youtube

A long blog silence. Sorry. Life has been hectic.

This is a treat.

Microsoft has produced a clever two-minute video dramatising the ‘divorce’ of a woman labelled “consumer” and her husband labelled “advertiser”.

After you’ve watched it… watch it again. I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but imagine the woman is one of your donors; you’re the other (self-obsessed) guy.

I’m reminded of this post by Jeff Brooks, Talk about your donors, not yourself. Jeff always gets it right.

The Microsoft video links to a blog that explains why they made it (to pitch its “digital advertising solutions”).

“We want to try and tell that digital media is not about technology but about quality of communication, about the interaction between 2 people. There is no better medium than a movie to symbolize the one-to-one communication between people, in this case between an advertiser and a consumer.”

I don’t want to get into whether Microsoft can follow through with this rhetoric or not. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on this one as they’ve won me over with the movie.

Remember, the donor wears the trousers. She decides.

Hat tip to Jeff Jarvis.

Those of you who read my recent telephone tree post will know that I studied ‘development’ at university. Naturally, I’m also a fan of Gapminder. So it was a real treat to come across this.

If you cannot make sense of big issues through storytelling, then you might as well have some fun with statistics.

Anyway, I’m off to Yorkshire for a long weekend.

I’m a little slow on the uptake on this one… like two years!

Canadian singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan’s World on Fire music video cost $150,000 to produce… except it didn’t, it cost $15 and the rest was donated to these charities.

Well, it hasn’t actually been available on YouTube for that long; thanks to Kai Chan Vong at Justgiving for the tip off.

Oh, and Justgiving has launched its very own page on YouTube. I’m pretty certain that we’ll see a steady increase in the number of people capturing their fundraising stories on video.

Of course, we already know that $500 can buy a family in China a water buffalo.

I meant to post this yesterday, but a deadline prevented me from doing so. Then, of course, blogging was out of the question in the evening (you know what day it was).

I may have earned some leeway had I been bright enough to think up something as clever as this. But instead I tucked into Gicela’s home-made chicken mole, followed by a DVD (…since you asked, it was Volver).

Anyway, I digress.

This pacy video by Michael Wesch has been doing the rounds in recent days, but since I viewed it for the first time only yesterday (where have I been?), I thought I’d post it here, in case you missed it, too!

This five-minute clip itself became a lesson in viral video and the power of Web 2.0

Oh, and another video: an amusing reality check