Web Monitor
17:26 UK time, Wednesday, 5 August 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today Web Monitor is mostly talking about hair. Pluck the most interesting bits from the web and send the links via the comment box.
• Some say the pop video is dead. After all, the MTV generation is getting grey now. Even the YouTube generation is reaching adulthood. And Web Monitor has heard on the grapevine that the viral advert is coming to its sell-by date as well. But there seems to be evidence that generation YouTube, combined with advertisers, is keeping music video producers in a job, at least until everyone can make their own. is just one example of music video innovation, using the stop-motion effect. The advertiser is Olympus and the notion is a story told through pictures being strewn across the floor.
Demonstrating a new medium for advertising, the song, Down Below by Johannes Stankowski, is being given away free as a ringtone. Three months before the PEN story was posted on YouTube with the same concept.
Share with us your favourite stop-motion clips or clever pop videos and short film websites by pasting the link into the comments box and hitting send.
You may be relieved to know that the welfare of beard wearers is being protected by the lobbying efforts of the Beard Liberation Front's founder, Keith Flett. He is a prolific writer of letters to the editors of newspapers, also a socialist historian, the founder of the Beard Liberation Front and now a tweeter.
: "I have a beard and I'm a socialist" but as shown, whilst technically true, this is an understatement to the extreme.
A highlight of Flett's Twitter antics has included his observations about the correlation between real ale drinkers and beard wearers. He tweeted on 3 August:
"Beard Liberation Front finds slight drop in numbers of bearded men drinking real ale as CAMRA's Great British Beer Fest is set to start"
And then updated this two days later with:
"Numbers of beards in decline at first day of great british beer festival says BLF as record crowds attend"
The man also seems to try to ruffle a few academic feathers, under the guise of letter-writer Keith Flett, London N17, as explains:
"Flett has claimed that his first published letter was in Guardian, criticising an article by Professor Eric Hobsbawm on Soviet history."
Send us your favourite Keith Flett internet appearance using the comments form.
• Web Monitor is tracking the mass participation trend, fuelled by prolific social networkers such as the mass moonwalk in London the day after Michael Jackson died. These socialites are also used by advertisers such as T-Mobile to organise a mass sing-along and flash mob dance to push its product.
After yesterday's post, Web Monitor was alerted to a fiery subculture of mass-participation: ginger collectives.
a heads up to the redhead festival happening in September:
"If you happen to be passing through the Netherlands next year on the first weekend of September (hey, you never know), you might want to make a stop in Breda. The city, I've just discovered, hosts an extensive annual two-day redhead festival. About 2000 redheads from 15 countries made it for redheadday 2008, and its organizers project an attendance of 5000 in 2009. Last year, some Dutch calendars even set the celebration in stone, and officially designated the first Sunday of September as redheadday."
The One Show blog has a ginger pride gallery. Web Monitor is concerned that once the Beard Liberation Front find out, they may argue for the beard pride gallery, and then there's the splinter group - the ginger beard liberation front which Web Monitor has just made up. Please send a link to the latter's website if they do exist.
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