Viddler

While I was in Vancouver during the month of February I spent a lot of my time being a tourist of the lovely city. It was my first visit and it reminds me of my hometown — Sydney. My uncle has lived there for several decades and thus knows the town extremely well! He took me on tours all around downtown and beyond, including across to Vancouver Island. No tour guide would be able to match the amount of detail my uncle went in to about the history of the areas and the history of my family that he mixed in.

Imagine if you could experience a similar tour guide without having to contact me to get my uncle to show you around. Although, I know he’d be more than happy to!

Imagine? People imagined that kind of experience years ago! You can load interactive travel guides by Lonely Planet on to a Sony PSP® and guide yourself around a major city using maps, audio/video guides, and even an audio phrasebook. What if you don’t have a fancy PSP, or an iPhone with all those ‘apps’?

Meet City-cast. A user-generated urban media experience that connects people with the city they live or travel in. People like my uncle can make recordings on his at specific locations and travelers can listen to these stories. Some of these stories can even be specific to the time of day/year. Travelers, even in your own town, have never had so much information at their fingertips, eardrums, and eyeballs.

About No Camels

No Camels is an underground “new media diplomacy” project covering the Israeli innovation culture. Supported by the Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy and produced by students from the Sammy Ofer School of Communication at IDC Herzliya, No Camels goes behind the scenes of this disruptive vibe, behind the minds of the people who strive to challenge the status quo of new media and high tech industries.

The video articles are produced by 3rd year BA students at IDC’s School of Communication as their final year project. The students not only research, storyboard, interview, film, edit and publish the content but also take care of the marketing and distribution of the content in the new media arena which they are covering with innovative and traditional techniques.

Check that out; a student created this video and published it on Viddler. Finally, education institutes are getting the hang of new media!

If you know of a dandy video you think is worthy of a feature on Viddler, then send me a message and tell me why you like it. It doesn’t matter how cool or silly the video is. If you like it, then I’ll help you spread it all over the internet!

Muuuuuuuuunday! Let’s do it again!

Music and video are so beautiful together. Once again, the amazing power of Radar Music Videos (subscribe) have combined the power of a great beat with the emotion of a superbly directed video.

Henry Scholfield directed this stop motion music video for the song “Do It Again” by UK band Archangel. Stop motion videos require thousands of still images to create movement, and this video is no exception. It features a stick figure on Post-It note going about its repetitive lifestyle. Do you feel stuck in a loop like the character in the video?

Skip your coffee today, save the money or give it to the dancing homeless person you pass on the way home, and bop along to this song!

You’re ready to rock Monday now, aren’t you! I especially love the part in the video where the Post-It note is laminated so that the stick figure character can go swimming.

You can listen to more great tunes by Archangel on their mySpace.

Bands/Musicians should check out Radar Music Videos because they commission directors to make music videos. It’s a great site to network and have your music videos created by talented directors on an independent budget.

If you want a music video featured on Music Video Monday, then just send me a messag with a link to the video. Giddy!

Have you ever thought about calibrating your HDTV before? I don’t own a T.V., but it made me think about calibrating my computer screen. When I was growing up there wasn’t really much to calibrating a CRT television. Nowadays, there’s interlacing & progressive scan, 720p, 1080p, widescreen, ultra-widescreen, and the old-school 4:3 formats. It’s a mess of confusion!

Viddler’s Technology Evangelist, Colin (friend him, yo!), recently made a Random 60 about HDTV choices whilst in a Walmart. High quality HDTVs are significantly cheaper than when they were released on mass scale at the turn of the 21st century. Thus, almost everyone owns one or is in the market for one.

In this episode of SYSTM (subscribe), Patrick Norton speaks to Robert Heron (PC Magazine’s HDTV expert) about the best HDTV calibration tools that anyone can afford. There’s hardly any need to hire a ‘professional’ to do it for you; you’re the professional now.

Have you needed to calibrate your HDTV? Or did you just use the factory settings?

Also, what’s your favorite content/show to watch on your beloved HDTV?

Leave your comments below.

Australia’s Automotive TV (subscribe) has an amazing 3D animation detailing changes in the rules of Formula One racing for 2009.

Every year the rules to Formula One are changed in ways yo challenge the teams. Sometimes the rule changes can significantly hinder the performance of the vehicles and sometimes they can be super duper cool like reintroducing the use of slick tires during a race after an eleven year absence.

The F1 season sped off in Melbourne, Australia, on March 27th, 2009. It begun with practice and qualifying, and ends on Sunday the 29th (today – Australian time) of March with the race.

Will you be watching the F1 this year? It’s going to be an amazing year! I want McLaren to be on the podium every race. Woohoo!

When do you think Formula One cars will start hybrid engine trials? 3 years? 7 years? Leave your thoughts below.

At Viddler we strive everyday to make your experience on the website as enjoyable as possible. Gosh, that sounds so cliché! Honestly, it makes me giddy when I see members of the community sharing their thoughts about Viddler on Twitter, Facebook, and even just wearing an awesome Viddler t-shirt around their local mall.

