Patrick Beeson

Fellow Scripps Project Manager Casey Peters and I submitted a "Rickroll" for the second chapter round on the collaborative video Web site Rootclip. It didn't win.

Creating the video

Casey and I hadn't intended to submit a video to Rootclip until the day before the second chapter window closed. There was only one other entry at the time, and I had a great idea involving one Rick Astley.

We created the entire video in the span of three hours, which included shooting, editing and post-production. The video was done courtesy Casey's Flip camera given to him by KnoxTube.

Since time was a factor, we shot each scene at our apartment complex. The Rootclip rules suggest a one-minute length, which made for some concise shots -- it's really hard to edit that tightly. Some of the running shots originally ran 30 seconds.

I was initially concerned about the editing process because we didn't have any software save for Window's Movie Maker. This turned out to be surprisingly robust. Add to this the Rick Astley clip gleaned from YouTube -- it's dead simple grabbing FLVs from YouTube -- and an accompanying soundtrack featuring NIN and Mr. Astley.

Unfortunately, the voting process on Rootclip didn't pan out so well.

Voting irregularities

Casey submitted the video an hour or two before launch. I promptly sent out a number of Tweets to illicit views before voting began. Facebook wall-spamming followed shortly thereafter.

We managed to collect a number of votes the first day, but it tapered off towards the deadline. This wasn't the case with the other two submissions ("Chase" and "The Persian Connection"). Both floated in our territory for a while then collected a huge number of votes throughout the weekend and into the final day of voting.

The result: Our video had 39 votes, while The Chase won with a staggering 123 votes. Persian was two short with 121 votes.

How did this happen despite leveraging the awesome power of Rick Astley? Because I know that many people can't hate the Rickroll, right?

It could be that some rogue voters registered a number of "faux users" for the sole purpose of increasing votes for their favorite submission. This is an unfortunate abuse of sites that use an open user-registration system, of which there are many across the Web, including Google and Yahoo!.

We see similar abuse at some of the Scripps sites by users bent on posting comments that harass other users (there is a solution in place at most sites).

Rootclip's back-end is built in Django. The user app is out of the box, and the registration app is the django-registration project, which works by requiring a username and password that can be confirmed by clicking a link contained in an email sent to the address used.

This means someone need only to create an email address for the sole purpose of creating a user and in turn, adding a vote or comment to a particular video.

I don't know that either the winner of Rootclip's chapter two or the runner-up benefited from this voting technique. Heck, maybe everyone just hates Rick Astley, which is a very real possibility.

And I know for a fact that Rootclip's creators/my coworkers, Erik Luchauer and Kevin Antoine, are some admirable guys.

But despite my and Casey's loss, I think Rootclip has one of the best concepts for leveraging user-contributed video on the Web in a creative manner. Who knows, I might make another Web video appearance in chapter three.

Only this time without Rick Astley.