There are a few videos on YouTube that almost every Internet citizen has viewed, at least a few times, and a handful of those are from Matt Harding — aka the Bad Dancer — who travels the world and “does his little dance.” After picking up sponsorship from Stride Gum, Matt has been able to go on more trips around the world and film his dance with his online fans. And then release a book about everything behind the scenes.
Here’s the latest video of Matt in HD, featuring his bad dancing, along with the semi-bad dancing of many fans, in many inspirational locations throughout the globe. Over 20 million views can’t be wrong.
Back in 2003, when I built my first self-hosted blog at bubbo.com, I included a unique travel (or, Where the Hell is Mike?) section that could dynamically track my current position around the globe. You can still see it at http://michael.bubbo.com/upcoming but here’s a quick screenshot:
I’m thinking about adding a plugin to MichaelBubbo.com to achieve the same idea, due in part of the creativity and pure genius of Matt’s inspirational goal. I won’t be doing any bad dancing, but I would like to keep a visual journal of where I’ve been and where I am going. It would be neat to connect it with the built-in iPhone GPS feature, as soon as I jump onto the iPhone bandwagon.
I recommend you order a copy of Matt’s book, Where the Hell is Matt?: Dancing Badly Around the World, as you can still get the Hardcover Edition here for about $10 — well worth it for a reminder of true inspiration and passion for something that looks meaningless at inception, but turns into a world-wide phenom.
You can keep up with Matt’s travels at his website: wherethehellismatt.com
Get ahold of Matt’s book in hardcover edition: for about $10 from amazon.com
You can also download the great music from the video: for $1 from amazon.com
Hi Michael,
Have you looked into the Skyhook plugin for Firefox? It enables some JavaScript functions that allow you to obtain geocoordinates. It’s the same WPS (Wifi Positioning System) that’s licensed to iPhone to compliment its CoreLocation services. You could run a local HTTP server that posts articles to your blog with the coordinates. What do you think?
Schien
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Hi Schien,
Thanks for the comment!
As I am not yet an iPhone user… I had no idea about Skyhook and the accompanying Loki service. You are quite right about running a local server that posts articles based on the coordinates of either my WiFi laptop or a new iPhone. I am really tempted to get one of those new iPhone 3G S now…
The iPhone or laptop could push the coordinates (whenever I push “update location” on a script) to a database on the web server, which would then be running a cron job every half hour or so. It could then automatically update an XML file that would display my past/current/future locations, all plotted on a Google map for a neat mashup effect. Each pinpoint on the map could have a color that reflects each status. Plus, it could integrate a backlink or URL that allows people to comment, by creating a WordPress post for each event or location.
I’d have to hash out all the details, but those are just some ideas that could work.
Michael
P.S. Skyhook + Loki is awesome, thanks for pointing it out Schien!
How do we use these backlinks?