueless, in-the-tank reporting of inflatable bubbles and blowhard CEOs as the U.S. and world economies slowly slid into a meltdown. You can quibble about Stewart’s motives in starting the piece — after he was spurned for an interview by CNBC’s faux populist ranter Rick Santelli — but you can’t argue with the results.

The piece wasn’t just the laugh-out-loud funniest thing on TV all week (and this was a week in which NBC rebroadcast the SNL “more cowbell” sketch, so that’s saying a lot) but it was exquistely reported, insightful, and it tapped into America’s real anger about the financial crisis in a way that mainstream journalism has found so elusive all these months. As one commenter on the Romenesko blog noted earlier today, “it’s simply pathetic that one has to watch a comedy show to see things like this.”

But that’s not all. The Stewart piece also got the kind of eyeballs that most newsrooms would kill for in this digital age — planted atop many, many major political, media and business Web sites — and the kind of water-cooler chatter that journalists would crave in any age. In a time when newspapers are flat-out dying if not dealing with bankruptcy or massive job losses, while other types of news orgs aren’t faring much better, the journalistic success of a comedy show rant shouldn’t be viewed as a stick in the eye — but a teachable moment. Why be a curmudgeon about kids today getting all their news from a comedy show, when it’s not really that hard to join Stewart in his own idol-smashing game.

Read the rest of the Will Bunch article here. It’s a great read for anyone in media.

Adam Bagerski’s Surprise 30th party Feb 27th 2009 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Another one bites the dust…

Click image to got to video. It’s a music clip and YouTube don’t allow embeds for that stuff remember…

Click image to watch the video.

A wonderful speech by the psychologist Barry Schwartz at this year’s TED Conference in which he – “makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.”

Some key points in the speech:
Rules create mediocrity.
Incentives reduce responsibility.
No incentives can be created that will work, in fact they demoralize professional activity.
They also create moral loss as well as a loss of morality.

Valentine’s Dance Photobooth from Jonny Davenport on Vimeo.

Click image to play and David will fill you in….

Found on Twitter posted by @alisamleo As she says.. “ad-men douchebaggery at its FINEST….”

Nemo-branded Skullcandy 2XL Booth at CES 2009 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

CES is always overwhelming but it was sweet to see NemoHQ client Skullcandy’s booth pop out on the crowded trade show floor.

Canon G10 review – New but not improved from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Now those of you who know us well at Nemo, and particularly StudioNemo, would surely understand that we take our cameras very very seriously indeed… Well, we have lived with and loved the Canon G9 for some time now. In fact we loved its ability to be a basic blogger’s work horse so much that it became standard issue around the shop. So naturally we were waiting with baited breath for the new, shiny updated G10 model…. uh oh… read on and watch the video, it gets ugly.

From Nemo’s Trevor Graves – “This is the review I have been excited to write for months. I have read the rumors on the blogs about Canon discontinuing the G9 and all the new and improved features for the G10. I pre-order the rig on Amazon and sure enough it’s delivered today October 3rd, 2008. With the excitement of a 10 year old I ripped open the box and unleashed the new toy.

That is where the excitement ended.

Being intimately familiar with the G9 I intuitively reached for the Video function of the G10 as I have heard about the new and improved DIGIC 4 chip and the ability of it to produce HD quality video on an SLR. How exciting to have better video!! Wait, what’s this, small video format and NO TIME LAPSE feature. WTF??? I pay $50 more and Canon drops features that turned me on to the G9 in the first place. WTF!!! I am pissed! Who was the genius at Canon that is living in a bat cave to lose sight of what makes the G9 wonderful in this new world of bloggin! Was the decision maker a frustrated SLR engineer that wanted to get their rocks off on a 14.7 megapixel CCD sensor? Why even have the G10 at all. Other point and shoots are smaller and have a large enough meg for decent prints, the larger SLR have better quality and better everything so why go with this G10 product that has nothing more to offer than less noisy images in low light and a faster processing speed that is negligible to the end user any way. WTF??? The over under dial is handy and more convenient but come on guys, I can tweak that exposure on the back end in photoshop and the G9 over/under function wasn’t that horrible. Shit even the lens cover looks cheaper than the original G9 lens cover. I bet this one scratches the lens in its poor construction too. WTF? You could have at least made that better for $50.”

