Twice each day we scan our YouTube metrics as well as websites on the cutting edge of internet culture to discover the most buzzed about videos.
Rippled
Chinese Friday
Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two
All India Rado’s latest music video/work of art took 6 months to complete using the “light painting” stop-motion technique. This video follows up an award winning 2009 clip. As seen on Laughing Squid.
We’ve seen LOTS of Rebecca Black covers over the past two months, but this cover on our Most Shared list by YouTube musician Dawen is definitely the first one we’ve come across in Chinese.
Appearing on both our Most Shared and top Trending video lists is this economics rap battle between John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek that’s a sequel to EconStories’ 2010 clip that drew over 2 million views.
Nyan Cat is the bizarre/silly internet meme of the month and here one YouTube user take it to a new level with a violin, real-life rendition. As seen on Tosh.0.
April has been a month filled with wedding, proposal, and prom trending videos, so in light of this morning’s ceremony and festivities, we decided to pull together a list of 10 of the most popular clips from the past month that fall into this category.
From anniversaries to viral spoofs to embarrassing best man toasts, April really brought us a lot of amusing and surprising variety of videos that sometimes stretch our traditional notions of romance…
And though it may not be from this month, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing flash mobs lately, so here’s December’s flash mob wedding for your enjoyment.
P.S. If you want to see how number 7 turned out, you can watch that here.
By far, this morning’s top rising search on YouTube is for footage of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Buckingham Palace balcony kiss early this morning following the pair’s nuptials at Westminster Abbey. Behind the big kiss — which many of the top spiking search terms are related to — were searches for the royal couple’s wedding vows.
A rebroadcasted stream and more are available at The Royal Channel on YouTube.
Twice each day we scan our YouTube metrics as well as websites on the cutting edge of internet culture to discover the most buzzed about videos.
Prom Ask Dance
Miss USA Pat Down
A California high school student organized an entire performance just to ask his date to prom in this Trending Video.
Stirring up conversation is this clip of 2003 Miss USA Susie Castillo giving an emotional description of a TSA pat-down she had just received in Dallas. Two As seen on Hot Air.
YouTube user Sean Ohlenkamp placed this folder on his wife’s desktop to celebrate their third anniversary. As seen on Gizmodo.
Penn State snapper Larry Federoff shows off his skills. As seen on BuzzFeed. (This is actually the 2nd trick shot long snapper.)
One of the most shared videos this month is a YouTube performance by the band Karmin. The duo’s cover of “Look At Me Now” by Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes has been viewed nearly seven million times since it was first trending on April 14th.
Karmin, made up of Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan, has been posting videos since last fall. Until early this month, Karmin’s most popular videos were covers of Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga, respectively. But none of those featured Amy’s channeling of Busta Rhymes. It seems that hip-hop has been working well for the pair as their take on Lil Wayne’s “6 Foot 7 Foot” has drawn half a million views in roughly 24 hours and is now also appearing on our Most Shared list alongside the original.
You just got a new web design gig. There’s a blank CSS file staring out from your favorite text editor. This time, you tell yourself, it’s going to be clean and simple CSS. No crazy descendant selector spaghetti code, no resorting to inline styles for quick changes, no !important. Clean, simple CSS built on established best practices.
Three months later you’re trying to figure out why the new #sidebar .row h3.smallHeader rule is going to affect the existing #sidebar .row header h3. You’ve failed. Again. But it’s okay, and you’re not alone.
In fact, CSS guru Nicole Sullivan thinks the reason you’ve ended up where you are again might even be because of “best practices.”
It is time to let ourselves off the hook. There is nothing we could have done by trying harder. There is no magic juju that some other developer has that we don’t. Following our beloved best practices leads to bad outcomes every. single. time.
What are those flawed best practices?
Classitis!
Never add an non-semantic element
Or, a non-semantic class
Use descendant selectors exclusively
Sites need to look exactly the same in every browser
No doubt some of Sullivan’s arguments will be controversial with Webmonkey readers, but she has a point: we have best practices, but we still end up with messy, difficult to maintain stylesheets — clearly something in those established practices is not working.
It’s important to note that Sullivan isn’t suggesting throwing out these ideas, just that developers ought to see them less as rules and more as suggestions. For example, don’t litter your markup with classes if you don’t need them, but when you do, don’t feel like adding a non-semantic class is the end of the world.
If you’d like to hear the entire talk, head over to the Webstock site for a video and some slides.
Amazon has apologized to customers affected by last week’s EC2 outage and offered a detailed post mortem about exactly what went wrong. The short answer is that a network update shifted traffic to the wrong router, which then wrecked havoc on Amazon’s US East Region Availability Zone.
In addition to apologizing, Amazon is giving affected customers “a 10 day credit equal to 100 percent of their usage of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances and RDS database instances that were running in the affected Availability Zone.”
Amazon is also promising to improve its communication with customers when things go wrong, but as we pointed out earlier, the real problem is not necessarily Amazon. While Amazon’s services unquestionably failed, those sites that had a true distributed system in place (e.g. Netflix, SmugMug, SimpleGeo) were not affected.
In the end it depends how you were using EC2. If you were simply using it as a scalable web hosting service, your site went down. If you were using EC2 as a platform to build your own cloud architecture, then your services did not go down. The later is a very complex thing to do, and it’s telling that the sites that survived unaffected were all large companies with entire engineering teams dedicated to creating reliable EC2-based systems.
That may be the real lesson of Amazon’s failure — EC2 is no substitute for quality engineers.
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Amazon has apologized to customers affected by last week’s EC2 outage and offered a 
