Hi Brendon, Hope you're well. Just thought I'd articulate a thought I had for quite a while now on the ever-increasing practice of making a blog post just a link to a video.

There are two (hmm correction, at least three) categories of folks that are pretty much left behind by this.

Those of us who live in third-world countries ... I have a DSL connection but the only time it is fast enough for videos is prior to 0500 local time. I do get up at 0400 just to get some on line work done, but you can readily see many vids never make it into the queue.

The second category might be more important to designers/internet marketers. Many government agencies and some businesses also routinely block video and some even audio from their networks. When I worked for years for Space Command, home of a "big pipe" network, I, of course, sometimes surfed at work. But I never listed to an audio clip, podcasts or watched a vid ... it was verboten. The guys who ran the network were not media file fans, and they were the boss. So the only "takeaways" from any of my surfing there were files that the poster had thought enough of to include a summary ... even if only a few lines ... to "tease" me into emailing myself the link for watching at home. And trust me, the usual, "this is good, you have to watch it" is not a compelling "tease".

The third important group just came to mind as I was writing ... surfing via cell phones/PDAs/BlackBerrys etc. is more and more common ... especially by folks who have money to spend on things .. but watching vids. on those kind of devices is problematical.

I don't routinely post any media files on any of my blogs but probably will soon. What I plan to do is always post a written "reason' for the media and a sidebar link to D/L the media without further search if the valuable (any returning visitor is valuable to me) visitor returns.

A thought, anyway ... perhaps others have some better ideas?

Brenden, i love your videos mate. i guess i'm a typical american, but hey, i've got a great connection and don't think sites should cater to lowest common denominator. sorry, dave, but that's my thought on the other comment.

anyhoo, LOVE this!!! just awesome! freaking unbelievable. thanks for posting it!

your biggest fan in the whole state of GA,

Lisa

Hi Lisa,thanks for pointing out the lack of clarity in my writing. Let me re-phrase:

I did not suggest _not_ using video. I suggested

a: Not posting vidoes with nothing more than a "Hey, this is great" comment and

b: Posting a separate link to get the videos without wading back through the blog posts a second time.

Rather thna bring a site down to a LCD, I'd submit that practice would raise a blog/site above the crowd ... and cater to the thousands of on-line users in the groups I mentioned who have incomes in the $xxx,xxx USD range, but still don't have easy video access.

Someone once told me if you want to catch fish, you have to fish where the fish are ;-)

Back to the video - Darren is a well known illusionist and mind manipulator in the UK.

Can I suggest that this is illusion? How many of the clues do you actually see in the same footage frame as the subject?

I'd suspect that Darren did his usual brilliant job of reading and influencing the subjects and that the visual stimuli clues didn't actually play much of a part at all.

For example, could the subjects have clearly seen the motif on the shirts of the people crossing the road, from their position inside the taxi?

In fact, the visual prompts could easily have been filmed seperately, either before or after the subjects taxi journey.

Call me a cinic if you like!

Seamus

Thanks guys

Terrific point as usual Dave. With this one I felt like talking about what it does would dilute the impact of seeing it a bit (but I should just write better).

Howdy Lisa - hope all is well your end.

And howdy Seamus - mate, you are such a cynic! Yes, I think they must have seen a fair bit more than they showed on the video.

Intersting though.

Cheers

Brendon