Jan 30, 2011
The other day I was lucky enough to catch the premier of Life in a Day on YouTube. I had not heard of the project previously, but was intrigued when I learned about it. On July 24, 2010 people all over the world were asked to film themselves and submit their day to YouTube. They thought they might get 15,000 submissions but got over 80,000.
The film premiered at Sundance on Thursday night, and they streamed it live on YouTube. I happened to be online at just the right time to watch, so while I pretended to give my full attention the World of Warcraft raid I was a part of I actually spent most of the time watching this on my second monitor.
I was really impressed by how many people submitted to this project. It is truly amazing. There was such diversity in the people who got involved. I think they said people from 192 countries contributed. I was honestly surprised by the wide range of people. For some reason when I think of YouTube “culture” I think of young adults and teens, but these people were of all ages, and cultures, and belief systems.
I feel like nowadays its so common to see conflict, and disagreement in the world. It’s all over tv and the internet. This is one of the first things I’ve seen in a long time where people strove to be part of global community and share their lives with others honestly. It was amazing to watch.
I think one of the things that struck me the most was during the Q&A after the movie. The creators said that they actually had difficulty finding clips that were dark or sad. It’s amazing that that much hope and happiness exists in the world when we rarely hear about it.
This is a very cool project and I recommend that people see it when it finally comes out in theaters or on dvd. Of course I completely realize that this type of film isn’t for everyone.
P.S. I wrote this on my phone so don’t be too offended if there are spelling and grammar mistakes. 🙂
Jul 31, 2010
I have recently discovered a pretty awesome site called GoodReads.com. It allows you to rate, comment on and basically track books you have read, are currently reading and would like to read at some point. Just like any good social networking site it also allows you to have friends and keep updated on their latest book status, ie ratings, comments, current reads and the like. There is also an option to recommend books to friends which is nice.
It has been a bit addicting when I sit down to explore. I haven’t had a chance to go through everything the site has to offer but I like it so far. It is nice to have a place to go to see a wide variety of reviews on a book you might want to read. There are multiple book lists that you can browse through and contribute to and many groups you can join to converse with people who have similar reading interests. I will have to look into some of those groups a bit more later.
Another feature I quite like is the author pages. You can become a fan of your favorite authors and if they are GoodReads members you can see their updates as well, and even when they post blogs on their own sites.
They have a nice organization system for your books called, originally enough, bookshelves. There are three you start out with automatically, Read, To Read, and Currently Reading, but you can create as many as you like and start your own organization system. Right now I haven’t created any of my own, though I probably will at some point. I’ve seen people with shelves based on genre or topic, others with shelves categorizing books to read such as to buy or not yet released, and even people with fun shelves like books with the prettiest covers. It’s a fun way to track your books and show your interests and people viewing your profile can browse your shelves as well.
It’s nice to have place on the web where the whole idea is book appreciation and sharing. And it’s done in a way that is fun and fits right in with the current social networking craze.