Well, Canon, seems like there’s some ’splaining to do….

Simple user interface, giant database of videos, easy search that works…and all built on the back of free content handed to them by the recording industry. Ha!

MTV Music

This is a beta version of the trailer for Spooky’s Birth of a Nation re-work

I spent last week traveling coast to coast with a stop at the SanFran MusicTech Summit as a panelist, a visit to Venables Bell to make a social media presentation, then on to NYC to speak on a panel at the CMJ Music Conference. Both panels covered social media but the audiences in SF and NYC were wildy disparate – music technologists at one and college students and musicians at the other. I intend to follow up this post with one about the SF visits but first I wanted to write about my fellow panelist at CMJ, the artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

Paul D. Miller is an artist who embraces the current fractured cultural landscape with abandon. A DJ by nature he is used to mashing, mixing, beat-colliding, deconstructing and rebuilding. He resists the idea of boundaries, everything in his world can be re-booted, shaped and formed anew. He is multi-disciplined and multi-genre. As a musician he regularly tours the world giving away thousands of copies of his CD remixes as he goes. He’s a writer whose latest book, ‘Sound Unbound – Sampling Digital Music and Culture‘, is a collection of essays from the likes of Steve Reich, Bruce Sterling and Simon Reynolds; it is of course accompanied by a free CD of avante-garde music.

DJ Spooky(l) and Dave Allen(r) at CMJ Oct 08

His latest work is “Rebirth of a Nation” – remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.” – literally a movie mashup that Miller has ‘remixed’ and re-purposed into a 21st century take of that classic movie by adding contemporary clips of social unrest and cultural upheaval seen through Miller’s particularly modern lens.

Miller describes in his own words the process of his work:

“Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs and signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like to flip things around. With a culture based on stuff like Emergency Broadcast Network hyper edited new briefs, Ninja Tune dance moguls Cold Cut’s “7 Minutes of Madness” remix of Eric B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” to Grandmaster Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” to later excursions into geographic, cultural, and temporal dispersion like MP3lit.com – contemporary 21st Century aesthetics needs to focus on how to cope with the immersion we experience on a daily level – a density that Sergei Eisenstein back in 1929 spoke of when he was asked about travel and film:“the hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of suspect dramatic or psychological past” Does this mean that we make our own films as we live them? Travelling without moving. It’s something even Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” wouldn’t have thought possible. But hey, like I always say, “who’s counting?””

Miller is a 21st century digital/analog mash up artist. He soaks up culture and remixes and re-purposes it every day. Nothing is sacred, everything is up for grabs. His work belies the efforts of those who embrace online social networking as something “new” brought to us by “new” technological tools. Miller’s work is an antidote to that wrong-headed thinking. In a world that is populated by digital youth there are already hundreds if not thousands of younger versions of Miller creating mashed up works every day. Their numbers grow daily.

Before the end of this decade these young artists will constitute a digital tsunami that will sweep aside current social media and social networking conceits.

Uupdate: Here’s a link to the site for RIP: A Remix Manifesto, where Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

Brent Terrazas thinks so – “This is disturbing – Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s a recent commercial for Domino’s Pizza that features a rapping “Pasta Dude” who gets knocked down by ‘the man’ (or rather, ‘the mom’). It seems like they were going over the top in an effort to be funny, however this is one of the worst commercials I can remember watching in a LOOOOOONG time.”

Oh well….at least it’s being discussed.

Directed by Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard

Co-director Aaron Rose will introduce the film this Friday at 7:15PM, Saturday at 3:00PM and Saturday at 7:15PM and will hold a Q and A afterward. Cinema 21.

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS celebrates the spirit behind one of the most influential cultural moments of a generation.

Here’s the synopsis:
In the early 1990’s a loose-knit group of likeminded outsiders found common ground at a little NYC storefront gallery. Rooted in the DIY (do-it-yourself) subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hip hop and graffiti, they made art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Developing their craft with almost no influence from the “establishment” art world, this group, and the subcultures they sprang from, have now become a movement that has been transforming pop culture.

Starring a selection of artists who are considered leaders within this culture, Beautiful Losers focuses on the telling of personal stories. It speaks to themes of what happens when the outside becomes “in” as it explores the creative ethos connecting these artists and today’s youth.

