Former DV Guru blogger Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo let me in on his new side project The West Side. Set in a unique, alternate universe, it melds together elements of two disparate film genres: the grit of an urban setting with the tradition of the American Western.

After watching the single episode on the site I left astounded. The black and white treatment fits the tone of the story perfectly although technically there is some distracting digital noise in some dark scenes. That’s alright because the story definitely piques my interest as we follow Qasim, played by Damian Washington, as he introduces us to the desolate urban city in search of a drink. The episode felt a tad sluggish but at the end I wanted more. Hopefully The West Side can deliver episodes consistently as it builds its audience on the open frontier of the Internet.

Watch Episode 1 of The West Side.

I just finished participating in the first Jason Calacanis and Friends live show on Operator 11. You’ve probably seen UStream.tv and Stickam.com for streaming live video and heard about Talkshoe.com for live audio casts; Well Operator 11 is like both of those things combined and it makes for a whole lot of fun.

If you ever wanted to have your own show live with user participation, than Operator 11 is the way to go. The Flash controls are intuitive and the quality isn’t too bad. As the director you can determine who is live and it lets you switch to different people with a click of the button. Participants can request they be put on camera via a simple button which shakes their video on the directors screen. Everyone in the live area can participate in the text chat that also gets displayed across the bottom of the video screen so people on the outside of the studio can see what the comments from the peanut gallery too. Other cool features include drag and drop video sources which let you switch to lpre-recorded clips and the whole show is recorded, saved and viewable to anyone who wasn’t there during the live recording.

Back to the CalacanisCast, things were going smooth at first and then Jason managed to crash the servers causing everyone to go into a spin-off room. After that, mayhem ensued and Jason began playing clips live off of YouTube and switching to shots of his dog Toro. Other highlights included Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg.com, and Robert Scoble who did a mighty fine Steve Ballmer impression (check the video at -21:15). I even got to say a few words but I was feeling shy in front of all the A-List bloggers; Afterall I am a nobody in the blogging world just like everyone else.

At the end of it all I had a lot of fun interacting with a bunch of different people from all over the world live and with video and sound. Operator 11 is sure to take off once more people start playing around with it. If you do go over and sign up add me as a friend and let’s get together and chat face to face sometime.

Check me out at -11:50, before the show ends.

Learn more about Operator 11.

This past weekend I made my way down to the AFI theater in Silver Spring, MD, to watch a documentary in the annual SilverDocs film festival. Knowing nothing more than the title and a brief blurb I decided the film What Would Jesus Buy? would be well worth the gamble of my $10 admittance.

What Would Jesus Buy? is focuses on the commercialization of Christmas, consumerism, globalization, and the eagerness of America to over spend. The film’s main character is Bill Talen better known as Reverend Bill, head of the church of Stop Shopping. As you might guess from their name, the Church of Stop Shopping preaches anti-commercialism through choir songs that deal with anti-shopping and anti-corporate themes. Taking their message to the streets, the film documents the many public demonstrations in malls and shopping centers across America, including the Mall of America in Minnesota and Disney Land in California, as the group travels the country in their bus one month before Christmas.

Reverand Billy is an eccentric character who plays the part of a reverend through his wildly energetic speeches to exorcising of large corporate headquarters at big box retailers like Wal-Mart. He was arrested or escorted away by police several times throughout the movie but that doesn’t stop his motivation to get his message out. It is hard to tell if Reverand Billy is a special character for the film or if Bill Talen really acts this way from day to day.

The film was directed by Rob VanAlkemade with Morgan Spurlock as executive producer. I was hoping this film would be more like Spurlock’s hit documentary Super Size Me or another one of my favorite documentaries The Corporation, packed with hard evidence about the topic. What Would Jesus Buy? starts out like that showing dramatic news footage of people getting trampled stampeding to buy Christmas gifts and reading facts about American’s debt after the holidays but quickly drops off to a roadie adventure. The film was entertaining as the Church of Stop Shopping was a zainy bunch, but it just didn’t live up to my expectations as a hard-hitting take action kind of film. Instead, it felt too preachy. I did come away from the film with a bunch of funny quips and terms like “The shopacalypse is upon us” and “Change-a-lujah”.

After the screening, Reverand Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping made a special appearance on stage where they performed two songs and answered questions from the audience. It’s these kinds of events that I really enjoy about film festivals since you would never get a show after the movie at your local cineplex. That made the price of admission totally worth it.

What Would Jesus Buy? is making the rounds in smaller film houses across the country but they expect to have a global release in time for Christmas this year. If you are in an anti-consumerism, preachy-gospel mood, then go check out this film when it comes to your area.

Reverand Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping homepage

With so many sites video aggregation sites out there, wouldn’t it be nice if you could search for videos across all of them from one place? Chime.tv lets you do just that and throws on a clean user interface to top it off.

Blip TV, Break.com, Daily Motion, Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh, & YouTube are all used as sources for Chime.tv’s content. The killer feature of this video site is it creates dynamic playlists based on your search term letting you sit back and enjoy the fruits of your not-so-hard labor. The experience is on par with the popular video on-demand application Joost, from the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Chime.tv offers a far better experience, in my opinion, for a few reasons.

1) Chime.tv is in the browser. There is no application to download and you can access your saved videos from any Internet-connected computer that has Flash.

