shelbinator.com

I hate a bad internet meme, but I love a good one, and Amber and Rusty have a good one. I was hoping to pick one picture per month and hit all twelve, but with 4 minutes left in the year, I’m going to just be a bit haphazard, especially since some of the pics I wanted to use aren’t on Flickr (and are trapped on a computer 600 miles north of my current location).

January

A trip I’ll never forget to the Iowa Caucus — last meal before the big day with some of Team Biden.

From Iowa almost directly to New York to join fellow YouTuber Erica America at MTV and become part of Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08, for what it was worth.

February

Super Tuesday — most special to me for getting my first taste of the Nokia N95, but enhanced by its coincidence with Fat Tuesday and one rather drunk McCain voter at the Vortex.

Prom photo — Broken Hearts & Bicycle Parts bike ride for SoPo Bike Collective.

March

Got Hope? Vine City gets mauled by an in-town tornado. Crazy times.

April

Cracked! Two years later than expected, I finally start generating mixed-mode fatigue cracks. Fat lot of good that did. Please kill me.

May

Hook up with New Media Strategies to cover ISEF ‘08.

July

I got older. And people came out for beers. And my mom didn’t even have to pay them this year.

August

Reconnected with a couple former summer camp-mates in Highlands, NC after, like, 20 years.

October

“Go big or go home,” as they say; I completely FUBAR my hair trying to achieve Greg House, M.D.’s mousey brown. Lauren buys a lab coat.

November

There’s like this historical election thing. I try to enjoy the moment as much as possible while pseudo-working.

December

My mom (right) gets me to march in the King Mango Strut Parade, our last as Miami residents.

We pop a little champagne in my dad’s chambers for one last Christmas amid burn barrels of confidential documents and moving boxes. The judge retires at 80 in January.

Alright. It’s 2009. Yeehaw. It’s also bedtime.

No time for words; must go get more coffee and put any words I can spare into the thesis. For now, you get my final Georgia video for that thing we called Street Team ‘08.

My phone will not be broadcasting to my usual Flixwagon account today; for ease of production I’ll be publishing to a parallel server for MTV, and clips will show up in the player below (UPDATED/FIXED):
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A few weeks ago I mentioned this shindig over at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation with CBS political correspondent Jeff Greenfield. Since Jeff had said that the current state and trajectory of media tested his faith in American polity, I threw together this little look back at the MTV Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 experiment:

Lucky for me, something got screwed up in the A/V system between Monday’s sound check and Tuesday’s event, my video had no sound, and I looked like a friggin’ idiot in front of the whole audience. Yeehaw!

It’s been done before, but frankly, I didn’t like any of the existing mashups out there. So here’s mine.

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation — you know, the guy who owns our Atlanta Falcons — is having one of its Speaker Series events this evening at 5:30.

Jeff Greenfield, CBS News Senior Political Correspondent

Known for his quick wit and savvy insight into politics, history, media and current events, Jeff Greenfield is one of America’s most respected commentators and journalists.
…
“I am an optimist by nature,” he says. “I still have a Jeffersonian faith in our capacity to reach for the best in us when we have to. But the more I look at the present, and the future, of the media, the more that faith is tested.”

The affair is booked solid, but lucky lucky you, I will be live-streaming the event over at ustream.tv/shelbinator starting around 5:20 p.m. (program begins at 5:30 p.m.). I will also be monitoring the chat room (or DM me on Twitter) so if you have any questions during the Q&A portion, take your best shot and, time permitting, I’ll raise my hand on your behalf.

I’m presenting a video overview of our Street Team shenanigans between the talk and the Q&A, so we’ll see whether I test, or restore, Jeff’s faith in the future of media. Place your bets!

I should’ve done this for my colleagues covering Denver, but I didn’t. Get over it, I was busy, and frankly most of the interesting stuff for the DNC was on C-SPAN. So far this Republican convention is a real snoozer, and it’s the protests and such outside that make it exciting. There are five or six Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 types running amok in Minneapolis with Nokia N95s doing the live-streaming thing like we did on Super Tuesday — now joined by the impressive ranks of TheUptake.org (using Qik, not Flixwagon) and even good old C-SPAN themselves, going the mojo route.

Unfortunately there’s no handy “group” feature for the Flixwagon coverage like the Qikkers have, so to see if any of the five streamers have new content, you have to visit all five of their pages individually (direct links to the videos have been disabled by Flixwagon for MTV’s purposes so auto-tweeting won’t work {they figured it out, even though the vids are on a separate subdomain}), and on a Flux-built site that takes way too long. So, for my own purposes and maybe even yours, I’m embedding all five (well, four, till Erica America gets her N95) Flixee widgets on a single page over here.

Where else to be for a speech this big but Manuel’s Tavern? After a quick stop a Verve Lounge to verify there was indeed not enough light (or quiet) to shoot satisfactory video, I headed to Manuel’s in time to wedge myself into a corner between a couple tables and ration my oxygen. Thirty-four Street Team ‘08 punks were at watch parties across the country to collect the ever-prized “youth reaction” on video, turn it around overnight on the Viacom servers and hope for inclusion on Friday night’s MTV News special, Choose or Lose: Obama Decoded.

I have no idea what “decoded” is supposed to mean. If you needed a lot of help breaking down the messages in the speech, perhaps a federal ballot is a bit dangerous of a weapon in your hands. And strictly speaking, in data terms, it was encoded and compressed, but now I’m just being nitpicky. The point is, out of something like 115 choice snippets of interviews, two got chosen and the rest of us are losers in the game of life. About 13 other interviews (if three instances of giving one’s name and age count) were provided by the “real” reporters from Denver, while political expert WaPo reporter Chris Cillizza (who thinks I live in my parents’ basement^*) got four 15-second clips to explain complex politics to the yout’s.

Anyway, rather than let all this footage rot in the trash, here’s what I got (including some of the famous Qik footage mentioned below), with apologies to my interviewees for the trouble.

(Quicktime format)

* Technically I don’t, but apparently that’s the best place for me to dissertate, sadly enough.

Back on Super Tuesday, our intrepid Alaska Street Team ‘08 reporter Dani Carlson was one of the 22 Flixwagon-enabled mobile reporters. Well trekking around on the tundra, she got some sit-down time with our latest vice presidential nominee, Gov. Sarah Palin:

The MTV News reprise highlights one of the more fun moments of the interview:

In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul “cool.” “He’s a good guy,” she added. “He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, ‘Right on, so am I.’ ”

That occurs around the 3:00 mark of the video clip. She also praised Romney (apparently for wanting to drill in ANWR) and had nothing to say about McCain (who back then was against it).

Apparently CNN’s internet reporter found my cellphone coverage of the hearty crowd reactions from the overflowing Manuel’s Tavern interesting enough to put on her big shiny screen. Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik — whose software I used to stream video from Manuel’s (because frankly I wasn’t all that caught up in the speech) — sent me a couple snapshots of someone’s TV after he, and a number of local tweeple, were all a-twitter about the segment. I was totally oblivious (no one in Manuel’s noticed and said “Hey, that’s us! And that’s that guy!”).

That’s fellow YDAtlien Justi in the corner of the second pic.

They must’ve had slim pickin’s in the blogosphere at 11:42 p.m. (judging by the sudden simultaneous influx to the blog of people googling “shelbinator”), because the video ain’t all that interesting. But for posterity, here it is:

There’s a view from the back bar here, too.