Watch the trailer here.

I’m not sure that this is quite the news we’ve been waiting for but News Corp, owners of MySpace, have announced that users on MySpaceTV can now directly upload their videos, or rather upload a video of themselves in front of the web cam, by hitting a record button. It’s as simple as going to the ‘Upload a Video’ link, fill out the video description and then hit ‘Record a Video.’ The world will now be a better place.

Click image to register for free download.

On September 23rd, Michael Moore offers his new movie, Slacker Uprising, as a free download on the Internet. The movie charts the rise of a new generation of young voters who are eager for change. The trailer doesn’t mention either presidential candidate by name but Moore has made no bones about his distaste for the current administration’s policies while in office for the past eight years.

Click image to watch trailer.

B-Day ride to Bend 08 from Steve Hoskins Jr. on Vimeo.

Two of our Nemo guys, Steve and Morgan, grab the bikes and head Southeast from Portland, climb over Mt Hood, ride through the reservation via Madras, stop off in Redmond and finally hit Bend. Amazing.

Click image to play ‘Because of’

I found a YouTube video of a song from one of America’s greatest living song writers, a video of a song in which he delivers an ode to passion, old age and inevitable decline. A look back at what was, has been and perhaps now will no longer be.

In this recent song, ‘Because of,’ Leonard Cohen revisits his youth, a time of prodigous output when he wrote great songs such as Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat and one of my favourites, Chelsea Hotel #2 in which Cohen captures the freewheeling essence of Manhattan in the 60’s – “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York, we were running for the money and the flesh.” There were always women surrounding Cohen and the threads of those relationships wove their way into his songs. As his Wikipedia entry says his work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation and sexuality.

The POV of the video for ‘Because of’ is via a porthole, or perhaps a lens intended to focus on the subject matter – women dancing half-naked on a bed. And Cohen, in that famous gravelly voice, intones rather than sings the lyrics of his lament.

“Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind……and they say, “look at me Leonard, look at me one last time…”

The song brings to mind another talented artist in Cohen’s peer group, the writer and novelist Philip Roth; they were born within a year of each other, Roth in 1933 and Cohen in 1934. In 2007 Roth delivered Exit Ghost, a novel of immense power, in which the novel’s central character Zuckerman struggles with his past [there are references to The Ghost Writer a previous Roth novel] and his incontinence and impotence due to an operation to combat his prostate cancer. Roth/Zuckerman sums up his helplessness when he writes “I gave up swimming regularly down at the college pool for the bulk of the year (with bloomers under my (swim) suit) and continued to confine myself to sporadically yellowing the waters of my own pond during the Berkshires’ few months of warm weather, when, rain or shine, I do my laps for half an hour everyday.”

The difference in these end game soliloquies from each man’s perspective is that Cohen seems more hopeful, as if there is more beyond the life he now lives, yet Zuckerman/Roth sees only despair, decline and finality. Clearly, even to the end, true passion not only consumes us but also never dies.

Nemo teamed up with Fuel TV to promote their show Dew Underground about the Dew Tour in Portland. We came up with the dewy and sticky idea of collaborating with Voodoo Doughnuts to create the Mountain Dew doughnut, known from here-out as the Voo Dew!

Voo Dew Doughnut – Nemo and the Dew Tour from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Nemo’s Chris Hotz explains the process that leads up to a special doughnut – it ain’t simple…

i suppose i should let bare my past for this project. you see, from the time i was 16 thru 23, i was on a strictly mountain dew diet. i didn’t drink water, or milk, or beer, or god forbid, coke products, ONLY mountain dew. at one point the Dew people told me i was drinking so much it was bad for my heart and i needed to stop. instead i asked for some coupons and like good americans, they gladly obliged. so with that in mind, this collaboration was actually pretty easy to come up with. the AST Dew tour only happens in a few very lucky cities, portland being one of only five venues. so as a city, we’re pretty fortunate.. we started to think about how lucky portland is to have such a cool and creative culture. those, “Keep Portland Weird” stickers are for a reason. as far as portland-centric institutions, Voodoo Doughnuts is one kick ass independent doughnut shop. i mean seriously, a maple bacon bar, genius… it almost seems like they make doughnuts that they dare you to eat. so as we started brainstorming, we threw out the idea of a Mountain Dew flavored doughnut. and honestly, i was thinking more about the color and the presentation, but when we contacted the VooDoo guys, they we’re all about getting the flavor JUST right. boiling down Mountain Dew into a syrupy reduction, lemon lime additives, caffeine powders, adding lemon sprinkles, laboring the color of the frosting. the first taste tests were unbelievable. the second test brought back memories from my childhood. damn i’m thirsty.

