A Tale of Two Superstars

Thanks to new mash-up, TimeTube, which lets you search YouTube videos and creates a visual historical time-line of the search term whether it's person, place or thing, I happened upon this video from February 2006. In the studio making "Bittersweet" is the first result for Kanye West and second for John Mayer (Eric Clapton duet is his first).

Kanye's latest is result is home-girl singing/rapping Jesus Walks, and Mayer's second to last is him calling a Japanese baseball game. (His last is a Perez Hilton lie detector test, which is not worth watching.)Yet what most of us Internetters know is that John Mayer in fact has release something more recently and with many more hits. And that's this awesome video on his creative songwriting process.

Now I'm not going to launch into a diatribe on how you can't get the whole story on YouTube anymore or how it is losing its cache as the home of great homegrown content. But as I've talked about specific to FoD (Funny or Die), it has major competition from other more specialized (and often high-quality) content sites that house videos as well as those that curate cool/funny/etc (even if they don't know how they do it). Not to mention, if you want more of these guys specifically you can find them at their own blogs.

Instead, I'm just going to say how interesting it can be to see where a quick, innocent search takes you...whether it starts on someone's blog, twitter feed or one of the many new tools out there like TimeTube. This search was short and specific. And thus the story (above) was framed in such a way. But it is nice to know that a less directed search can take some unpredictable turns if you let it (stumble), and it can lead to an even more random and intriguing story.