Eye-opening eye candy: HOME, the full movie

Below, for your clicking pleasure, is HOME, a 1.5 hour movie about Planet Earth. It’s eye-candy, but it’s also eye-opening, even though you already know all the Al Gore/climate change stats.

HOME is bad for cars, Las Vegas, Dubai, Israel, cows. Good for greenies and fans of HD gyroscope cameras. Forget about the ragtrade sponsor, that’s how the movie is going to go viral: it’s free.


Yann Arthus-Bertrand, GoodPlanet Foundation President and photographer of ‘Earth From the Air’, produced the movie and he says:

“We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth’s climate.

“The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

“For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because HOME is a non-profit film.”

HOME can also be found on . If you want the movie on your iPod, iPhone or other players which can spew out MP4’s, subscribe to the Quickrelease.tv podcast on iTunes.

Commute book heading for 15,000 views

The Bike to Work Book is going great guns. The page-flippy versions on Issuu.com have had 14,444 views between them.

There’s more than one because I produce personalised versions for anybody with an audience, be that an email list or a website on which to embed the book.

Here’s one I did for a British bike shop, Mr Cycles:

Get your own - Open publication

One of the personalised versions - produced for the Cadence Revolution podcast - has had nearly 1000 views. The main Bike to Work Book on Issuu.com has had 11,272 views. The back-end stats show me that nearly fifty percent of readers flick through to the very end of the book.

To ramp up views even further I created a ‘Social Media Release’ on the book yesterday. I placed this on PitchEngine, a spiffy new place for storing and broadcasting press releases. This release and another I created on PRLog.org helped get the Bike to Work Book high up on Google News.

PitchEngine is the more tech-savvy of the two services, featuring lots of social media bells and whistles, including embedding of YouTube videos. I created this short for PitchEngine:

Thanks a million (nearly)

The Quickrelease.tv videos have had 996,534 views on YouTube. Just a few more click throughs and I’ll burst through the One Million Views threshold!

Please sponsor my tough charity bike ride (sorry, meant to say foreign holiday)

This viral video has bike content at the beginning and the end. It’s a critique of ‘charity beggers’ and is to promote, of all things, a Christian Aid charity website called Ctrl.Alt.Shift:

OMG, an anti-Apple posting by me on Me

Now, if only the producers of this new BBC comedy sketch show had used a Mac instead of a PC this attack could have been a metaphor for what Mobile Me has been doing to users…



Upset at outages? Me.com?

Recycling with Amy Greenhouse

This is a bizarre, but funny, video viral from Greenpeace, promoting recycling, even at rock festivals.

Glad to hear that ‘Trace’ got back to town on a solar-powered rickshaw…

Get in the mood for Le Tour

The Tour de France starts in Brittany on 5th July. I’m a lucky bugger, I’ll be there.

I’m getting warmed up for the event by re-watching this video:



I billed this as ‘Best Tour de France footage ever?’ and it’s had 117,000+ views on YouTube. But it’s only the short and shonky version. The higher-res, nine-minute version can be found on .

The video is made up of ‘rushes’ from the IMAX movie with the production name of Brainpower but which morphed into Wired to Win when it was released to IMAX cinemas in 2006.

The IMAX movie, as you’d expect, is larger than life and truly stunning. But it was distributed much later than first billed. Following the initial shooting in 2003 there had to be an extensive reshooting of scenes to accommodate the removal of Tyler Hamilton from the movie.

At the time Hamilton was embroiled in a drugs hearing, which he sadly later lost. Had he embarked on the same course of action as Floyd Landis - request for an open hearing, wiki-style posting of all hearing evidence on his website so experts could crawl all over it - the outcome may have been different. Well, perhaps not the outcome because Read the rest of this entry »

Top ten vodcasts

I’ve just been fiddling with the text on my video podcast’s . While I was there I clicked on the Libsyn stats package. I thought you might like to see the results for the most popular episodes. They’re listed below in order of popularity. 56 episodes are hosted on Libsyn but these are the top ten.

Best Tour de France footage ever filmed? 05/10/2007
Pre-production footage from the IMAX movie ‘Brainpower’. The Tyler Hamilton material was later cut.

APPLE TV: How to get kids to fix bicycles 02/19/2008
Weldtech mechanic Jeff Beach teaches basic bike maintenance to eager kids at the Newcastle Phoenix cycling club.

APPLE TV: Bicycle Anatomy for Beginners 04/01/2008
Loving close-ups of bike parts, named for newbies. This also features ‘bespoke’ music made from bicycle parts.

Phil Liggett and friends go cycling 08/17/2007
A video of last year’s Phil and Friends ride in the Peak District. Two ‘voices of cycling’ are featured, the other being Eurosport’s David Harmon.

2 CHAIN GANG Wax or shave? 04/24/2008
An episode from a 1990s TV series in which I get my leg hairs pulled out and then go for a ride in the country with a road club.

6 CHAIN GANG Jason McRoy MTB superstar (RIP) 04/24/2008
This is also from the Tyne Tees series Chain Gang. It features the iconic rider on his home turf as well as competing against Myles Rockwell in the 1994 Reebok Eliminator on the Kamikaze course at Mammoth Mountain, California.

BIKE THIEVES: know thine enemy 08/07/2007
This is a video short, first aired on Channel 4, interviewing a bike thief and putting his words on an animation of stealing techniques.

Kinda saucy: woman in shorts on bike from Oz comedy 07/30/2007
I’m surprised this one isn’t higher up the list. It’s from 1980s hit comedy series the Paul Hogan Show. It’s sub-Benny Hill stuff.

Out for a cushy spin: Cyclists Special, 1955 07/12/2007
A full-length version of the famous cinema short about a train-borne CTC-led cycle tour of the Midlands.

John Burke: the Al Gore of the bike trade? 05/09/2007
This is a bicycle advocacy talk given to industry leaders at the 2007 Taiwan trade show. Burke argued that bike companies should increase their financial support of bicycle advocates and political lobbying groups. He called the bicycle “the perfect product at the perfect time.” And bike companies would sell more of them if there were more places for folks to ride them.

“The number one way to grow the business and to have an impact on society, health, environment and congestion is to create a bicycle-friendly world,” said Burke.

He revealed that for every $100 of sales, bike companies typically spend $3.90 on marketing, $1.60 on R&D but just 10 cents on advocacy.

“That doesn’t make sense. As an industry we need to look at how we spend money. Why do we spend the amount of money on marketing and product and little on advocacy?”

Putting ‘APPLE TV’ at the front of an episode helps it to rise up the rankings. Personally, I’m using my Apple TV much more than my TiVo-style Sky HD box. This will only accelerate now that the UK version of Apple TV has two quid video rentals. Not that I’m lazy or anything but the ability to cut out the trip to the video rental store is a real boon.

Expedia’s video viral nicely executed

I have had problems with Expedia in the past. Always read the small print, there’s a ‘no changing any details’ reason the flight tickets are often so cheap!

But their latest video viral - all about funny Johnny-Foreigner hotel signs - is smile-worthy. Humour is a good viral tactic, although I can’t see this one being passed on in huge numbers. It’s not very edgy, but probably good for the demographic.

WARNING: contains zero bike content, another minus point in my book…

Moonwalking bear vid nearly tops viral list

According to the Viral Video Chart, Transport for London’s ‘Do the Test’ video is now at number two in the list. Yesterday it was at number eight.

The British video has had 1.18m views on YouTube. Very few viewers will know - or care - that the idea for the video was plagiarised from an American academic.