Twitter as Poetry [Conan Video]

On Monday, Conan O’Brien, the new and better host of The Tonight Show, made a social media hit when he invited William Shatner (aka Captain Kirk) onto his show to recite, in the form of poetry – in a delivery that only Shatner can give – the farewell speech given by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin before she left office. Shatner’s version, akin to his now famous version of Rocketman, generated huge buzz on Twitter.

The response to Shatner’s version of Palin’s words was so huge, that the comedic genius that is Conan O’Brien brought the former Star Trek star back on The Tonight Show to recite more of Sarah Palin’s words. But instead of a speech, William Shatner recited different tweets from Sarah Palin’s Twitter account. The result is, well, you decide:

I love Shatner! And not just because I am a Star Trek fan. He knows his speech patterns are unique and has the humility to make fun of himself as well as the subject matter. I guess this has almost nothing to do with video production or online video, it’s more about social media (twitter) than anything, and how it can sometimes shape video production. But I thought it was hilarious and wanted to share. What do you think?

Online Video – Size Does Matter

I ran across an interesting article about the myth that online video has to be short and attention spans on the web are shorter than Paris Hilton’s skirts. All the videos we make for aggregation on the web follow this principle of “shorter is better” – somewhere Ryan Seacrest has a small smirk on his face. Anyway, the below New York Times article says that the trends as of late are for longer longer online videos. What do you think? What’s your attention span online?

NY Times article