Click to play.

Looks like fun. Fun sells. Jeep

Magic Flashlights from Mike Benson on Vimeo.

Nike 6.0 at StudioNemo from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Video of Josh Letchworth shooting 6.0 athletes Ben Horan, Nigel Sylvester and Trevor Jacob at StudioNemo.

Click image to Play

Today’s Digital Youth are already well-versed in Trust and Fame, they understand very clearly that their song, their video is only as good as the one that went before it on YouTube unless it is awesome, catchy and fun. Seattle’s Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head worked with the video crew That Go to cut this clip for their song ‘Sophisticated Side Ponytail.’ That Go also made a great clip for Thunderheist recently.

Happy Prescriptions “Thought it’d lead us..”

Getting it right, getting exposed. A comment on the Girl Talk post, left by a user named ‘Natron’ led me to a web site for Happy Prescriptions, no doubt the web site for said ‘Natron’ who it turns out is a Portland musician. Another click of a hand [you have to visit the site to get that] led me to Happy Prescriptions MySpace where I found the video above. There’s also a free MP3 ep there. Circle complete.

Dreamy, carefree video episodes extolling the beach culture delights of 10 Cane Rum. Brought to us by Mother, NY. There are more of these here.

It seems that the powers that be at Facebook and their archenemies over at the record labels need to hurry up and reach agreement on what is Fair Use when it comes to posting videos online. I received yet another lovely notice from Facebook today about “possible infringement” not “actual” but “possible.” Read on -

Notification of Alleged Copyright Infringement
We have removed your video entitled “Cut Copy, party at Dave’s, Nemo puts up the posters” uploaded at 2:23pm April 29th, 2008. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio. If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

The Facebook Team
copyright@facebook.com

So lets refer to the video from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that spells out our rights under the DMCA rules.

Here’s the story behind the video that was taken down. The Australian band, Cut Copy, and their manager Neil are friends of mine. I invited the band to dinner at my house in Portland prior to their show in town. We had a good time, we shot video, I edited it and posted it. Seemed harmless enough but clearly not. I have filed a counter claim with Facebook so we’ll see how that goes. And someone should let Universal Music know that I fed Cut Copy dinner that night too….I’ll send Universal a bill… Watch another video from the same night here.

Related Post: How YouTube Could Make Some Money with Viacom

AdWeek reports that “Federated Media Publishing, the blog-centric ad network helmed by Industry Standard founder John Battelle, has partnered with Microsoft to launch CrowdFire, a music-themed social media platform where fans can share and consume videos, photos and personal accounts from live concerts.”

Reading the story and then digging through the CrowdFire site I can’t help but feel that this is just yet-another-social-network. The site is clean enough and easy to navigate but seems a bit jargon-heavy as in the use of the word crowdsource. And Battelle comes over as oddly quaint when he says that the idea for CrowdFire was sparked when he attended several recent music festivals, and saw how prominent cell phone cameras and other portable video recording devices have become. That sounds so 2000 to me….

HCSC Photo Workshop 2008- Bud Fawcett from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Nemo’s Trevor Graves heads up to Mt Hood every summer to share his experience as a snowboard shooter with the kids at the High Cascades Snowboard Camp. Here’s a first look at the team getting set up on day one. Each year they open up the workshop with a historical slide show from Bud Fawcett. Bud was one of the original gangstas of snowboard photography. The historical sense of snowboarding isn’t as well established as surf and skate. It’s a shame. Bud keeps those authentic real moments alive in his stills.

As CNet reports today, Hollywood and YouTube may be edging towards their own version of Pax Romana. Meanwhile, beyond the learned walls of the law courts and Google’s battle with Viacom, we here at Social Cache have been scratching our heads over Viacom’s position.

