ONN Point

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

The Onion News Network takes a stab at life after the Internet Meltdown of 2007. They're doing pretty well.

[via ]

"One day, your computer will be a big ass table with pictures of other people's kids all over it."

This new technology, as hawked by Microsoft, has been featured a number of times on websides, but this interpretation takes the cake.

[via Second Verse]

No Title Necessary

Its only at 13, 892 views (as of 7:50 pm), but if it doesn't get to 200 thousand by the end of tomorrow then my worst fears are confirmed: people just aren't into awesomeness.

Update: The video doesn't quite have as many views as I would have thought (stuck around 33,000) but the creators have chimed in on the Youtube comment thread:

so i think it's time we made a statement here. we never had any idea this video would make such waves. we have decided to open a profile on my space back slash cocons. please go add us. the page is still under construction and there are many more videos to come. thank you all and stay tuned. -90210 twins (and brian)

[via Jervenaut]

Tag-Teaming Your Furniture

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Onion Sandwich

Um. Websides is getting kinda serious. Apologies all around. I promise WE PROMISE to make it fun and lighthearted for all three of you reading. In fact, the websides staff promises to make you smile tomorrow. Its a guarantee.

Until then, Murder is off on a rant about the new ONN (Onion News Network)

Viral videos were at one point seen as content that you could advertise around, right? Like a TV show has commercial breaks, this meant, on the simplest level, plugging Adsense around the video box itself or selling banner ad space across the top of a video's page. It was there, but it was inherently separate.

But in this case, rather than separating the advertisement from the content, the advertisement has become the content. Of course, the easy answer is to say that incorporating the ad into the video makes it more in your face, and that's why I feel so strangely probed afterwards. But it's more than that. What I'm saying is there's practically no way to distinguish the two.

Look at the similarities between the Dewar's content and the Onion content. While the Onion satirizes a modern newscast, the Dewar's ad appeals to nostalgia and satirizes the silent-film era newsreel. Both take a completely sarcastic tone and use it as a medium for humor. The difference is that that is what the Onion does, while what Dewar's does is sell whiskey. Sandwiching the Onion content between the Dewar's content is brilliant as well, because while the Onion content is longer continuously, by the end of the video there's been just as much time devoted to both.

But the Dewar's ad content, humorous, engaging, and ultimately effective as it is, could not survive without the Onion content. By attaching itself to "real" internet video content and replicating itself after it, it becomes more than an advertisement, it becomes the video content. The two are now indistinguishable. The advertising is doing more than selling a product, it is trying to sell itself as something more than just an advertisement, and that's what's so brilliant/scary.

Sandwiching the Onion content between the Dewar's content does more that hide the fact that you're watching both for an almost equal amount of time, it ends up creating the underlying feeling that it's the Onion content that is out of place. Instead of noticing a Dewar's ad in the middle of an Onion news segment, I'm noticing an Onion news segment in the middle of a Dewar's ad.

Who's thirsty with me?

- Murder

[via ]