2) All the content on the Internet is available not just select partners. Joost provides a wide variety of content but once you have seen it all the only thing you can do is wait for Joost to add more shows. Meanwhile, the Internet will never run out of things for you to kill hours of time watching. This is also a plus for content providers to offer a new way to distribute content to an audience and not be shut out by the big wigs at Joost.

3) No annoying ads. The ads on Joost, while short, become bland and annoying very fast. Chime.tv offers only the stuff you want without interrupting you for something don’t give two hoots about.

The video quality on Chime.tv is on par with YouTube videos; heavily compressed with visible artifacts. Joost is slightly better but for all the other advantages Chime.tv offers it earns my recommendation over Joost.

All I’ll say is Ocean’s 13 is better than Ocean’s 12 but not as good as the more recent Ocean’s 11. Same city, same idea, pretty much the same cast. If you saw the first two then you will probably want to see the third one too!

I love how slick Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan are both in dress and in attitude. If I could be anyone I would be one of them.

I must have spoken too soon as Internet video giant YouTube has released their embeddable flash video player. Try it below…

All of these features are available in the embedded player and not just on the YouTube page.

If you were thinking that all you had to do was just make your video available to an online audience, think again! Now you have to make it as easy as possible to keep them entertained giving them more control over their viewing experience.

(via DownloadSquad)

Last night Break.com launched a new video player with some unique features. The video of the player in action can be seen below.

Some of the new things are…

• Clicking on the bottom right corner allows you to resize the player as a video is playing.
• You can also elect to center the player in the middle of your browser, make it full-screen, or bring it back to normal size while a video is playing.
• Clicking on the picture and dragging it right or left while the mouse is still pressed down grabs the video and fast-forwards or rewinds it. (Very cool!)
• Controls for brightness, contrast, saturation, and smoothing can bump up and overlay the player.
• Slo-motion
• Keyboard shortcuts — A for fullscreen, S for slow-mo, V for preferences, up and down for volume, right and left for fast-forward and rewind.
• If selected, a guide overlays the entire screen with more from this user, top-rated, most-viewed, and related video scrolling through.

Of course to play with the new features you will have to view a video on Break.com’s pages not an embedded version like above.

(via NewTeeVee)

Browsing the headlines at CNN today I noticed a link to preview their new beta look. Here is a look of the current design followed by the new beta look…

As you can see, CNN is trying to better organize their information as well as web 2.0-ifying their look with rounded corners and brighter colors. Under the shiny hood they have ditched all table-based layout elements (<table>, <tr>, <td>) and have instead gone with a 100% standards-based layout (<div>, <p>, <ul>, <li>). For the laymen, CNN has made their layout lighter in code and easier to maintain.

The bad news is CNN is relying on a lot more JavaScript files; 15 total scripts on the new homepage compared to 9 on the old. For a comparison, other news sites like MSNBC.com uses 12 and USNews.com uses 10. The more scripts a page needs to call the longer the load time as the browser has to download the complete JS file before the page continues to load. Below is a table outlining some other technical stats between the previously mentioned news sites.

With the technical bits aside, the new design greatly enhances usability, especially in the article pages. Thanks to AJAX a reader can interact with photos and video on the page without being forced to reload or pop-up a new window. This makes things like their in-line photo displays a joy to use. But photos are not the only thing that have been made easier to use; CNN’s new YouTube-inspired Flash video player has its own little tab that comes into view when needed and tucks neatly away when not in use.

Flash video players are universal and can be used on any system with the Flash plugin. This is a big step up from the former Windows Media only video option that came in a pop up player on the old CNN. Not only is video more user friendly but it is also bigger making it a much more enjoyable experience.

Conclusion
The new look provides several necessary improvements as CNN looks to focus more on multimedia driven content in the future. The changes that I have seen today are a big step forward and I look forward to checking back as CNN remains my top spot for national news. I look forward to seeing whatever else they may have in store.

Former Weblogs Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis unveiled Mahalo.com, previously referred by Jason as Project X, at the D Conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal today. Mahalo dubs itself as “the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible.”

My immediate reaction of the new site was “isn’t this a lot like Wikipedia or Yahoo from 1996?” But after taking it in for a couple of minutes I realized Mahalo isn’t trying to out-do Google but rather climb to the top of selected search terms. Mahalo wants to be a one stop site for very specific, though popular, search terms making it a valuable resource to link to or cite throughout the web. While most people may not be swayed to jump straight to Mahalo for their questions, they will learn to trust the source when it appears near the top of their search result.

ChaCha.com, another human powered search engine, hasn’t gotten much traction even though it has been at the search game since late 2006. I imagine Mahalo will have a tough time finding it’s niche since against the likes of Wikipedia. Unlike the open-system of Wikipedia that anyone can contribute to, Mahalo is a controlled by a select few and the general public can merely suggest links to be included in the topic pages.

I imagine Mr. Calacanis has something else up his sleeve and, to be fair, Mahalo is in Alpha (whatever that means). Hopefully this By Humans For Humans approach will prod the other search engines in to improving their offerings but, in the long run, Mahalo will only rise to the like of About.com.

PROS
-Human moderated so there will be no Spam.
-Quality links and information organized in one place.
-Focused results for very specific topics.

CONS
-Not an open system like Wikipedia
-Small selection of search terms compared to the rest of the Internet.
-Human powered = Labor intensive.

Conclusion: Google and Wikipedia work for me until Mahalo offers something more compelling.