Finding the human connection

I think one of the things that has really fascinated me with Web 2.0 is the way that people can connect...not just through conversation, but through the human experience. I got particularly interested in this after watching the Michael Wesch lecture that talked about how people responded to the "Numa Numa" guy by wanting to join in to be part of the abandonment of dancing to an upbeat song. There is so much that is negative in the world right now, that I find I really like to see these moments where people are just happy or willing to help their fellow people. That's why the "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos are neat to me as well- it's just dancing and people join in. This reminded me of link that one of my favorite websites woot.com provided on the tweenbots project.



This is something I would love to do as a group project- something simple like getting an item from point A to point B. This is one of the reasons I'm really a fan of geocaching right now. In geocaching, I have often come across a travel bug that I have to look up on the website to see where it is heading. I then move it to a geocache that is a little closer to its end destination. What would be neat is to video an item traveling and have a sort of traveling vlog for an item. This is obviously a project that would take much longer than we have remaining in this class, but it's something that I could see doing for fun - releasing an item into the world that has a destination and directions to post a vlog to a specific channel in youtube so everyone will follow it. This has the possibility to go viral simply because as more people help the item get to its destination, the more people that will be interested in how the progress is going and tell their friends about it.

A series of videos I am digging right now have Ben Folds using Chatroulette at his concerts and basically welcoming the person that pops up on screen to be a guest of honor at the concert.



I'm not quite sure how I would use this as a group project, but it seems to have a certain potential to allow for interactions. I'll be honest, I've gotten on chatroulette a few times, and almost every time, I get to see naked guys. So I've kind of been leery of it since then. I like the concept of it, however, and think it could be used to create some really interesting videos, as evidenced by the Ben Folds videos.

These are just a few ideas that I could see playing around with videos in the future (maybe even in my classes!- I'm sure I could tie this into World Lit somehow), but since we sort of have (several) directions that the fun group project is heading in, this is just food for thought.