Obviously Viacom is up in arms over what it argues is copyright infringement whenever one of its artists’ songs are used in a user-generated video. Their lawyers are even arguing that in most cases they want to set aside the notion of fair use. That in itself is ridiculous as in a lot of circumstances Viacom has stepped over the edge of copyright boundaries. In 2007 Viacom sent YouTube 100,000 takedown notices! And as this video from the EFF points out, many of those videos that Viacom had asked YouTube to remove, were not infringing anyone’s copyright.

We ourselves received a takedown notice and had a video removed from YouTube. The video was of one of our numerous snowboarding expeditions to Mt Hood and it included a clip of a song by the group White Zombie. We could have argued that under the law if we had used the music for parody, for comment, for criticism, for news reporting or for non-commercial use then we’d be in the clear. In this instance it was the latter – non-commercial use. We couldn’t be bothered, we weren’t that attached to the video and anyway, like millions of other folks, we put up videos at an alarming rate. Here’s our latest.

So here’s the Nemo and Social Cash POV. By removing our video Viacom denied thousands of people the pleasure of hearing a White Zombie song. One of its own artists! And no money was changing hands. One solution – Viacom should provide YouTube with a license from a roster of its artists who agree that their music can be used in a video for non-commercial use. In return YouTube provides its users with a simple license that allows users to add music from these artists to their amateur videos for non-commercial use for a small fee of, perhaps $3.00. Now Viacom and its artists get a share of this revenue, YouTube users won’t receive takedown notices, and Viacom can go a long way to recouping its, no doubt, millions of dollars it is spending on these lawsuits.

You’re welcome. Let me know why it won’t work….

Meanwhile over at MySpace, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has a business that’s built on the backs of thousands of unsigned musicians. Who is looking out for them?

The people in the video who see this glass elevator dunk an Oreo cookie into a glass of milk are paying attention. I wonder how many of them grab a bag of Oreo’s on the way home. A cool, alternative way to push advertising.

My Online Marketing Presentation About Radiohead from iaintait on Vimeo.

Well, either Gary Busey has or GotVMail has. Gary appears to be “tired and emotional” as Private Eye would say, so it’s sure to be viral.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal today [subscription req.] a report says that YouTube will will fall short of revenue expectations. The twist to this chatter is that Google has found that 80% to 90% of video watchers hate to watch pre-roll advertising and they leave the video the minute they see any hint of a pre-roll. The story goes that Google intends to ignore its own research and go ahead with pre-roll anyway.

And the reason that most pages on YouTube are ad free? Because Google is fearful of showing that it is profiting from copyright infringement. They already in the middle of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. That apparently leaves Google with only 4% of the videos being legally a-ok to advertise around as they have been approved by the copyright owners.

Bottom line for Google and the lawsuit they face, is that it is very unlikely they will receive a ruling in their favor to make money from copyright-violating content. It also will be a barrier to entry for anyone trying to launch a social media advertising program around these big content sites. Even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation doesn’t own the copyright to hundreds of thousands of songs on its MySpace site.

Crazy, entertaining, popular? Yes.

Watch it here. Some folks mention 45 million views but I don’t see those numbers. As of today it has 3,262,406 views. Still, nothing wrong with those numbers. As Seth Godin asks, are you sponsoring or advertising on the right sites?

Via Seth’s Blog

As we celebrate Independence Day we can mull this over. Regardless of the facts of the case and Viacom’s complaint it would seem that, as the NYT reports, “the order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people could be exposed.”

Via the New York Times:
A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P., or Internet protocol, address. Both companies have argued that such data cannot be used to unmask the identities of individual users with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using records of their online activities.

Here’s the back story on the lawsuit from FindLaw:

Viacom and its companies filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google seeking at least $1 billion in damages.

The media company charges that “YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale,” by taking “the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube’s benefit without payment or license. The suit alleges that the copyright infringement is on such a large scale that it “identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times.”

Viacom details the “legitimate licensed channels” that it works with to distribute the company’s copyright-protected content. These partners include Apple’s iTunes Music Store and Joost.

The suit also charges that YouTube selectively deploys filtering technology “[b]y limiting copyright protection to business partners who have agreed to grant it licenses,” even though copyright holders are entitled to protection of their works under federal copyright law without such business agreements.

