The «Amen Break» and remixing culture

The «Amen Break» is a six-second drum solo from the song «Amen, Brother» as performed by the 1960s band «The Winstons». The break has been used extensively as a sample in drum-and-bass, hip hop, and jungle music. It's even been used in TV commercials, as well as in the beginning of the intro music for the «Powerpuff girls».

Interestingly, «The Winstons» and the drummer Gregory Sylvester «G.C.» Coleman supposedly never received any royalties for the repeated use of their drum beat. Instead, a company called Zero-G has claimed copyright over the piece through their inclusion of it in a collection of samples.

This video explains the history and importance of «the world's most important 6-second drum loop».

Homelessness

This is a short interview with a man who has been homeless for six months, even though he has no drog, alcohol, or mental health issues. YouTube user davidbarker1971 writes: «The number of people becoming homeless and walking the streets to find a place to sleep is increasing - especially with banks increasing their loan rates, the number of houses being repossessed the highest since 1971 and UBS Invesment Bank warning the credit crunch will get worse before it gets better.»

New Lightbulbs

Common Craft is a two-person company from Seattle. Their products are «explanations» through short videos in a format they call «Paperworks». This video explains why new lightbulbs are better than old lightbulbs.

Gapminder Statistics

According to Hans Rosling, the main challenge for his students in development studies is not ignorance, but preconceived ideas. His solution is to improve the communication of data already available. In this video, Rosling shows that there is no longer a gap between rich and poor countries. He does this by displaying «old» data using amazing statistical visualizations. You can try some of the software yourself on Gapminder World. For more videos by Hans Rosling, check out the GapCasts.

Web 2.0 / The new internet

For this first video on The Eight Minute Society, we're going to add Michael Wesch's brilliant primer on the «new» internet characterized by sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Project Gutenberg, Facebook, blogs, etc. It's not really a video blog, but it's informative, educational, well composed, and short, so we'll give it a try.

A Political Manifesto for the Eight Minute Society

The appearance of the first video blogs resembled the appearance of the first personal web sites. People publish their pictures, they talk about their dogs, they name their favorite pizza and shares their favorite jokes.

Video blogs can, however, be a lot more. First of all, video blogs can contain a lot of information. In most cases, a video blog of eight minutes can contain more information than an article it takes eight minutes to read.

Second, video blogs are more accessible. Not everyone reads especially quick. A lot of people are dyslectic. Some people are blind. Others don't have time to read, but would be happy to have something interesting to listen to during their daily commute or while making dinner.

Third, the cost of producing a video blog is negligible. Not only because the technical part of producing the clip is easy – you click record, speak for eight minutes, stop the recording, and publish the video – but also because what is elementary to some is quite complicated to others.

Consider the amount of preparation it would take a professor in physics to explain the current understanding of gravity to a person that doesn't know anything but the fact that most things actually do tend to fall to the ground.

Having a collection of eight minute stubs explaining the basics of things like globalization, copyright, cholesterol, the internal combustion engine, World Trade Organization, the networked economy, separation of power, Wikipedia, the linguistic turn, or the causes of the french revolution, would be an invaluable source to knowledge. With video blogs, the cost of making and sharing this is virtually zero.