Beginning again with a new millennium, this time the Year 2000 or “Y2K” (as the acronym-fetishists called it), we who care about wisdom, creativity, art, noble human values, and who have been professionally involved with digital media, basically waited. Surely World Events, like the World Trade Center and related attacks and consequential tragedies, as well as the fog of business and corporate wars of power drew primary focus. Still, digital media and Web Two Point Oh, moved steadily forward.
The first half of the first decade, we waitied. Then, as we turned the corner from 2005 to 2006, original online exploded into a wild, sustained crescendo that extends to this writing … just as the last days of the First Decade, Fall 2010, Fade to Black.
Burning Shorts was born in early 2006 and first appeared in public by May of that Year. For reference, early 2006 was immediately prior to the acquisition by Google of YouTube, which was a paradigm changer for original online content. Burning Shorts predates the Goo-Tube Era and, immodestly, anticipates it. Immediately prior to the commencement of the the Goo-Tube Era, conditions were even more unpredictable than currently from the perspective of optimizing the creative and social value of Web2.0, the locomotive of digital media then and now.
There were and, to some extent still continue, more than fifty sites we call “the raw and unfiltered …” sites: the “aggregators” of online video content of which YouTube is now clearly the largest, the “Rome” of the online video Empire. We call these sites “the raw and unfiltered …” simply because their content fits the description. More specifically, the Raw and the Unfiltered Sites presented and present three main kinds of video: what we call …
The Theater of Idiocy and Pain
The Promise of Porn
Other Items of Possible Interest (online tutorials, videos for special interests, music videos of the most prominent and the most obscure, etc.)
Collectively, these Three mainly comprise the Raw and Unfiltered. The Mission of Burning Shorts (including its offspring Flaming Arrows and now the introduction of “Stray Bullets”) is to hunt–with more desperation than a wild, starving prospector in the Sierras hunting for gold in a white-out blizzard–for media-defining greatness in original online video-digital expression.
Traffic to Burning Shorts, from its start in the relative “antiquity” of Early 2006 to the present, has climbed always, often with sharp peak upon peak of volume … and without any “SEO” of “SMO” rigging of any kind. Even more unpredictably, traffic continued to climb dramatically during the Burning Shorts (editorial) Hiatus of 2009-1010. The Hiatus was due to many factors, including an apparently stale period of creativity online during the Hiatus as the action shifted from video screen to corporate antics including mergers and other off-screen zany antics the rich and powerful use to consolidate control of media. Yes, the corporate antics continue … and, yet, the Providentially encouraging sign of relentlessly surging traffic here demand our return to action.
As we, at Burning Shorts, proudly declare: “Always ready: Never prepared!” So truly, due to popular demand and love in our hearts that never dies for the goodness of creative expression, we are back in action, with greater intensity than ever before in our history.
At the same time, our Past Issues, we hope and believe, offer much more than an archive of old content. Rather, they offer the best of the best, and, as importantly, one contemporary, collective report from the Front of online creativity, commencing at the beginning until the present.
Here, then, are all issues that are Burning Shorts from inaugural issue to the present: Both for historical and creative design, we identify these issues and this era of the history of Burning Shorts as “Volume One”. Given combined historical and creative aims in the Issues of Volume One, we present Past Issues – VOLUME ONE in chronological order rather than the more common site/blog convention of reverse chronology. We hope chronology may lead the most inquisitive to experience Burning Shorts, Volume ONE, in one organic whole to date … At the same time, we celebrate the post-linear approach to artistic experience, so Past Issues are presented to be beheld, above all, in the order you, our cherished visitor, chooses freely.