In last Friday’s FilmCouch, Paul and I spent some time talking about Internet video, particularly the excellent web show by Rob Parrish, Next to Heaven. We didn’t have time to mention it in the show, but I wanted to highlight another innovative use of self-published web video, (what I believe to be) the only indy web reality show, UrbanHonking’s Ultimate Blogger. Blogging challenges were issued in video segments, complete with reality TV staples like hard-won immunity against being “voted off the Internet.” Ultimate Blogger is essentially an elaborate art project connecting disparate groups of hipsters who are finding innovative ways to use blogging as a creative medium.

Before I go on I should mention that I was a contestant in Ultimate Blogger 3, as a member of team G-RAD, which represented G-RAD.org, a community site/blog-hub based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. G-RAD has been influenced in many ways by UrbanHonking. I also have to mention that we won, which is very exciting to me.

More after the jump…

My only real problem with Ultimate Blogger is with the challenge videos. The hosts of the show, Mike and Steve, decided to take a behind-the-scenes-look approach, documenting their apparent struggles to make each video. While this scores a few points for being “meta,” it leaves the viewer with painfully long, poorly acted arguments before getting to the content of the segment. They brought in a series of guest directors for each video, whose work tended to be quite good, if it weren’t buffered by ten minutes of making-of tedium.

As the season progressed, the videos got better. The behind-the-scenes drama became more believable, or at least more entertaining. Despite my misgivings about the editing of the videos, I think Ultimate Blogger is a really great experiment. Anyone who watches reality TV, or has stayed up all night working on a school assignment, is aware of the ways in which a tight deadline can affect creative output, both in positive and negative ways. I was often surprised by what the teams repeatedly accomplished in only three days or less.

The drama of the final episode leads me to believe that there will be no Ultimate Blogger 4, but I hope that’s not true. The concept and the format work pretty well, and I’d love to see the kinks ironed out. In terms of self-congratulatory hipster web projects, Ultimate Blogger is way more fun to follow than the typical cynical blog rant.