David Bowie in persona as Ziggy

David Bowie is, or more correctly, has been one of our more chameleon-like musical performers since the late 60’s. By 1972 when Bowie had adopted a new persona, Ziggy Stardust, his performances were memorable not only for introducing a new genre, Glam Rock, but for his wildly coloured orange hair, his sci-fi inspired modern outfits and his androgynous stance. As the music critic Robert Hilburn says of Bowie in retrospect, it was hard to tell “whether Bowie wanted to be the new Elvis Presley or Judy Garland.”

Bowie’s use of personas to present his music as well as his world-view continued through the albums Aladdin Sane [A lad insane] and Diamond Dogs, and reached its apotheosis with his Thin White Duke persona for the album Station to Station, which many people criticized as too close to a portrayal of a Nazi for comfort. Bowie and his supporters blamed his cocaine addiction at the time. He recovered from the bad press to deliver a trilogy of his greatest work Low, Heroes and Lodger, known as the Berlin Trilogy, all produced by Brian Eno.

All of this brings up an interesting question – Which version of Bowie do/did you relate to the most?

Bowie’s Ziggy persona catapulted him to fame in the USA, but who was more famous? Bowie or Ziggy? If we take the dictionary definition of persona it defines persona as so: the mask or façade presented to satisfy the demands of the situation or the environment. And identity as so: the state or fact of being the same one as described.

That’s not helpful. Bowie could be identified as Bowie as he steps from the stage still in his Ziggy costume if we look beyond his Ziggy persona. For example a fan might exclaim – “that’s David Bowie dressed as Ziggy Stardust.” More likely though a fan would exclaim – “There’s Ziggy Stardust.” Persona and identity become inseparable.

And of course all these thoughts bring me to Social Media which was not an online phenomena in 1972. With regard to personas vs identity on Facebook for instance, I read this post on idunno.org – “The ease by which fake profiles can be created on social networking sites clearly defines the separation between the two concepts. From a technical point of view a users identity is tied to authentication and authorisation (claims in SAML talk); your identity on facebook is your login information nothing more, and we’re gradually becoming well trained not to give that away. What other people recognise “you” by is your persona; the public facing information you provide; and there is no way to check the veracity of that persona, except by validating those incidents or attributes known by shared experience.”

In other words we can argue that we know Bowie was “acting out” his persona mainly in performance because we can “validate those incidents” as mentioned above. On Facebook we may never be able to “validate those incidents” amongst our hundreds of “friends.” I’ve argued before that especially for marketers, they don’t exist.

Meanwhile Bowie was very successful at it, as Robert Hilburn points out referring to the soon to be released 1972 Santa Monica concert – “For the encore, he turned to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” a delicate, anthem-ish number from “Ziggy.” Reaching out to the audience, Bowie offered these soothing words: “You’re not alone . . . gimme your hands.” Thousands in the auditorium reached out to him.”

What does Hilburn mean by him?

Antony and the Johnsons in concert with the Oregon Symphony, conducted by Nico Muhly, and part of the 2008 Time-Based Art Festival

September 5, 2008 at 8:30 pm Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

Starting at 10 am on Friday, June 27, 2008 PICA will begin a special MEMBERS ONLY pre-sale for tickets to see Antony and the Johnsons in concert with the Oregon Symphony, conducted by Nico Muhly as part of the 2008 Time-Based Art Festival. Available to the general public on July 11th, 2008, tickets range in price from $20-$75 and seating is assigned.

Not a PICA member? Join now to to be the first to buy your tickets and receive the discounted member price. You can also become a member by calling 503-242-1419.

Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet Evangelist, says that he sees a future where video will be downloaded rather than streamed. If the U.S. had a policy to roll out more broadband capacity users would be able to download an hour of video in 16 seconds. “It’s like the iPod–you can download music faster than you can listen to it,” he told Cnet.

Cool Hunting dropped the word on Portland’s Rock Camp For Girls documentary. How both of us missed the fact that it opened March 7th is a crime! We here at Nemo at least can take credit for hosting Shayla Hason’s – Hope Is A Muscle photo exhibition starring the Rock Camp For Girls kids.

