While researching the meteoric rise of the fan-made Hot Hot Sex video to the top of YouTube’s charts, I tried to get in touch with its creator, Italian writer Clarus Bartel.

I sent him a message through his Flickr account, but he responded that he didn’t speak English, so I asked Philip Rogosky to do the honors. Here’s the first published interview with Clarus Bartel about his #1 video.

Translated from Italian

It all started with the Qoob music channel’s video contest. I didn’t participate in the contest, I just downloaded the footage in order to edit it and I added a different track. I cut out some scenes where they were singing, added some effects to the background, and then I uploaded it to YouTube.

Never would I have imagined that such an ugly video, made on a whim, would make it to the top of the charts. Believe me, even taking the iPod commercial effect into account, nothing can explain the absurd number of views. I get constant messages accusing me of being a hacker, when i barely know how to turn a computer on and off. Some people call me a genius, because I beat the system. Everyone is free to imagine me as they choose, however they prefer. Like the kid from Rome who keeps writing me because he’s convinced it’s all some kind of conspiracy!

The discrepancy between the number of comments and the views has to do with the fact that I’m deleting hundreds of insults I receive every day. But for the rest of this absurd occurrence, I have no explanation. I have as much of a clue as you do!

His original response:

Tutto nasce da un “Video Contest” del canale musicale QOOB Io no ho partecipato al concorso, ho solo scaricato le sequenze per il montaggio inserendo un’altra canzone. Ho fatto dei tagli eliminando le scene in cui cantavano, poi ho aggiunto qualche effetto per lo sfondo e di seguito ho inserito il video su youtube. Mai mi sarei aspettato che un video così orribile e creato in un momento di svago, arrivasse al numero uno della classifica.

Credimi, anche se fosse stato aiutato dalla pubblicità dell’Ipod, questo non spiega il suo impressionante numero di visualizzazioni. Mi arrivano continuamente messaggi di accuse perchè vengo scambiato per un Hacker, io che a malapena so accendere e spegnere il Computer. Alcuni pensano che io sia un genio che ha fregato il sistema. Ognuno mi vede è mi immagina come vuole, a suo piacimente, come quel ragazzo di Roma che mi scrive continuamente e che crede in una cospirazione!

La discrepanza del numero dei commenti e il numero di visualizzazioni e dovuto al fatto che ogni giorno devo cancellare un centinaio di insulti indirizzati a me.

Il resto di questa assurda vicenda non so spiegarla.

Ne so quanto te!

Strangeness

He definitely seems sincere. Though I still don’t believe that the video’s been viewed 4.2 million times in the last 24 hours, I doubt that he had anything to do with it. (This Google cache from 1am yesterday showed 84,883,762 views. At the time I published my post early this morning, it was at 89,174,590.) That growth seems extremely unlikely for a video that’s been around for 11 months, but who knows? It’s always possible that 65% of Brazil’s broadband users viewed it yesterday, but I doubt it.

Also, I noticed Clarus disabled ratings on the video this morning. This makes it difficult to discover how many ratings he’s received, which I can’t help but wonder about. I can understand why someone would turn off comments (moderating them can be a nightmare), but why turn off ratings? I can only think of two reasons why someone would turn off ratings: they’re unhappy with the ratings they’re receiving, or they don’t want the rating counts tracked.

Update: In a followup email, Clarus confirms that he disabled ratings by mistake, and he’ll turn them back on once YouTube ends their maintenance period tonight. Here’s the second part of the interview, translated into English:

What do you do for a living? Some of your photos are very good.

Thanks so much for your appreciation of my photos! I make my livelihood working in a factory. In my free time I listen to music, watch movies, and I take photos. For fun, I recut films and music videos, re-editing my versions.

You’ve been adding and removing references to Barack Obama in the CSS video title and description. Why?

I took advantage of the video’s visibility and added in “Vote Obama” because, even though I’m Italian, I’m following the American primaries closely and I hope to see an African-American in the White House.

I deleted the phrase because the primary voting is suspended for the moment. If, when another vote comes up, the video is still there at its rank, I’ll continue my support for Obama, adding the phrase back in if necessary.

