Best. Video. Blog. Ever.

By Adam | Published: October 28, 2008

OK, admittedly, this is a professional video editor from New York who went on a European road trip and made a 5 minute-long video cutdown of his holiday. With that said, Justin’s video shows what can be done with simple tools and the power and democracy of the medium.

Justin’s Website is onetrick.net.

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And… We're Not So Back

By Adam | Published: September 8, 2008

 

LOLA - The London Ontario Live Arts Festival

Well, it’s kind of funny really – the best laid plans of mice and men and all of that. There has been SO much that I’ve wanted to blog about, but in between preparing for my class, working on my book, and of course the LOLA Festival, I’ve hardly had the time. Fear not, I will return soon with my thoughts on Chrome, thoughts on frameworks for monetizing digital content, and, of course, many other thoughts on the state of our technocultural union.

 

In the meantime, please check out www.lolafest.com for show times, artist and band bios and, during the festival, live streams and up-to-the-minute photography and videos.

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And We're Back

By Adam | Published: August 20, 2008

As many are aware, I’ve left EK3 to focus on teaching, writing, and personal projects full time. That will also mean more frequent blog postings.

Leaving EK3 was a tough decision. There are many great people there, and the work that’s being done in those offices on York St. is truly innovative and exciting; Yet, there are so many other areas, especially in the realm of technoculture and eCommerce that have piqued my interest, and I just wasn’t going to be able to explore them while still spending my full-time day at EK3.

So, here I am. I’m mapping out the next three months, and well, given what I’ve got on my plate, it’s a pretty good thing I left my job, because I wouldn’t have time to do it all otherwise. Now to figure out how to get paid for it…

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In Your Face(book) Spam

By Adam | Published: August 19, 2008

Advertising media – the term for the way that ads get put in front of us – is a little like water in that it will insidiously seep into every part of our lives. Marketers, having recently discovered the Long Tail and the viral network effects of social engineering, are also looking at ways to optimize two things:

The ratio between the amount they spend and the number of people who see each ad
The ratio between the number of people who see each ad and the number of people that take action based on the ad’s content

So far, the bottom-feeders have thus far stuck to malware, spam spim (instant and text messages), sporge and other nefarious but cheap shotgun approaches to marketing.

So perhaps I naively wanted to believe that my precious Facebook addiction would be immune to the unpleasantness of viral hoaxes and spam. I deleted my Friendster account for no greater reason than I despised the marked uptick in people I didn’t know who suddenly wanted to become my ‘friend’ because they ‘liked my pic.’ Myspace has had its share too, but for some reason, it seemed I had remarkably fewer ‘drive-by requests’ there than on Friendster.

But Facebook seems to have dodged the dodgy friend request bullet.Perhaps it IS widespread, but we never hear about it because invisible Facebook thought police nip it in the bud before most people get harassed. Whatever the reason there have been three incidents in the last week that make me think that Facebook’s spam-free gravy train is over.

First, a former co-worker posted a note to my wall that went something like this:

SOMEONE HAS A CRSH ON YOU!

WANNA FIND OUT WHO IT IS?

http://****************.blogspot.com

THIS IS A GREAT, ITS SO ACCURATE!

Despite early indications that I was being targeted for a set-up by my friend, a quick peek at her profile shows that I wasn’t the only one to get this message. Instead, virtually her entire contact list got their respective walls sprayed with this advert (for a dating site) and each one carried with it a unique address (for tracking purposes, I’m sure). Perhaps the most understanding and gracious response to these spam-posts was “looks like something’s got a hold of your account, huh?” indicating a (likely) application that is running wild (and violating their Facebook ToS, I’m sure).

A few days later, this arrived in my inbox from my teen-aged cousin:

Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record (sic) shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And (sic) on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages (sic) around to see if the
Members (sic) are active or not,If (sic) you’re active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The (sic) user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then
send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerber (sic)

Obviously this didn’t come from Mark Zukerber, or even Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not dissimilar to the (relatively) harmless hoaxes I get in my inbox every so often incenting people to get their share of Microsoft’s billions, or participating in an experiment for Yahoo!. Meant as cruel, viral jokes on the uniformed, these juvenile excursions into social engineering are really just that – trivial exploits that are more time-wasting annoyances than actual threats.

But then something else happened. I got a friend request from someone I’d been to school with 20 years ago. We knew each other moderately well, had a few friends in common and I certainly recognized his name when the friend request popped up; So, I accepted. Within 12 hours (12!) This newly-found-again friend had posted an offer for free ringtones on my wall. I explored the possibilities in my mind: Could this be the real guy, or perhaps someone masquerading as a friend to gain entry to a social network so that he could spam it? Are people really that desperate, or am I really that paranoid?

