The revenge of talent

No doubt I already spend too much time on the internet, but I nevertheless managed to miss Dave Carroll's rise to internet celebrity status. You can read the full backstory in the Toronto Star's United loses luggage of "United Breaks Guitars" guy. Oh, and the video the article links to is worth its four minutes for the humor alone, not to mention the band's talent.

While you're watching the video (should you decide to watch it), understand that you're staring into the eyeballs of a sea change in corporate public relations. Yeah, there's a whole lot of noise out there, and there will be more all the time as Google (the owner of YouTube) and its competitors bring more servers online every hour. But talent wins. Talent with humor wins bigger. Because we not only like to laugh, but we also like to make other people laugh, and forwarding an internet video's URL is almost as frictionless as it gets for doing that.

Major props to Mr. Carroll and crew for their most entertaining revenge. Not least of all because it actually turned into a net win career-wise. But in the larger scheme, it forced a big, faceless corporation to notice someone it would have been able to scrape off the bottoms of its shoes in a pre-web world.

So rock on, Dave Carroll...however that translates in the country music world.