Don’t Digg this pirate Diggnation London MP4 video

Heh, ok, so it’s just a 1-minute clip linked immediately below from my mobile phone, with me sitting waaaay back in the audience, but I’m just having some fun with the story headline, to reflect the fun I had at the event and the irreverent spirit of Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose of Digg/Diggnation, heroes of the evening. [The main image at right is from MichaelHenley's Flickr Photostream (thank you!).

CLICK HERE FOR THE 1-MINUTE MP4 CLIP FROM MY PHONE. ...

duh, I may recode it to other formats later, but can't be bothered right now]

Here is the background: I’m attending Ryan Carson’s Future of Web Apps in London, and after an intense and excellent first day (yesterday, 3rd October 2007) of back-to-back presentations, brainstorming, shmoozing, and some free beer, the main auditorium is set up for a 7:30PM live recording of the next Diggnation podcast. Digg’s Kevin Rose has already given a nice keynote speech about lessons learned from the crazy startup days of Digg (“hey, if the growth meant I could pay the bills and bring in a few hundred extra dollars, I was a happy guy”).

Now it’s 7:30. The crowd filters in, and the atmosphere is electric. Alex and Kevin come in like two rock stars, background music pumping; the crowd goes wild, everyone on their feet screaming, cheering. The ‘format’ is a cross between Wayne’s World, (David) Baddiel and (Frank) Skinner’s unscripted chat show, and GeekBrief.TV, i.e. two guys sit on a couch, allegedly review the top stories on Digg, but with the wisecracking, beer drinking, sniping, and side remarks, there’s not time for too many Digg stories. But who cares?

The guys are obviously enjoying their fame. Kevin is clearly still pinching himself – this is their biggest live gig ever, as far as anyone can tell, and Kevin is blown away by the enormous (>1000) and pumped-up audience of wild fans. He grins and blushes from time to time throughout the event. Alex, on the other hand is a natural – he was born to be on stage. The wordplay and body language between the two is wonderful. Alex has impeccable TIMING, which is everything. The brat!

A young woman in the audience holds up a ‘Marry Me, Alex’ sign, comes up on stage and gives him a big kiss. You’ll have to watch the podcast, but it’ll never capture the impact of the live event. It was insane, inane, irreverent, sophomoric, and full of Politically Incorrect commentary. And I’m probably old enough to be their grandfather, so I’m not going to pretend I was ‘in there’ on their wavelength: but that’s not the point – anyone who’s seen my postings about live rock gigs knows that I’m a sucker for performers who have the charisma and style to work creatively with a live audience, and these guys, especially Alex, have it in spades. He was just riffing on the atomosphere, saying what the crowd wanted to hear and more, and improvising with some idiotic and (in context) wildly funny stuff.

The 1-minute clip captures an off-the-cuff routine they did about a 1-week life-cycle of ‘iPhone coolness’ in San Francisco (using the accidentally-dropped gizmo to impress an imaginary hot waitress one week, only to find that it was already commonplace in the Bay Area the following week; so they escalated their pickup lines to the next level by revealing some super-cool (and of course totally pathetic) 3rd party (now banned) iPhone app. Kevin chimes in with a late rejoinder, and Alex takes it to the next level with another even more outrageous line. This is great stuff – and I’m no Digg fanboy: I only dropped in on a whim, at the last moment, fully expecting NOT to enjoy the rants of this high-adrenaline crowd.

Well, it probably won’t make any sense, either in my description above, or in the clip, but it was brilliant to watch live: it simultaneously praised and hammered Apple (for their cool gadget and their uncool 3rd-party hacks attitude), did the same for sad-geeks-trying-to-get-girls, people who were LESS cool, people who were MORE cool, even each other, all at the same time. Hey, Kevin even (pre-emptively, I expect) knocks sadd-os who write posts like THIS one… ha!

Well, now that I think of it, I have seen the Big Names of comedy, like Frank Skinner, in live/closeup cabaret settings in the UK, and I would say Alex has definitely ‘got it’. But he is, by his own admission on stage, a complete and utter a**h*le, so I wouldn’t want him to see THIS posting or have any of the above commentary to go to his head…

Oh yeah, I was gonna write about all the great stuff I saw at FOWA. Will have to do that later.

Check Diggnation for the actual high-quality podcast, to be uploaded soon.

Technorati Tags: diggnation, london, FOWA, future.of.web.apps