In any case, I quickly un-friended him in order to stop any possible future wall posts.

Social networking is simply an optimization of our collective communities, and it is this optimization that the so-called social networking sites are taking most advantage of. As that optimization becomes increasingly automated, it’s only natural that the liquid-like nature of advertising media will find similar optimizations and efficiencies by capitalizing on the platform’s automation.

Facebook needs to quickly look at how this is happening and close off the trickle before it becomes a torrent. If there’s one thing that could really kill that user experience, it’s spam.

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A Break In Blogging

By Adam | Published: August 8, 2008

I have been noticeably slow in posting and blogging lately due to some personal circumstances that are on the cusp of being resolved (everything’s fine, just making some life choices). I will resume blogging in a week or two.

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Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog

By Adam | Published: July 24, 2008


“Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.”
- From Dr. Horrible’s Master Plan

Yes it’s true – Joss Whedon has published a completely silly, but very entertaining mini-series. Conceived and produced during the writer’s strike last year, The video blog is more TV than Internet, but one can see where it draws its inspiration from in the first few seconds. For Joss Whedon, WWW stands for “Well Worth Watching” (just trying to make my level of cheeziness consistent with his).

It’s not genius, but it is fun. Moreover, it’s a great example of traditional, old media TV style entertainment working its way into the new media in a very unpretentious way.

Update: Variety explains the ‘nefarious plot’ of Whedon et al this way:

“The ‘Web miniseries,’ as Whedon dubs it, made a big splash in its debut over three days last week as a free streaming option on the Web or paid download via Apple’s iTunes. But now comes the really tricky part: Turning ‘Dr. Horrible’ from a one-trick supervillain into a profitable franchise (think DVD release, soundtrack, merchandise, live events and, of course, a sequel or two) wholly owned by its creators.

Whedon’s gambit is the most high-profile example of a movement under way among Hollywood scribes to harness the marketing and distribution power of the Internet for their own creative (and moneymaking) ends, sidestepping the major studios and networks in the process.”

You can read the full article here, or visit Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog for more info (sadly, however, you’ll have to buy the miniseries if you watched it on the first go-round).

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Jennifer Aniston's Sweater: Part Deux

By Adam | Published: July 22, 2008

Filed under the “Too important not to blog but kind of meh news” department comes word that TiVo has hooked up their TV service to Amazon’s eCommerce services. In what appears to be a move towards t-commerce, real-time merchandising is now a reality. Let’s start with some history:

Jennifer Aniston’s Sweater refers to a concept whereby a viewer, enjoying some random episode of the hit show Friends (I said it was history), takes a hankerin’ for the sweater Jennifer Aniston is sporting. Deciding that they must have said sweater, they click a button on their remote, highlight Jennifer’s Sweater on the TV, click “Buy” on their remote, and ‘poof,’ it shows up at their house within 48 hours.

This concept got a lot of play in the late 90′s as Web-based TV startups DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) and Pseudo.Com sought to use technologies such as the (at the time) ubiquitous to “stream” postage stamp-sized video through people’s web browsers. The sites ran up huge cost deficits (bandwidth actually overshadowed production costs, if that can be believed), and both shuttered even before the dot-com bubble burst, despite sponsorship deals from Starbucks and other mainstream ‘engagement-focused’ brands. Before they shut down, and desperate for monetization models, DEN and Pseudo were also trying to find other ways to offset production and (more urgently) distribution costs and tried adding eCommerce to their offerings. It didn’t work.

Seeing the Internet as a tremendous threat to their share of leisure time, the entertainment industry was beginning to panic about finding ways to extend value into these new, interactive networks. ABC bought the InfoSeek and GoTo.com portals, rebranding the new mix as go.com. NBC picked up Snap.com in 1998 to launch them into the online world, and had already forged the MSNBC partnership to bridge their news offerings across Web and TV.

When it came to iTV (Interactive TV), the idea was simple: Split this new way of consuming TV into two categories. There was iTV, or single screen interactive Television, and there was eTV, or enhanced “Two-screen” Television, where viewers would watch shows on their normal Plain Old TV, and enjoy synced content on a laptop or other computer in the same room. Only CBS, under the stoic and visionary leadership of Sumner Redstone and Les Moonves stayed out of the fray while ABC, NBC and FOX all sought to use fragile 3rd party technologies such as Wink.