Note: You can potentially own a Viddler t-shirt by entering our April Fools’ Day Contest.

Our latest Viddler staff member is Bernie. He has been breezing through old and new customer support (b2b and partners) tickets, forum posts, and any other questions of support people may have. He’s like The Flash, don’t deny it! *Whoosh!*

Rob (president & co-founder) takes a moment to sit down and introduce Bernie to you over the morning coffee.

Bernie has been with Viddler for about a month now, but do give him a warm welcome on this video, in the blog comments, or by sending him a message. He’ll love them!

As always, if you have any questions at all, feel free to contact support and/or write down your query/thoughts on the forums.

Just in case you happened to miss it Engadget (subscribe) Editor-in-chief, Joshua Topolsky, was on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon a couple of weeks ago. Jimmy is a big fan of Engadget and he makes that known multiple times in this segment.

Josh, Jim, and ?uestlove (drummer of The Roots) all geek out over the Palm Pre which is due to be released mid-year. The Palm Pre is Palm’s attempt at rescuing themselves from meltdown and the device is being dubbed an ‘iPhone killer’. That is, until Apple announced their iPhone OS 3.0 software — also to be released towards the middle of 2009. It’s going to be a spicy showdown between these two products!

iPhone users, do you think the Palm Pre could pry you away from your precious Apple hardware?

Non-iPhone users, do you plan to get an iPhone with OS 3.0 or Palm Pree?

Everyone, leave your comments below.

It’s time to get pranking, punking, and plurking! Ha! I got you already; no one still actively uses Plurk, do they?

Every year Google seems to top everyone with their April Fools’ hoaxes. They sure have had some creative ones! This year I’d want to see everyone in the Viddler Community have a crack at pranking someone — nay, everyone! — with a good April Fools Day joke!

Upload your video(s) before or on April Fools’ Day (April 1st), add them to the group on April 2nd, and you’ll be in the running to win a USD$100 gift voucher from ThinkGeek OR Amazon! AND a Viddler t-shirt.

7 runners up will also receive Viddler t-shirts to prance around in!

You can buy pretty much anything from ThinkGeek: Wi-Fi detecting t-shirts, power outlets for your car in the shape of a coffee cup, candy tablets that make sour foods taste sweet… you name it, they’ve probably got it. For everything else, there’s Amazon.

Don’t go tagging your videos with ‘April Fools’, ‘prank’, ‘joke’, etc until April 2nd. We want your pranks to be believable. You can send me links to your video(s) once April Fools’ Day is over and you’ve successfully pranked all your peers. He he he!

Get your prank on!

See The Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes of All Time if you need some inspiration.

Larger Than Life prints (subscribe) have teamed up with Poptropica to bring you the most amazing life-size reusable stickers on Earth!

Life is pretty large and it’s a little hard to contain to a small surface area. Hence, why LTLPrints are dedicated to making your walls fun! With LTLPrints you can create your own decal designs and have them printed & shipped to you on reusable, self-adhesive material that won’t damage your walls. You can make them up to 7 feet high and 4.5 feet wide. Wowzers!

There’s a lot of neat decal designs on the site, but now they’ve teamed up with Poptropica — the virtual online world for kids (think: Second Life for under thirteens) — to bring you the characters life-size for your kids’ bedroom walls. You can even customize them with your own text and graphics. Just imagine your child’s name next to their favorite character. Sweet, huh!

Larger Than Life prints recently held a design competition. Check out the designs from great artists. You can even purchase them if you want! I like the squid one!

You can also find video tutorials on how to design your own Larger Than Life prints on LTLprints’ Viddler.

Anytime you have a stupendous video you’d like featured on The Viddler Blog just send me a message and I’d be happy to embed your pretty video right here.

Albert Grassia (friend him up!) is heading down to Peru on an adventure to supply communities down there with clean water. Nope, it’s not with charity: water, but it’s a very similar project.

Albert needs your support for this project though. He’s made a website where you can see progress updates as well as donate as little or as much as you like. If everyone that watches this video donates five bucks, then his goals will be reached in no time! C’mon, you don’t really need that grandé Starbucks coffee do you? Will it kill you? Wouldn’t clean water for Peruvians be a little more giddy?

Good luck in your adventure, Albert! I can’t wait to see your videos on Viddler! You can also keep up to date with his progress via his Twitter and Qik.

As always, if you have a great project you’d like featured on The Viddler Blog, please send me a message and fabulous things will happen.

You’re still wired from that dance music this morning aren’t you!

I thought I’d share Dougal Wilson’s thoughts about making music videos. From start to finish they can take as long an an episode of a television show to create. Music videos can be very emotional and a great addition to the music.

This intriguing video was brought to you by Radar Music Videos (subscribe). If you like watching and/or creating music videos, then definitely check out Radar Music Videos! They connect musicians with directors and amazing music videos are created!

See the music videos Dougal has created at Colonel Blimp.