Most reviews of the 2007 documentary “Girls Rock,” might mention it’s a tearjerker (it is) or praise it for being uplifting (also true), but none so far mention the overwhelming urge you will get to take out your checkbook to support the cause. Arne Johnson and Shane King (two seasoned SF-based documentarians and longtime pals) tell the story of four girls, all dealing with their own struggles in adolescence and gender, over the course of their time at Portland, OR’s Rock Camp for Girls. The film deftly relates their struggles and giggles, unapologetically delving into the issues without preaching and with surprising honesty.

We highly recommend you check it out for yourself. To find out screening dates and locations, check out their site. (You may want to check their blog also as it seems to be updated more regularly.) Also, donate!

Weezer cover Radiohead’s Creep, live in Portland from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Weezer came to Portland last night and rounded up 200 local Portland musicians and fans via a radio call-out from KNRK 94.7, our local alternative radio station. A few of us here at Nemo got the tip so we headed off down to the Oaks Park Fairground pavilion to watch everyone stream in and learn the songs, practice a little and then have a great time performing with their favorite band. The video here is the band and their fans performing Radiohead’s ‘Creep’.

In an age when it is difficult for bands to break through the white noise of popular music culture, Weezer have come up with an interesting idea – tour up the west coast dropping in on radio stations and inviting their fans to come jam with them. They record each nights’ performance and then they will select the best cuts for a limited edition CD to follow. Judging by last night’s crowd it’s the perfect way to engage directly with your fans in an unassuming and non-pretentious way.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

Nemo hosted Shayla Hason’s Hope Is A Muscle photo exhibition last night. Here’s the video with Shayla discussing her work with the Portland Rock N Roll Camp for Girls.

More fun here.

Juxtaposing nature with man-made objects, Pennsylvania-based artist Lee Stoetzel uses woods chosen for their natural flaws to make large-scale sculptures…like VW buses…

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The new short film by Blu – an ambiguous animation painted on public walls.
Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)

Here’s one of those moments where modern culture and history collide very nicely. The modern part being the simple viral nature of YouTube, an email from my friend Maf who is traveling around his birthplace, Wales and the old Llanfrynach Church organ. And like anything to do with UK history it comes with a simple tale. This one is about gaining access to the church – “Here’s a little video of the old pump organ in the church next door to my Brothers house in Cowbridge, Wales, UK (yes near England). To get into the Church you must got to the pub across the road and ask at the bar for the key. It feels impolite to ask for the key without getting a drink. I think a lot of people may be drunk when they visit the Church… awesome.”

Find more at Maf and Tara’s blog.

Click image to play movie

Southwest Airlines shot a timelapse movie of their latest aircraft, Illinois One, being built and painted. It took 26 different people over 3 shifts for 6 days to paint and took 93 gallons of paint, including primer and 10 different colors to complete.

While Guy Ritchie was busy shooting Nike’s The Next Level Madonna was doing the vacuuming….

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

72andSunny enrolled Mr Madonna, Guy Ritchie to helm the spot for Nike’s Arsenal footy team, The Next Level. One question – football or soccer?

Google held an event last month to pull together executives from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Pepsi and General Mills and try and persuade them to run advertising on YouTube. Google’s challenge is to teach these executives that YouTube is more than just a site for users to upload goofy video clips, it’s actually more of a social network activity site. As Google executives pointed out using YouTube is more engaging than watching television as there is much more interactivity. And one of Google’s execs, Dave Eun said that “he thought advertisers were far too focused on well-known television brands, and that some of the best video comes from smaller outlets like the Sundance Channel and the Professional Bull Riders Association.” Google is also trying to get the industry to set standards for online videos, on the assumption that standards will help advertisers spend more on video ads.

Nemo Design presents Furry Kama Sutra, a photography/Video exhibition by New York based photographer Michael Cogliantry, opening on May 02, 2008. The show will run through Tuesday, June 01, 2008 at Nemo Design: 1875 SE Belmont Street in Portland, OR.

Furry Kama Sutra is the title for a new project by New York based photographer / director Michael Cogliantry.

For this series, Cogliantry captures the little seen world of Furry in a series of photographs and videos that are part position manual, part sexual sub-culture exploration.

Dressed as animal of their choice, Furries are considered the ultimate explorers of anonymous sex. In the fur suit, one can leave the confines of the computer room and venture out into other’s bedrooms, remaining totally anonymous. Groups are based largely online, but hold conventions all over the world, usually barring the media.

