Tag Archives: YouTube

Baby time-lapse goes viral

Francis Vachon, a Quebec City-based freelance photographer who has shot photos for various news agencies (and The Gazette), created a four-hour time-lapse video of his infant son playing with toys, and posted it on YouTube so he could embed it on his blog.

I thought it was cute.

Then I noticed it was getting attention from the local blogger-vedettes like Dominic Arpin and Patrick Lagacé.

And then … Boing Boing. Kottke. Neatorama. Urlesque. Urlesque again. Le Post in France. The Guardian viral video chart. BuzzFeed.

And Boing Boing wannabe websites that copy them without mentioning their source.

And lots of mommy/baby blogs. And personal blogs. And foreignlanguage blogs. And Andrew Sullivan. It’s even being used as a throw-away reference in online video media analysis.

Less than a week after it was posted, the video has been watched 172,793 357,655 times, favourited 935 1,677 times, and has received 32 most-viewed and most-discussed honours.

It’s even been Benny-Hillified.

Will his Rue Petit-Champlain time-lapse get as much attention? Is this a YouTube star in the making? Will Weezer have to feature him in their next video?

UPDATE: Le Journal de Québec has a story about Vachon and his kid. He estimates the clip, which has 4,071 images, has been linked to from 4,000 websites. Vachon has his reaction to the craziness on his blog, and notes that it will be on ABC’s Good Morning America, where the virality will only get worse.

UPDATE (Feb. 13): The Globe and Mail looks at how this video has affected the career of the artist whose music Vachon used. (Feb. 20): Coeur de Pirate has released their video of the song used by Vachon (via).

UPDATE (Feb. 23): 10,000 Words makes mention of the video comparing it to other interesting forms of online photojournalism, including this messy kitchen cleaning time-lapse.

Young Girl Talking About Herself

Guillaume sent me this video, from the maker of Hampster On a Piano (Eating Popcorn)

To most of us, YouTube is a giant library of random videos, some of which were even posted by the copyright owners.

But to many others, YouTube is a community of video bloggers, and people who talk to each other by staring into a low-quality webcam and posting their unedited thoughts to their channel in an effort to get friends and seem cool … or something.

Personally, I’ve always wondered: Who, other than pedophiles, wants to watch a 16-year-old girl spend five minutes saying nothing of consequence about herself?

Heck, even pedophiles have to be pretty bored to watch some of this stuff.

Porn spam sinks to new low

There are various levels of immorality on the Internet that people with no shame have exploited for their own ends:

  • Spam: The broadcast of messages for a purely commercial purpose
  • Porn: Exploiting our animal desires by peddling pictures of naked women
  • Plagiarism: The appropriation of someone else’s artistic work as your own without permission
  • Tabloidism: The exploitation of catastrophic events to draw attention to yourself

Well now we have all the above rolled into one:

Dawson YouTube spam

Someone has taken a YouTube Dawson College shooting tribute video (one of those lame wire-service-still-photos-combined-with-sad-song montages) and re-uploaded it with an ad for a porn site at the bottom.

The reason? The original video had “college” and “girl” in its description.

Why don’t porn spammers have better quality control?

Bilingualism isn’t a threat to Quebec

Chris DeWolf emailed me about this blog post on the two solitudes from Voir’s François Parenteau. In it, he argues that anglos are zombies (then he argues that we’re not zombies) and that we’re coming to get francophones so we can enslave them, or other such nonsense:

Et c’est vrai aussi que, d’un point de vue strictement francophone, les anglophones sont des morts-vivants. Ils sont vivants, en ce sens qu’ils marchent, travaillent, mangent, dorment, votent et font des enfants. Mais comme ils font tout ça en anglais, ils sont morts au regard de la communauté francophone. Ils ne créeront jamais rien en français. Ils ne consommeront aucun produit culturel en français. Ils ne retireront rien et n’amèneront rien à la sphère culturelle francophone. Ils la “compétitionnent” même avec la leur propre, indépendante, nourrie à même la culture majoritaire de ce zombie-land qu’est l’Amérique du Nord. Et pire encore, on le sait, ils transforment automatiquement en zombie les francophones avec qui ils entrent en contact. Il n’y a qu’à voir les communautés francophones hors-Québec pour s’en rendre compte.

My problem isn’t that he’s paranoid, or that he spews vitriolic hatred and xenophobia, painting hundreds of millions of people with one gigantic brush. My problem is how familiar this kind of language is, leading people to believe that such opinions are valid.

