resolved: the more diverse/massive the web gets, the greater the need for gatekeepers. or tastemakers. or aggregators. or alligators. whatever.
it's why boing boing is one of the most popular blogs on the Net and why iTunes celebrity playlists are so successful. we don't know what to read/view. we need cultural-ninja dopplegangers - smarter, cooler, less-busy versions of ourselves to do it for us. in some spheres of life middle[wo]men can make you want to gauge your own eye out with a rusty spoon, but when it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff of online video, sites like Glumbert are a godsend.
this assumes, of course, that you find value in seeing well-produced shorts like Jason Reitman's Sexual Consent, a safe-yet-steamy 6-minute send-up of the rather litigious culture we live in.
reitman is best known for two things: being the son of Ivan Reitman [Animal House, Ghostbusters, Kindergarten Cop, Dave, etc.] and recently directing the satirical feature Thank You For Smoking. i'm sure he's known for other things, but not by me at the time of this post.
during my efforts to discover what makes reit-LO tick, i discovered that the short was actually produced in 2004. it's curious what causes an idea or piece of content to tip when it tips. robert scoble wrote about the same phenomenon when sales of his seminal book-on-blogging Naked Conversations [co-written with social media evangelist shel israel] received an unexpected boost long after initial release. in their case, Amazon had paired Naked Conversations with a more recent release [Chris Anderson's fascinating The Long Tail], and their own sales/traffic spiked as a result.
not sure what did it for reitman jr, though my money's on YouTube. Sexual Consent was posted there in early October and has clocked 50k views to date. it might also help that he has another feature in pre-production [Juno]...and, undoubtedly, being profiled by a popular video-tracker like Glumbert doesn't hurt either.
click on the image above to dig the smart satire of jason reitman.
tags: sexual, consent, jasonreitman, glumbert