Thanks for visiting my web site. My newsletter is the Software View. It's a free, no cost, e-mail and web based newsletter with articles, commentary, and my views of developments in the software world. If you wish to join, just click here or send an e-mail to thesoftwareview-owner@west-point.org

"Star Wars kid" is an Internet phenomenon which started when a video clip recorded by Ghyslain Raza, a fourteen-year-old Quebecois male high school student, was leaked on-line. On November 4, 2002 the boy made a video of himself swinging a golf ball retriever around as a weapon, imitating the Darth Maul character from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace wielding a double-bladed lightsaber. The video was filmed at the studio of his high school, and the tape was left forgotten in a basement, the original owner of the videotape discovered his recorded acts and immediately shared it with some friends. Thinking that it would be a funny prank, they encoded it to a WMV file and shared it using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network. As of November 27, 2006 it has been estimated by The Viral Factory that the video had been viewed over 900 million times, making it the most popular "viral video" on the Internet. Thanks to the creation of YouTube it may have been seen almost a billion times.
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"Numa Numa" is an Adobe Flash-based video of American Gary Brolsma lip-synching the song, "Dragostea din tei" by the Moldovan pop band, O-Zone. It became an Internet phenomenon showcasing amateur videos and webcams. Brolsma first published his "Numa Numa Dance" on the Newgrounds web site on 6 December 2004, where it has since been seen more than 14 million times and copied onto hundreds of other websites and blogs. Brolsma's video "singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams ... It's a video of someone who is having the time of his life, wants to share his joy with everyone, and doesn't care what anyone else thinks".
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"the Evolution of Dance" The number one most-viewed video of all-time on YouTube.com. The number one top-rated video of all-time on YouTube.com. The number three most-discussed video on YouTube.com. Inspirational comedian Judson Laipply
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"Lazy Sunday" is a music video starring NBC's Saturday Night Live cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg that aired on the December 17, 2005, episode of the show. It was the second SNL Digital Short to be aired. The video was viewed more than five million times at YouTube.com before NBC Universal asked the site to remove it in February 2006. This video was one of the early reasons that YouTube.com rocketed to success, experienced explosive growth, and enjoyed its incredible rise in popularity. It spawned countless parodies and response videos. NBC's working title for this video is the Chronic(les) of Narnia.
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"Lonelygirl15" - the number two most-subscribed YouTube.com channel of all-time. Lonelygirl15 is an interactive web-based video series, centering on the life of a fictional teenage girl named Bree, whose YouTube.com username is the eponymous "lonelygirl15." The series is presented through short, regularly updated videoblogs posted by the fictional characters. Lonelygirl15 came to international attention ostensibly as a real video blogger who achieved massive popularity on YouTube.com, but was eventually outed by suspicious viewers as a hoax featuring a fictive character played by American-New Zealand actress Jessica Rose. lonelygirl15 debuted on YouTube.com posing as a "real" 16-year-old video blogger with the eponymous username. In "lonelygirl15"'s earliest videos, she posted video replies to, and dropped the names of popular YouTubers, which attracted the attention of their fans. To further the initial illusion that Bree was a real girl, a MySpace page was set up for her and she began meaningfully corresponding with many of her fans. Several fans of lonelygirl15's video posts began to wonder if Bree was, in fact, a real person or if the posts were part of a teaser campaign for a television show or an upcoming movie (similar to the viral marketing used to hype The Blair Witch Project). Others felt that the blog might be part of an alternate reality game.
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Elephants Dream boasts a Creative Commons license. It is open-source, so you can even change the movie for free.
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Warner Bros. Records sponsored a contest with Creative Commons recently that allowed fans to remix a new song by the band Fort Minor.
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They are utterly confident that the News Show will be a revolutionary, game-changing, paradigm-shifting breakthrough. Armed with just a laptop and a webcam, they will hunt down the news and deliver it to your desktop in 7-minute clips. Plus, you can join the fun and contribute with your own views. It's streaming video, it's TV-style journalism, and it's something you've got to see for yourself. So join them every day at noon (Eastern Standard Time). You never know what they're cooking.
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The BBS Documentary, a four-year project to tell the story of the dial-up bulletin board systems of the 70's, 80's, and 90's. Hundreds of hours of interviews on-line. The BBS Documentary Interview Collection will be extended edits of the 205 interviews I conducted, presented as video and audio files, along with ZIP archives of all the photos and supporting materials for that interview. And of course, every minute is Creative Commons licensed, as well.
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"The NerdTV mpeg-4 video, mp3, ogg vorbis, and aac audio, and text transcripts offered on this site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License and are copyright by NerdTV LLC and PBS." This license means you can do pretty much what you like with the content as long as you follow two simple rules:
  1. Any derivative work must include attribution to the original source -- Robert X. Cringely and PBS -- and include a link back to http://www.pbs.org/nerdtv, and;
  2. No matter how much effort you’ve put into that derivative work, you can’t sell it or in any way receive remuneration for its distribution or performance.


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