The short of it is that all the networks ultimately tried to find mechanisms to create eCommerce revenue opportunities. Partly fueled by its eCommerce experimentation, NBC bought ValueVision and rebranded it ShopNBC, hoping to buy into a streamlined eCommerce/operationally endowed organization it could integrate against. CBS did some of their own testing, but to give you an indication if its lack of success, this is what was what the New York Times said in July of 1999:

CBS sold thousands of copies of its ”Joan of Arc” video on cbs.com after broadcasting the mini-series last month, said Dana McClintock, a spokesman. On a broader level, the network’s stakes in Internet companies like Sportsline and Hollywood Online ”will provide an array of opportunities” in E-commerce, Mr. McClintock said.

”Right now, those opportunities are few and far between,” he added, ”but in the future there will be a lot of them.”

ABC tried to do the same thing in 2002 with Shop The Soaps (an effort in which I was intimately involved). HSN and ABC struck a deal that saw Daytime soap writers adding products to their narratives (mostly jewelry and some apparel). When the commercial break hit, ABC produced a 15 second sting designed to drive traffic to an eCommerce site linked from ABC.com. The promise was that viewers could ‘become part of the story’ by purchasing whatever it was that was revealed on the show.

One would think that this particular audience would be primed for this offer, but the site didn’t do enough revenue to even cover the cost of the 15 seconds of airtime we displaced with the promotional message.

With all of this said, people do buy stuff from TV. HSN and QVC combined represent about $7Billion US in sales, with about 15% of that generated from their Website. By contrast, according to eMarketer, eCommerce as a whole, excluding travel, generated around $130Billion during 2007 in the US alone.

So if TV viewers are buying stuff, why hasn’t this worked in the past? To start, HSN, QVC and ShopNBC viewers are watching with the intention of at least considering a purchase. Most viewers watching a TV show for entertainment aren’t really in that mindspace. Even interactive TV experiences such as what Wink offered in the early part of the decade were largely ignored by most folks, which is one of the primary reasons it hasn’t been incorporated into the richer experiences of iTV today.

See if this sounds familiar(TiVo Press Release):

“Product Purchase adds a whole new dimension to the TV viewing experience,” said Evan Young, Director of Broadband Services for TiVo Inc. “By teaming with Amazon.com, TiVo enables viewers to purchase products related to their favorite TV shows or that they’ve seen in TV ads without leaving their couch. For example, if a guest on the Daily Show or Oprah has a new book, CD, or DVD out, you can purchase it on Amazon.com using your TiVo remote without missing a second of TV, whether the viewer is watching live or recorded. The viewer with an impulse can buy right away and no longer needs to remember to do so the next time they are at their PC. Television advertisers and consumer products companies are no longer limited to the traditional linear shopping channels that require live viewing for product merchandising and fulfillment — if their product is seen or advertised on any TV show or network, and sold by Amazon.com it can be merchandised to viewers through TiVo.”

“Starting today, TiVo will launch the new service to consumers by merchandising products related to several high profile shows, including but not limited to The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Colbert Report, and Burn Notice.”

What’s not mentioned there is what ArsTechnica points out:

[TiVo] devices are, after all, in only about 4 million households.

While the technology has changed slightly – the ease of real-time payment is a big one, as is the innovation TiVo provides by ‘pausing’ a show while the transaction is completed, the mental model that consumers have regarding their leisure time and entertainment consumption hasn’t. I will be anxious to see how this pans out; However, the short of it is that I don’t believe in the transactionalized entertainment model. All my experience suggests that people watch TV to be entertained. That said, I believe that people will someday shop through their televisions, as they will through all internet enabled devices, but shopping by narrative hasn’t worked on the Web, nor has it worked on TV. I don’t think it will for the foreseeable future.

Read
ArsTechnica Analysis
New York Times Analysis

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The Super-Super Star

By Adam | Published: July 14, 2008

From armchair quartebacking to gossiping about celebrities and neighbors alike, the vast majority of people in the world love to talk about other people. It’s a way of connecting to something universally shared, and of expressing opinions that can be well thought through, well reasoned, emotionally conceived or even passionately regarded. In any of these cases, the opinion is ultimately empty, because nothing will stop the celebrity from being a celebrity.

Celebrities are our new royalty, a broad swath of Dukes and Duchesses, Earls and Ladies, Princes and Princesses, and Kings and Queens that hold their ceremonial positions at the pleasure of their popularity, and whose influence is as powerless as the opinions that swirl around them.