I wonder if I should even point out that the entire premise for the post is wrong. He says census data shows that French is the mother tongue of less than 50% of Montrealers (which is true), and that this is because of an increase in the number of English speakers. A quick look at the census data shows that almost all the change in percentages comes because of an increase in immigration and the number of allophones (who speak neither language at home). What’s more, a majority of these immigrants to Quebec are choosing French over English for the first time.

Of course, facts are irrelevant. What matters is what’s in his gut. And the irrational fear is there. Just like Americans think they’re going to get swarmed by illegal Mexican immigrants and have to speak Spanish, people like Parenteau think there’s an organized anglo conspiracy to rid Quebec of the French language, and that the percentage of francophones, now around 80% province-wide, will drop to zero.

I’m not suggesting that being surrounded by a population 50 times your size doesn’t put a melting pot pressure. It does, though nowhere near as big as alarmists make it out to be. And the shrinking population of francophones outside Quebec should be of concern as well to anyone who wants this country to promote bilingualism.

But it’s not equivalent to South African apartheid, as one commenter (who wants everyone to know he has a bachelor’s degree) suggested.

Facebook and YouTube have to change

Parenteau points to the English-only Facebook as an example of the assimilation of francophones into anglophonia. I think it’s annoying that Facebook is only now considering creating versions of itself in other languages. YouTube, which launched an English-only Canadian site despite already having translated versions, is even moreso.

But the blame for this should rest on Facebook and YouTube, not anglophones in general. And the suggestion that francophones should boycott these sites (yeah, good luck with that) is exactly how it should be dealt with.

Blaming anglos doesn’t solve anything

Even if we ignore all of that, the fact remains that Parenteau and company don’t put forward any serious solutions for the problem of “zombies” eating their brains. Some suggest sovereignty, which wouldn’t stop Quebecers from using Facebook, nor would it make French more common elsewhere in Canada. Restrictive legislation like Bill 101 just makes companies look for loopholes, which is why Momma’s Pizza House is now Maison de Pizza Maman but Burger King is still Burger King. Boycotts and popular campaigns don’t work.

And most importantly, blaming all us anglos for the problem and calling us names won’t do a thing for the cause. It’s not going to make us all run away to Toronto or start speaking French. It’s just going to get us riled up and start writing blog posts.

But I’m not going to stoop to François Parenteau’s level. I’m not going to pretend like he represents the majority of francophones. I know better than to suggest that 80% of Quebec’s population are ignorant xenophobes who want to rid the world of everyone who isn’t like them.

Why aren’t we happy with bilingualism?

Montreal is the most bilingual city in North America. It’s a place where it’s not uncommon to find people switching languages in mid-sentence. But rather than embrace that, the two solitudes are at each other’s throats. Yes, that means we have some unilingual anglophones, but they represent less than 5% of the population. Is this really the end of the world? The alien invasion? The apocalypse?

We should be celebrating the fact that we can speak two languages here. We should be promoting it as an economic strength. Instead, we have people like François Parenteau who believe refusing to speak another language makes him a better person.

YouTube Canada is pointless and insulting

YouTube exploited the media’s cluelessness about the Internet to get some free advertising launched its Canadian site today, with a big press release and everything.

YouTube, an American video-sharing website, was not available to Canadian Internet users prior to today. Internet traffic would be stopped at the border, searched, and then forced to pay taxes and duties before being allowed to continue. As a result, no Canadian-made videos had ever appeared on the No. 1 video-sharing site.

Oh wait, none of that is true? Then what’s the purpose again?

“YouTube Canada”, which looks exactly like regular YouTube except that its featured content is from obviously-Canadian sources, is basically nothing more than a bunch of content licensing agreements with media outlets like Dose.ca (funny they don’t use CanWest’s crappy internal video portal), the Canadian Football League, CBC and others. You’ll note that these groups already have YouTube channels, which just makes the pointlessness of this launch even more apparent.

The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram was one of the few not to be taken in by the smoke and mirrors. He asks, very reasonably, what the point of a “localized” Canadian site is in the first place. (His remarks remind me a bit of Casey McKinnon’s views on CanCon.)

One thing that Ingram didn’t mention though, is a mistake a lot of these companies make when they create Canadian versions of themselves: The “Canadian” YouTube is English-only.

It’s not that YouTube lacks translation abilities. YouTube France is in French. So what’s the story?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Guy Bertrand or anything. But to launch a website branded as “Canadian” in only one of its languages is a pretty big “Fuck You” to francophone Canadians.

So colour me underwhelmed about all this.