The collection of seven 40 x 50” color photographs poses and three video episodes
were shot at various “by-the-hour” motels around Las Vegas.

Nemo Design (Nemodesign.com) is a Portland-based integrated branding, marketing and design shop. Nemo Design’s capabilities include brand strategy, design, motion graphics, interactive development, film, video, print and photography production. Nemo Design is located at 1875 SE Belmont Street in Portland, OR.

It’s like, “I’m just saying…” Erykah is the real deal.

“Profits may not have arrived for online video, but venture capitalists are still happy to pick up the bill. More and more U.S.-based, venture-backed online video companies are attracting more and more financing each year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Some $460.5 million was invested in such startups in 2007, up from $266.9 million in 2006. And already, in the first quarter of 2008, another $217.3 million rained down on the category.” Story here.

Nate, friend of Nemo, went out to play with Microsoft’s new Surface interface. There’s more info here at the Surface blog.

Tree Stencil Cut and Spray Timelapse – Draft from Jaymis on Vimeo.

From the artist – “This is a timelapse shot over several months totalling about 10 hours cutting and then spraying a stencil. It still needs some tweaks to editing and motion, but it takes an extremely long time to render, and there are loads of other projects in the way, so I’d prefer to share it incomplete and warty rather than never showing it because it’s not “perfect”.

Tech:
Shot with a Pentax *ist DS Digital SLR. The frames were taken as quickly as the camera could record to SD card – about 1 frame every 1.7 seconds.

The camera was immobile on a tripod, the pan and scan (or “Ken Burns Effect” if you want to be all photo nerd) was added later in After Effects. I shot medium-resolution images, which gave me 1500×1000ish pixels, allowing quite a bit of resizing and moving around the frame.

The faster, motion-blurred action as the video progresses is also post-production, created by speeding up the clips and blending multiple frames together.”

What would a music video look like if it were purely directed by the music? Not driven by a concept, nor by a desire to build an image, but purely as an expression of a great song? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form. The song is “Moonlight in Glory,” from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, remastered in 2006. Jakob Trollback is a designer and creative thinker and he’s also a DJ. His company is Trollback + Company. From the TED Conference 2008

Ethan Bodnar’s blog tagline is ‘Happily Creative/Since 1990′ – that was the year he was born.

Quit being a Bitchr… says iJustine [Justine Esarik]

Nemo Design Bike Polo from Pampelmoose

The Nike ad.

The man himself – Saul Williams

Pitchfork.tv is almost here and apparently Wired got an early look-see... I’m not sure about this move into online TV. The one’s I’ve used such as Joost have ultimately let me down because they still push content at me rather than allowing me to pull in the content I want. Also I don’t want to spend a lot of time at the laptop just watching one piece of content; the thrill of discovery through linking ever onward on the ‘net means it takes a lot of great stuff to make me hang around one site, aka being ’sticky.’

I’m worried that the Pitchfork folks are seeing the internet as a TV channel rather like some ad agencies do. When PFork founder Ryan Schreiber says this – “There are a lot of people doing really cool stuff with music and video on the web, but in terms of clean, crisp audio and video recordings, there’s really nothing out there,” he is missing the point – yes there are many great sites that we can visit to watch stuff (hello, YouTube) but do we need “clean, crisp audio and video”? I say no we don’t, we want instant gratification and we don’t need production techniques to tidy it up and make it presentable. I saw amazing footage last month of a Boeing 777 trying to land in a storm in Frankfurt – it was a shot on either a mobile phone or a cheap digital camera and I watched it multiple times because of the content and subject matter and the commentators voice – someone who was equal parts thrilled and scared at what he was witnessing/capturing.

Schreiber goes on to say – “[We're] really documenting the music that we like and that we feel is vital.” That’s noble but should Pitchfork be a gatekeeper or a filter or both? A better way to go might be as a consumer-driven social network that allows music fans to upload what *they* believe is *vital.* Meanwhile I’ll wait until the folks at Hipster Runoff have their say.

The blogosphere is all a-twitter about the new Bjork video from Encyclopedia Pictura. It is a truly breathtaking piece, gorgeous to look at. Watch it here.