Valleywag
NICK DOUGLAS — Ever been at the bar at 2 A.M. and see one of those striped-shirt bridge-and-tunnel guys make a desperate last-call pass at the sketchiest girl in the establishment? It looks like the video partnership between the San Jose Mercury News and PodTech.net. Their debut video features Yahoo Brickhouse (the net giant's San Francisco startup incubator which is, rumor has it, as hopeless as PodTech and the Merc). I don't know who edited this thing, because I couldn't stand the dark video and distracting background noise long enough to see the credits. But I'm guessing the black-and-white hyper-actively subtitled intro was commissioned from a high school film class. And oh boy you can watch it below!
San Jose Mercury News adds video, fails at that too
12:31 PM on Mon May 14 2007
By Nick Douglas
502 views
3 comments
Comments
that image of a slightly young white dude in a passive collar shirt talking about "blogs" and "forums" with the embedded video player beneath him? ZEITGEIST!
this also reminds me of Van Halen's "Right Now" video. Or the one that played after INXS's "Need You Tonight" with all the words on cards.
Actually, this is a perfect reflection of the the Merc -- MOR, all things to all people, therefore nothing to anyone. The fact the supposed chronicler of everything innovative is so late to the game says a lot as well.
The Yahoo spokesperson mentions that Brickhouse is a mechanism to deal with its overflowing abundance of innovation. It seems that Yahoo's real mechansim to innovate is to emulate Google. Yahoo's innovation seems to come from outside primarily through acquisition (Flickr, Jumpcut, etc.). Now that Goog has lit a match under Yahoo, the media portal has to innovate than let its acquired properties rot in purgatory (ie: GeoCities). It will be nice to see Yahoo roll something out to show non-believers that it has indeed found its mojo. As far as the Merc's video, I personally like its newspaper. This videointerview is too long and should be more concise and edited so it doesn't come across as a vendor commerical.
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