Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Unlikely Musical Instruments: Floppy Disk Drives

Performances involving unusual musical instruments have been a longtime YouTube staple, but over the last several months, we've started to see more and more of a particularly strange "instrument" being used to create tunes: old floppy disk drives.

YouTube saw a big spike in searches for "floppy drive" starting this past October, when the Star Wars "Imperial March" below first went viral. It's now been seen over 4.3 million times. It was created by Polish science students at a university.



This week, you can witness how elaborate recycling floppy disk drives for this untended purpose can get. MrSolidSnake745 is an entire channel of retro-tech covers using the drives and his videos have been viewed over 2 million times and counting. Here's the clip that's currently trending...



And that's not even the only channel producing covers like these ongoingly:



While searches since October have been noticeably higher for "floppy drive" videos, the trend is not necessarily a new one and some popular floppy drive covers have been around for longer:



Check out the floppy disk topic page to discover more.
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She Blinded Me with Science (and LOLs)!

This post was authored by Will Goodman, managing editor of CBSNews.com's The Feed, for a YouTube Trends series exploring viral video phenomena.

One of the most amazing things about the rise of YouTube videos and Internet culture is that there is no limitation to the kind of material that can go viral. Once upon time the domain for what would spread on a large-scale level was largely limited to the land of LOLs, FAILs, cats, babies and a few other Internet-popular subjects that tended towards the least-common denominator (no offense meant to cats or babies).

But no more! Now viral videos can broaden your mind and educate while also entertaining you. Let’s put the focus on learning today, particularly on the subject of science, and kick things off with one of the most recent entries to hit The Feed, though also the closest to the aforementioned topics of old (in this case, something of a FAIL).



Was there chemistry involved? Yes. Did you learn a lot from it? Maybe not, but there is definitely a lesson in here on avoiding putting liquid nitrogen in a closed container unless you’re looking to cause some damage (most likely to yourself). But fear not, because that was just a recent example to engage you and now we turn our focus towards actually educating and expanding your mind, which is exactly what our next video does in the most amazing of ways.

This one will get your mind turning and your feet tapping. Watch Bobby McFerrin, whom you might remember from the hit song "Don't Worry, Be Happy", demonstrate the power of the pentatonic scale.



Now did you learn something this time? Yes you did, though you probably barely realized it while it was happening. (One of the best possible ways to learn, in this blogger’s humble opinion.) And that is exactly the lesson that a Biola University math teacher, Matthew Weathers, incorporates extremely well into his creative class presentation in our next video. Educators, take note!



It’s always a thrill to catch moments like these on video. But there are now quite a few people on YouTube who regularly create informative and entertaining videos. Take one of my favorites, C.G.P. Grey, who puts out videos on a variety of subjects from currency to geography to mathematics and more. It’s still early in the year and some folks are still shopping for their 2012 calendars, so let’s take a quick look at one of his more recent entries explaining just how the modern calendar we use came to be as a quick example of his work.



So there you have it. You can get your laugh and learn on just about any day of the week with the help of YouTube. Now I like to try and come full circle whenever possible, which is why it’s so amazing that I can finish with a clip showing stuff exploding… but for science! No, for real this time. The video below is a fun compilation put out by The Periodic Table of Videos, a video series between the University of Nottingham's School of Chemistry and video journalist Brady Haran that really teaches you chemical reactions. Isn’t science just the coolest?



Boom! I hope you’ve all learned something today.

Today's Trend analysis provided by
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Top Musical Tesla Coils

One of the popular "science" videos of the week was this clip of a gentleman who rigged a Tesla coil to his head and programmed it to play the theme from Mortal Kombat



But musical Tesla coils have quite the history on YouTube and many of the most popular videos date back to 2007 and 2008. Here's a playlist of the most-viewed musical Tesla coil videos:

(Use the arrows to navigate between videos or watch them all here.)
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Inside YouTube Search: iPhone Spike

After only "Steve Jobs," "iPhone 4s" was the top rising search globally on YouTube last week, and the official video introducing Apple's voice control app, Siri, was seen over one million times.

The announcement of the 4s caused a predictable sharp spike in "iPhone" searches that dwarfs the spikes for previous releases in the past few years. We've plotted out the weekly search interest below:



Over 20,000 videos tagged "iPhone" were posted in the past week, a mix of official videos, news videos, parodies, and other reactions. Some of the most popular parodies were those spoofing Apple's commercials and promos, like this one, which has been seen over 400,000 times:



More: As noted above, "Steve Jobs" was the top rising search last week and his 2005 Stanford commencement speech was third. The address was watched roughly 4.6 million times in the past 7 days. More on the reaction to the sad news of his passing here.
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Steve Jobs Tributes Pouring in on YouTube

Following the sad news yesterday evening that Steve Jobs had passed away searches, views, and uploads related to the Apple co-founder began to spike. For example, Jobs' Stanford commencement speech from 2005, which is already the most-viewed graduation address on YouTube, is drawing hundreds of thousands of views last night into today.

By noon today, roughly 3,000 videos were uploaded with the keywords "Steve Jobs" in the previous 24 hours alone. Specifically, numerous mash-up tribute videos are popping up as are personal vlog reflections on the news, with many creators acknowledging that they're using the products he developed:

(Use the arrows to navigate between videos or watch them all here.)



Most of the videos so far have a sober tone, and recollect how the technology that Jobs created has affected their lives. We expect to see more of these through the rest of the week, with so many filmmakers and video producers fans counted among Apple's fans.

In early September, comedy music video group Pantless Knights created a tribute to Jobs' retirement that was trending then and is trending once again:
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Moving Images from Space

One of the most popular trending videos of last week was this stunning footage compiled from photographs taken by the International Space Station of Earth at night. The images, which are made publicly available via NASA's website, were translated into video by yesterday2221 and that dazzling clip has now been seen over 4.7 million times in the past eight days, drawing as many as 1.7 million views from around the world last Monday.



The clip has since inspired a number of other space enthusiasts to create similar videos using NASA imagery of our planet. For example, here's a video depicting the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights).



NASA has posted these types of composite videos as well as other footage from the ISS in the past. Most notably, imagery of major storms affecting the United States:
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iPhone 5 'Concept Features' Draw Millions of Views

The iPhone 5 might not be out yet, but that hasn't stopped Apple fans from seeking out supposedly "leaked" videos of the device and videomakers from creating futuristic concept videos. Searches for "iPhone 5" have risen dramatically in the past two weeks and over 5,000 various iphone 5-related videos have been posted in the past month.

One of the most popular of these types of videos was a product imagining produced by AatmaStudio, and with 16.5 million views, it's among the most-viewed videos overall in the past month. Here's a chart tracking its popularity:



As you can see the video is still averaging roughly half of a million views per day.

You may recall, back in February, this humorous "review" of the yet-to-be-released iPad 2 drew over 4 million views itself:
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10 Most-Viewed Rube Goldberg Machines of All-Time

As you can see in today's 4 @ 4 AM, one of the day's trending clips is this impressive Rube Goldberg contraption from 2D Photography, which uses only camera equipment. We decided to look at the data for the 10 most-viewed such videos of all-time.

There are some well-known machines that didn't make the cut -- like this proposal -- but the ones that did make it varied from simple at-home creations to elaborate works by creative professionals.

Of course, our list is topped off by one of the most-watched videos of 2010, the machine created for Ok Go's "This Too Shall Pass."



(May take a moment to load in full.)

Methodology: We ranked the most-viewed videos containing "rube goldber" in their title or in their tags and removed 3D animations -- except 1 -- as well as documentary clips and domino-based contraptions. We'll save the dominoes for another time.
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