Perhaps first in line for the Hollywood throne are the power-couple known as Brangelina. Their love affair(s) have captured the hearts and minds of many on the planet, and when word came of Angelina’s pregnancy, followed shortly by Jack Black’s Twin slip during a junket for Kung-Fu Panda, the world held its breath for the birth of these ‘divine’ children. And when it came time to sell the rights to the photographs of the royal offspring, an as-yet-unnamed U.S. magazine paid US$11 Million for the privilege of first-run publication.

$11 Million. Let me type that again, numerically this time: $11,000,000.

Is this an egregious sum of money to pay for photographs of two people’s newborn twins? Shall we all suck in our breath, aghast at how insane that number is? Not at all.

These magazine publishing guys aren’t stupid… If someone has agreed to pay that much money for some baby pictures, you can be damned sure that they’re going to make that money back, and then some.

But what does this have to do with a blog on technoculture? A LOT. The pioneers of the early internet long held the belief that the democratizing nature of a virtually free global publishing system was going to fracture our media space so much that anyone with talent and gumption could get their stuff seen by anyone else on the planet. Gone would be the days, they thought, of mega-media empires. The studio system might buckle under its own weight as increased competition for the entertainment mindspace of consumers around the world. Music, movies, news, TV, fiction, commerce, whatever – all would face stiff competition from users all over the world.

While internet video has presented us with a few new ‘stars,’ they have by and large either been either associated with Hollywood (LonleyGirl15) or about Hollywoord (“Leave her Alone” fanboy Chris Cocker). Moreover, they have largely been popularized through traditional media channels which are, for the most part, controlled by the same folks that control Hollywood.

But with new media continuing to fragment our content consumption into smaller and smaller niches, as McLuhan suggested, how does someone expect to make back their 11 Mill? This speaks to Dr. McLuhan’s most famous quote: The medium is the massage. In other words, the same content can be reformatted many times and repurposed into the different niches from the hit-driven popular media, all the way down the long tail.

While many will marvel and gawk at the famous-from-birth twins, and talk about what this will do to Brad & Angela’s marriage, some will sneer at the disgusting consumerist nation that gives light to this sort of thing, while still others will create mocking flash videos with the photos.

No matter what point of view each individual takes, they all have one thing in common: They are all essentially still commoners taking interest in their lords, and the aristocracy knows how to play this game.

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Michael Geist on Rogers' iPhone Plans

By Adam | Published: July 8, 2008

I’m travelling this week, but want to blog this story. I have specific thoughts about the real threat that wireless pricing and Bill C-61 have for Canadian industry, but for now, Michael Geist has written a great piece on Rogers’ plans…

Michael Geist – Canadians Face Triple Lock on Apple iPhone

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TED: Nicholas Negroponte On OLPC

By Adam | Published: June 27, 2008

MIT Media Lab founder and “Being Digital” author Nicholas Negroponte stopped by the EG conference last December to give a sort of status update on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project he’s been driving for the past two years. The project’s mandate is to create an inexpensive, durable and well-designed laptop that costs less than 100$ per unit for distribution in 3rd world countries and poverty-stricken communities.

The big message of the night had to do with for-profit sales of the OLPC in a program called Give One, Get One. Basically, buy a laptop for ~$400, and they’ll donate one on your behalf to a needy child somewhere. So, rather than suggest each person in the room buy one (there were about 300 people that were present), Negroponte suggested they use their mailing lists and tell all their friends.

In the spirit of that request, here’s the link for the Give One, Get One Website: http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php, and following through with Dr. Negroponte’s message, I ask you to do the same. Send this post (or the link), hit the digg link in the top right corner, even just mention it at that cocktail party you’re late for… Just get the word out.

WIth that plug in place, I have some other insights and thoughts after the video…

Marred by both skepticism and controversy (the CTO departed very publicly in March to start her own for-profit company “to commercialize OLPC’s technology, including the screen and battery“), Negroponte was back and re-focusing the message, starting with the benefits of being an NFP instead of a for-profit organization (as was widely advised before launch):

“The clarity of purpose is there; the moral purpose is clear. I can see any head of state, any executive I want, anytime because I’m not selling laptops.” 

The other nifty point he makes, and one that I personally dug, was that part of the user interaction design for the OLPC is to help children learn how to learn:

“Seymour [Papert] made a very simple observation in 1968… that children who write computer programs understand things differently, and when they debug the programs, the come the closest to learning about learning.” 

See the video on TED

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