When did you decide to turn off ratings?

I read the article on Waxy.org. I see there are still (legitimate) doubts about me. I disabled ratings by mistake, and only noticed late because for a while there YouTube was doing maintenance.

It bothers me to see that in this article, I’m passed off as a hacker.

Before disabling comments there had been 486 of them in 5 or 6 hours, almost all of them with the usual accusations of hacking, and some with variations such as black bastard, gay bastard, Brasilian bastard, and similar crap.

I started to seriously consider deleting this goddamned video, when finally this article came to my rescue, calming me down some (unless my crappy translation is fooling me).

Thank you, Clarus!

Yesterday, YouTube refreshed their leaderboards and a strange new video became the Most Viewed Video of All-Time, topping the world-famous Evolution of Dance video. With 89 million views, the new winner is a fan-made music video. But did it get there legitimately?

In early 2007, a popular Italian music community called Qoob.tv announced a contest for the Brazilian band CSS, in which fans could remix green-screen footage created by the band to create their own video for their song “Alcohol.” Instead, an Italian music blogger and photographer named Clarus Bartel remixed the “Alcohol” footage for a different song, Music Is My Hot Hot Sex, the song made famous by the iPod Touch ad. Update: See our interview with the video’s creator.

Since he uploaded the video to YouTube, it’s accumulated a staggering 89 million views, at an average 265,500 views per day. (Though, as you’ll see below, most of those viewers were in the last two months.) Not only would this make his video the most-viewed of all time, defeating runner-up The Evolution of Dance by over 12 million views, but it’s also added more views-per-day than any video but Britney’s latest single.

The commenters on the CSS video are baffled, many of them accusing foul play. I decided to look into it, to see if there was a method to determine if the number of views were somehow false.

One method of detecting suspicious view counts on YouTube would be to compare the ratio of social activity to the view count. If the number of ratings, comments, and favorites are much lower than other videos with similar views, then it’s possible that the numbers have been artificially inflated.

Using the YouTube API, I retrieved statistics for the top 500 videos. I chose to compare the number of ratings, because comments can be turned off or removed by video owners and the number of favorites was unavailable in the API. The spreadsheet is below.

Continue reading “New Video Overtakes "Evolution of Dance" for #1 Spot on YouTube” →

If you’re going to be in Austin this weekend for SXSW Interactive, you should come to “Worst Website Ever,” the session I’m leading on Saturday 5pm. Eight smart people will be proposing their worst possible web startup ideas in short 5-minute presentations, punctuated by questions and heckling by yours truly.

When it comes to geek conferences, I’m not a huge fan of panels and I have a very short attention span. So I proposed something unorthodox, and the voters apparently liked it. (With ten people speaking, I’m pretty sure this is the largest SXSW session ever.)

The speakers are some of the most interesting and/or talented people I know: Lane Becker, Jeffery Bennett, Ben Brown, Katie Spence, Michael Buffington, Lia Bulaong, David Friedman, and Merlin Mann. I’ll be playing ringmaster and badass MC, accompanied by August Capital’s David Hornik as honorary judge.

Did I mention it’s not a panel?

As for the rest of SXSW, my picks for daytime programming at the Interactive/Film conference are on Sched.org, and you’ll find many more unofficial parties and gatherings on Upcoming (mine here). Naturally, you can stalk me on Twitter. If you see me, say hi. Don’t be shy, life’s too short.

I’ll see you in Austin.

I’m working on a couple larger projects at the moment which I should be able to announce soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a very rare recording I found on Big O Magazine’s always-excellent ROIO of the Week (Recordings of Indeterminate Origin).

These are the unreleased demos from Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, one of my favorite albums ever. Unlike the lush arrangements found on the album, these early versions are stripped down to only piano, and acoustic guitar. It’s like Hissing of Summer Lawns in the style of Blue or For the Roses. At the time of its 1975 release, The Hissing of Summer Lawns was panned by critics unhappy with her shift towards jazz/folk/rock fusion. I doubt they would’ve complained if these demos were the final cuts.

