Last week, Bob Dylan released for a limited time a free mp3 (“Beyond Here Lies Nothin”) from his upcoming album, Together Through Life. Over at Newsweek, you’ll now find another cut being streamed — “Feel A Change Comin’ On.” Head on over and have a listen.
via Stereogum
Eggman913 on YouTube has a pretty neat schtick. He takes artistic images, then morphs them together in pretty creative ways. The piece above plays with images of famous actresses from different moments in American film history. Eggman913 has also created a montage called Women in Art, which we’ve featured here before. (It has only 9.2 million views on YouTube.) Then there are pieces that have fun with the art of Picasso and Monet, plus a companion clip called Men in Film. The actresses shown in the video above include:
Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Norma Shearer, Ruth Chatterton, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Deborah Kerr, Judy Garland, Anne Baxter, Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy Dandridge, Shirley MacLaine, Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, Janet Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Ann Margret, Julie Andrews, Raquel Welch, Tuesday Weld, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve, Jacqueline Bisset, Candice Bergen, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sigourney Weaver, Kathleen Turner, Holly Hunter, Jodie Foster, Angela Bassett, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Salma Hayek, Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Diane Lane, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, Halle Berry.
A quick heads up: Stanford has just launched a free software development course for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The lectures will be rolled out on iTunes first, and eventually they will be posted on YouTube as well. You can get the first lecture on iTunes here. This 10 week computer science course is officially called iPhone Application Programming. Watch for new lectures to be posted weekly. You’ll be learning to develop iPhone apps in no time.
You can find this course housed under the Computer Science section of our collection of Free University Courses.
A light (and, for me, nostalgic) way to ease into the weekend…
Over at Marvel.com, they’re streaming episodes from the original Spider-Man TV series that hit the airwaves back in 1967. A new episode will be posted every Thursday. Above, you’ll find Episode 1, and see where it all began.
This really caught my eye…
If you didn’t make it to the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern (and chances are you didn’t), then you can still see it virtually. As you’ll see, the Tate Modern has created a fantastic web site that lets you take a panoramic tour of the Rothko collection. Once you enter the tour here, you should switch into full screen mode (look toward the bottom of screen), then use the arrows and your mouse to move around. You can move from room to room, and zoom in on various paintings. Quite the way to see an exhibition if you can’t make a long journey.
“Over the centuries a number of images have been put forward as life portraits of our greatest writer, but at present none of them is generally accepted as such. Up until now… With the emergence of the Cobbe portrait, we are presented with a contemporary portrait that has strong claims to represent the dramatist as he appeared to his contemporaries.”
These lines from shakespearefound.org.uk (associated with the University of Warwick) set the stage for a 20 minute video/film that features Prof. Stanley Wells talking about the Cobbe portrait, and why it’s believed to present the real Shakespeare, the towering author we still know little about today. You can watch the video above, or find it on iTunesU, where it’s among the most downloaded videos.
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On the Oscar Channel on YouTube, you can flip through some classic prize-winning moments. Above, we feature Roberto Benigni’s speech upon receiving The Academy Award for best actor (Life is Beautiful) in 1998. You can also see vintage speeches by Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Federico Fellini, and others. Perhaps a questionable call, The Oscar Channel has been added to our page, Intelligent YouTube: The Best Smart Video Collections.
Let me bring this to your attention. Erwan Bomstein-Erb, the founder and director of Canal Educatif in Paris, has released a documentary (in English) about The Gates of Hell, a monumental project that Auguste Rodin worked on, not necessarily consistently, for 37 years. On its own, this video is worth your time. But you should also know that this is one of ten films about major artworks that Bomstein-Erb plans to produce in HD. Canal Educatif is all about using the internet to provide global access to “cultural capital.” A goal that we can wholeheartedly support. This kind of philanthropic venture is hard to fund, especially during these difficult times. So Bomstein-Erb is looking for sponsors and partners to support his mission. If you would like to get in touch, you can drop him a line through Canal Educatif’s web site. Lastly, you should check out the Canal Educatif channel on YouTube. Good luck Erwan.
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Let me bring this to your attention. Erwan Bomstein-Erb, the founder and director of Canal Educatif in Paris, has released a documentary (in English) about The Gates of Hell, a monumental project that Auguste Rodin worked on, not necessarily consistently, for 37 years. On its own, this video is worth your time. But you should also know that this is one of ten films about major artworks that Bomstein-Erb plans to produce in HD. Canal Educatif is all about using the internet to provide global access to “cultural capital.” A goal that we can wholeheartedly support. This kind of philanthropic venture is hard to fund, especially during these difficult times. So Bomstein-Erb is looking for sponsors and partners to support his mission. If you would like to get in touch, you can drop him a line through Canal Educatif’s web site. Lastly, you should check out the Canal Educatif channel on YouTube. Good luck Erwan.
I’m no fan of Ayn Rand, but I found this footage intriguing. Back before 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had his own TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace asking probing questions to celebrities of the day (and peddling cigarettes). An archive of the television series is hosted by The University of Texas, and features talks with Frank Lloyd Wright, Eleanor Roosevelt, Salvador Dali and many others. In the meantime, I leave you with Ayn Rand. You can get Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
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On Thursday, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU. Now, as promised, it’s time to give you some more details about the new university video hub.
I had a chance to chat with Obadiah Greenberg, a key Googler behind the launch. And he gave me some insight into the genesis of the project. As you can imagine, YouTube EDU wasn’t built overnight. It took about a year to move from concept to launch. The work was driven along by a team of five, and they did it using Google’s famous 20% time policy. That is, they each committed essentially one day per week to bringing this project to fruition.
What you’re seeing now is essentially version 1.0. Obadiah expects YouTube EDU to evolve over time, especially as his team gathers data and feedback that will inform future iterations. But, make no mistake, this initial product has accomplished quite a bit. It centralizes the video collections from over 100 universities/colleges. This amounts to over 20,000 individual videos and 200 complete courses. It also makes these collections much easier for new users to discover and sift through. Back in early 2007, before YouTube really started working with universities, I kvetched in a public radio interview that GooTube could do more to organize the world of intellectual video, and now I certainly have a lot less to complain about (although I do still see some important tweaks that could be made here and there).
The universities participating in YouTube EDU have also had an upbeat response. Both Scott Stocker (Director of Web Communications at Stanford) and Genevieve Haines (Director of Integrated Communications at UCLA) welcomed the idea that many new visitors will encounter their video collections. As Genevieve put it, it’s never a bad thing when the world’s top video sharing site makes a big commitment to university content. This move opens up many long range possibilities for educators and students, she says. But, over the short term, it guarantees that schools will learn more about how the wider public engages with their videos. By looking at traffic patterns and user comments left on YouTube, the university teams will find out whether there’s a real market for serious lectures and courses, or whether users prefer lighter fare, or some combination of the two. With this knowledge in hand, media strategies will be revised.
For Ben Hubbard, who manages the webcasting initiative at UC Berkeley, YouTube EDU offers another perk. He told me: “There are a lot of universities and other centers for learning engaged with their local communities on YouTube, but it hasn’t always been very easy to find them. YouTube EDU makes it much easier for us to locate our peer institutions, connect around common interests, and perhaps even engage with one another in a more meaningful and productive way to create (or make more rich) a community of best practices.”
But perhaps the biggest plus is reserved for you and me. The Google team anticipates that the visibility of this project will open the floodgates, bringing many more universities to YouTube EDU in the coming months. This means that many more free lectures and courses will be coming online. A big plus for any reader of this blog. We’ll monitor all of this, and keep you posted as things move along …
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