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Matt created the first video in Sep/Oct 2004, on his own. Thought it was funny to upload a video of himself dancing. It was a smash. Stride Gum heard about it (Cadburys?) and asked him to make another one. He finished it last month.

Did they make you chew gum on your trip?
They didn’t make me do much of anything. They are very good people.
Did they tell you where to go?
Nope. They said, and I’m quoting here:
“We like what you’re doing. We want to help you. We don’t want to mess with you.”
These words charmed me, and they stayed true to them.
Did they edit the video for you? Nope. I came home, put it together, sorted the music out, and slapped it up on the internet. That was pretty much it.
Like I said: good people.

Smart people, actually. Stay outta da way.

How do you arrange your travel?
I used STA Travel to book most of the flights for both trips. They specialize in backpacker-style travel and can get you pretty much anywhere. They also have branches all over the planet in case you get into trouble. Booking online is fine for normal domestic travel, but when you’re heading to Botswana, you need to talk face-to-face with an expert.

Can you recommend a brand of guide books? I use Lonely Planet. I’ve strayed in the past; Rough Guide often has better maps, other smaller brands are more likely to have the out-of-the-way places. But I always come crawling back to LP’s simple, efficient format. I just find that I’m able to get to what I want to know a lot quicker and more reliably than with any other books. There are certainly improvements that could be made, and the books for some regions are better than others just because they’re written by so many different authors. But the bottom line is that Lonely Planet gets my endorsement. They’re the biggest and the best.

Missed opportunities? Add Qantas to that list.

Can my band make the music for your next video? Highly doubtful. But I can’t stop you from slapping whatever soundtrack you want on there and making your own version. It’s the internet. Anything is possible.

Matt understands the power of the mashup.

Here are a bunch of mashups, take-offs, satires, tributes, fanmash, whatnots. Where The Hell is Ashley? In a laundromat. A snail’s response to where the hell is matt .. in the garden.

Anyway, just a short sharp sweet braindump there. The community that has built up around Matt is very interesting, the potential endless. But I have an appointment now. *waves* Oh one more thing – something strange is happening to a video I uploaded over a month ago to YouTube – it’s going ballistic. I’ll check again later, but there’s been 2,000 views in the last hour and I’m getting bombarded with YouTubes auto-email of “a comment has been made”. I’ll check into it and let you know what is happening soon.

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