The Seeding of Summer Lawns

01. Harry’s House/Centerpiece
02. Edith and the Kingpin
03. In France They Kiss on Main Street
04. Sweet Bird
05. Shade of Scarlett Conquering
06. Shadows and Light
07. Dreamland (later released on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter)
08. The Boho Dance
09. Hunter (unreleased demo from Blue sessions)

As I mentioned, I found these on Big O Zine. That site is an odd cookie, the web presence of a long-running music magazine in Singapore with no less than four active domain names that redirect to each other in strange ways. The navigation is obscure and each page on the massive site is created manually in Dreamweaver, so it feels like a throwback to online zines from the mid-1990s. There’s no homepage for the ROIO of the Week, so your best bet is finding the most recent ROIO of the Week on the homepage and skimming the hand-edited list of archives from there.

But man, what a resource. Not confining themselves to just live bootlegs, Big O posts demos, alternate studio sessions, and other extreme rarities from classic and current artists. (For example, Steely Dan’s Royal Scam Outtakes, Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball outtakes, Barry Gibb’s unreleased 1970 album, Jeff Buckley’s Grace outtakes, and Janis Joplin’s 1964 audition tapes.) But you need to be quick: they’re usually removed within a week or two. The Joni bootleg was removed from their site, but this is so great, I’m giving it a permanent home so it can be heard by a wider audience.

Update: I’ve updated the links to point to this playlist of fan-remastered versions on YouTube.

It’s almost been five years since the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market tragedy, when an 86-year-old man accidentally took the lives of ten unsuspecting people with his burgundy Buick LeSabre. I was there, and documented the aftermath in real-time.

This morning, at around 2am, I received an anonymous comment on that entry from someone who survived. It’s a haunting glimpse into the experience of cheating death.

From: vancouverite

When it’s not your day to die, it’s just not your day to die.

I was there that day. Right there. My son was less than a year old at the time and it was a rarity that he and his father stayed home that day, they’d normally be rushing me along impatiently.

So I was dawdling, perusing the lovely organic greens and the beautiful melons, working my way up one side of the street stalls and back down the other.

I am only alive because at that moment, I was looking at Meyer lemons instead of arugula.

It started with a loud, continuous screeching/scraping noise, and then loud boombangs (the screeching turned out to be the upright poles of the display tents and the tables being dragged across the road surface, the bangs being those structures falling).

A young couple standing next to me at the lemons stand joined me in glancing up the street towards the growing cacophony that was heading our way. He gently moved in front of her, shielding her with his body instinctively as the disaster careened mere inches from us. We were so close I’m sure I could have touched the vehicle if I reached my arm out.

My first and only thought was to get home to my child as fast as I possibly could, everything else was suspended in time. I realized I had never let go of my 4 bags of produce. I looked down and saw red smeared on my legs. It seemed to be a combination of strawberries, raspberries, tomato and perhaps blood.

One minute I remember feeling jealous of a pretty slim girl with Manolo mules on talking on her cell phone. I can clearly remember seeing one of those perfect shoes lying sideways in the middle of the road with no idea where its wearer was who was right in front of me just a moment ago.

I remember the middle-aged black woman, separated from her teen daughter, distraught and focussed simultaneously as only a mother can be. I’ll never forget the raw sound of relief she uttered as she found and embraced her daughter a few moments later.

Worst of all, I remember being so close to him in his car, I could see the bodies, one under, one on the hood, and the utter chaos moving along in slow motion. The image of his face with his glasses askew will haunt me for the rest of my life. I could have sworn he looked right at me, he wasn’t even looking forward through the smashed windshield.

I remember the man running after the car crying and yelling “he just killed my wife”.

Just today, the accident invaded my life again. As I drove back to my downtown office this afternoon, the pedestrian traffic was quite heavy, and I thought to myself, as I have now and again since that day, “I know exactly what it would look and sound and be like if someone were to just plow through these people”.

I think about everyone that was there that day and have often wished for just one chance to get together to share our compartmentalized grief, to tell our stories, and to comfort one another in a way noone else can.