It all started with Ed McMahon, but Farrah Fawcett died (albeit with some advance notice)… and then Michael Jackson met his sudden end…  And then Billy Mays… and now Karl Malden has passed on.  Is our 3-count down for the count? I suspect that it, like many of our superstitions, was more a matter of perception than of actual substance.  With that said, I believe that their proximity is of note.

Two things are at work here – and both of them have to do with great thinkers from the mid-century. The first is Andy Warhol’s prescient statement that everyone has, on average, 15 minutes of fame.  While this statement has come, for many, to mean that each and every person will have 15 minutes of fame, I’ve always understood the Warholian axiom to mean that fame averages out among the population.  For example, if there were only 6 people on the planet, and all of them knew me, but they didn’t know each other, then my 100% of fame would mean 15% fame for everyone, on average.

Said differently, if there are 6 Billion people on the planet, and each of us has 15 minutes of fame, that means that there is 90,000,000,000 minutes (or 1,500,000,000 hours, or 62,500,000 days, or 171,233 years) of fame to go around.  Now take a guy like Michael Jackson, who saw roughly 36 years of fame (from 14-50).  If we use him as an average ‘superstar’ and divide his fame-life (36) into the total number of fame years available (171,233) we wind up with 4757 people who can have as many fame-years as Michael did.  Obviously, there aren’t 4757 superstars like Michael Jackson, so in order to accommodate all the fame, we need to move from superstar to D-list (and cut down the fame-years for each appropriately). If you keep sub-dividing celebrity (and expanding the definition), you’ll ultimately end up at Warhol’s conjecture that if you take all the fame-time that is possible in life and divide it across all the people on the planet, you end up with 15 minutes per person.

In 1960, the global population was estimated at 3,039,451,023, a number expected to grow to 6,848,932,929 by next year (thanks infoplease).  This doubling of our population in 2.5 generations (and still within most folks lifetimes) means that the amount of fame-time available has also been amplified, meaning more celebrity is available… This is one root cause for the increase in celebrity deaths (and one reason why it’s going to get more pronounced).

To borrow on David Cronenberg’s insights regarding Warhol, Celebrity = Disaster(death) and Disaster(death) = celebrity.  In this way, a celebrity’s death is a disaster, and the death of anyone is a disaster that makes them a celebrity – consider that the only times not-so-notable people are mentioned in the Newspaper is for their obituary.

The other cause of the death of the ‘rule of three’ can be traced back to another mid-century titan: McLuhan.  The Electric Media that McLuhan predicted, manifested by the Internet, has created more niches and more opportunities for global promotion than any other innovation in history.  From Perez Hilton to Paris Hilton, the mechanisms for production and distribution have been democratized (to paraphrase Chris Anderson), and we now have more mini-celebrities than ever.  Take for example this week’s user-generated content work of Julia Bentley & Andrew Gunadie who, with a well-produced and toungue-in-Canadian-cheek internet video became national celebrities.

The point is, when everyone has so much access to fame-time, and whenever there is so much opportunity to distribute this fame, the number of celebrities, and the number of the celebrity deaths, will naturally increase.

Warhol and McLuhan were fare more morbid and prescient than we ever considered, an underestimation that can only end in disaster…

According to the site, PodCamp London is part of a collection of “Un-Conferences” that…

“…are an open community for new and social media enthusiasts and professionals including bloggers, podcasters, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media to share and learn. 

PodCamp isn’t just about podcasting! If you’re interested in blogging, social media, social networking, podcasting, video on the net, if you’re a podsafe musician (or want to be), or just someone curious about new media, then please join us — and bring a friend or colleague.”

Registration is free, but the event is out of tickets. There is a possibility they’ll open up some more, so keep checking this page for current info on registration and a list of current attendees.

See you there!

There’s been a lot made of the Facebook TOS update that came out a few days ago, specifically the exclusion of a line that had assured users that all content they’d posted to their profile would be deleted if they chose to cancel their account with the service. The idea is that if I leave Facebook, all my personal information would be deleted forever, and to the service, it would be as though I’d never existed. This TOS change has new been retracted, and, one would assume, any technical changes have been rolled back.

What’s at issue is that comments on photos and statuses, messages, links and even “Likes” that are ascribed to other profiles would then be deleted, and those – while trivial – are still “User Generated Content” (strictly speaking) with all the rights and affordances that entails. Indeed, that’s been what Facebook is claiming is the reason for the omission of the line that grants them the right to hang on to those materials, but I think there’s something else going on…

User-Generated Content must be “Future Proof” in order to have continuing value to the medium that carries it. In the past few months, YouTube has added a HD option to many videos. I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the video shown on my iPhone, and I’m told that those watching YouTube on AppleTV have seen similar improvements. This is all due to the fact that YouTube has retained the ‘original’ video files that were uploaded by users, even going back to the first ones. Thus, when they made the partnership with Apple (for example), they could re-encode all the videos as assets in a format iPhones and Apple TV’s could handle (i.e. not flash).

FlickR does the same thing, and one would presume that MySpace and Facebook are doing the same with all the content that is contributed into their systems.

Here’s the question: If I link to a video to share it with my friends (who presumably enjoy it) and they share it with their friends (assuming the privacy setting is appropriate), and I delete my account, shouldn’t that link to the video survive? It’s essentially ‘content’ that I’ve generated, even though I may not be the author of the original content, it’s link and the associated context I place it in, plus any comments I’ve made on it are effectively my content.

Facebook’s next big challenge will be how to distribute all this user-generated content into new devices and applications. Already, I can’t watch Facebook videos on my iPhone or someone else’s blackberry, and moreover, accessing any of the existing social networking features through the set-top devices (Walled gardens like XBOX360, PS3, AppleTV, Tivo, etc) is impossible.

Being able to access social networks through off-web devices is a fundamental and critical strategic consideration if social networks are to continue to have relevance in the next 5000 days of the Internet, and in order to do that, ensuring content can survive into each of these other mediums in perpetuity is a critical legal hurdle.