11.06.07
Lessig on Copyright, Business, and Culture
From the 2007 Ted Conference:
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06.04.07
Death Star Crisis Management Video
So what happens when you combine the 30th anniversary of Star Wars being released in theaters, cheap stop motion technology, and a great script? Why, the Death Star Crisis Management Video! It’s something perfect for a Monday and finally answers my question – just how exactly did Darth Vader got picked up after the explosion.
05.25.07
ZeFrank on Creativity/Cultural Change
An excerpt with ZeFrank from CecilVortex:
I’ve also been thinking a lot about this culture of authorship that we’re entering into. You’ve got so many people that are making things now, whether it’s emails or instant messages or uploading images to Flickr, making movies, creating audio on cheap prosumer technology. What’s really interesting to me is that, as anyone knows who’s gone into a creative discipline, the second that you start doing those things, the world around you changes. If you draw, you start seeing the edges of things, and you start seeing the deformities of their shape when you move around them. When you start playing guitar, you start noticing notes in all the music you play, and in fact, the music that you listen to never sounds the same from that point on. I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that’s being produced right now. And I think it’s the wrong thing to look at. It’s actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world — that’s the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate.
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05.22.07
A Fair(y) Use Tale
When copyright critics need an example of everything that’s wrong with the current system Disney is nearly always mentioned. The company has been a leading advocate of extending the length of creative works despite having a foundation in open source fairy tales (Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). That’s why an enterprising person has put together this movie about appropriate fair use situations. Oh, and they used nothing but Disney clips to do so. Educational and oh so clever.
05.11.07
Gears of War: The Mashup Phenom
You might have heard of ‘Gears of War’. It, thus far, has been the premier title for next generation gaming. One of the most notable things about the game’s success was its marketing. Rather than have the traditional rain of empty slug casings over a throbbing techno beat ads featured the incredibly down tempo ‘Mad World’ (originally by Tears for Fears) with incredible in-game footage.
The ads hit a cord with gamers. The commercial quickly shot up the download charts at iTunes and launched a slew of user generated remixes, mashups, and homages. As Long Zheng writes on the istartedsomething blog it was a marketers wet dream. Mich Matthews is the Senior Vice President of Central Marketing at Microsoft:
Speaking at the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit, Mich was discussing the effects of building reach through information sharing by the customer. “The ideal campaign may get two times, four times, even ten times more of that reach via pass along and remixing.”
Mich’s comments, along with the original Gears of War ad, are in the embedded video:
The comments on Long’s board quickly keyed in on the cold, almost calculating nature of Mich’s comments. My response:
Planning for customer engagement does seem to be incredibly cold and calculating. It also seems to miss the point. People didn’t send time on mashups because the saw the commercial and thought “Wow, what a great brand to be associated with”. They contributed the time and effort the did because the commercial resonated with them. In the ad we see a war torn city. We hear the melancholy rendition of ‘Mad World’. Almost inevitably one’s mind draws parallels to our own troubled world. The song and images speak to our own fears and insecurities. The commercial fades out with the avatar of ourselves firing back at seemingly impossible darkness. What happened? Did he survive?
Mich can share all the information she wants with the customer. If all that’s there is something more to buy the effort will fail. The information must be an experience that reveals something more about ourselves.
If you want your content mashed up provide a profound experience. Speak to the human condition. And then let people tailor it to be their own. That’s how mashups get started.
Agree? Disagree?
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05.09.07
Social Media Excels at Silly Humor
Kevin Rose may have hit a bit of a legal bump with the Digg/HD-DVD fiasco. But despite the ‘Diggnation’ rising up and quite possibly forcing the social news website to close because of legal ramification they still love the spokesman – at least enough to take a offhanded bit of slang and remix it into numerous humiliating variations. The clip as it originally appeared:
Less than a week later we have Kevin Rose Trance mix:
and this lovely bit of electronica:
and then there’s this enterprising use that delivered exactly what Kevin wanted (squirrel and all):
For a moment lets suspend the reality of just how plug-n-play most generic electronic music vocals are. When people reach a certain amount of ‘Internet fame’ they simply hint that something should be done and there is some enterprising individual who will go out and make it happen. Steven Colbert has been plumbing the depths of viewer created content for some time (even going so far as to attempt an all out mass-made Google bomb). ZeFrank also turned his audience from passive viewers into content creators (which amplified his own efforts).
So we have legions of video editing, song writing, and prose typing people at the ready to make a gag. But why can’t we harness this same amount of creativity and passion for solving some of the world’s problems? Is it much easier to agree on humor than on the proper course for famine relief? Or does the weight of such ’serious’ causes turn content creation from fun into work?
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04.23.07
The Burg; Niche Online Sitcom
Television weekends for those of us without cable are very slim pickings. This time of year the networks are either airing the latest golf, nascar, or infomercial ‘event’ to fill time until the workweek prime time. Its a situation that has repeatedly driven me online to find my entertainment. This weekend the latest expedition came up big: I discovered The Burg.
No, this isn’t a civil war drama set in Williamsburg, VA – this is Williamsburg, NY. And, like most things from said city, the characters believe the world revolves around their little pocket of shoddy apartments and weekend antics. However, with writing this sharp and situations this funny we can forgive them for their narcissism. Each episode runs around 10-15 minutes in length and some episodes do contain profanity (no blaring at work – you’ve been warned). That said the Burg has that kind of cool credibility that Friends always lacked – and are all that much more fun to watch because of it.
Would a show like this been possible even five years ago? With broadband just reaching penetration its doubtful. The Burg could very well be a harbinger for great things to come: online only, real to the core, and damn proud of it.
The Burg, episode 9: the 90’s:
02.04.07
Doctorow on CC Licensed Stories
Cory Doctorow, sci fi author and contributor to Boing Boing has an interview up with the people at Forbes. In it he talks about the positive effect releasing his material under the Creative Commons license has had for his work:
Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.
The thing about an e-book is that it’s a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation–when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were “My friend suggested I pick up….” The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.
Cory’s writings, free for download, can be found on his site Craphound.com.
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01.25.07
New Term: Content Jockey
While reading the SpreadShirt Blog I came across a brand new term: content jockey, which leads to another term called ‘Reahmicks’. What is a content jockey?
Reahmicks.us is a pacific movement of people also known to be content jockeys (CJs), meaning they remix anything that needs to be remixed to fit their needs: existing content, situations, words, images, music, jobs, projects, disciplines, homes, lifestyles, clothes, timezones, languages, definitions, and whatelseÂ… of course, themselves – in their personal as well as professional life. The word “reahmicks” is a remixed variant of the word “remix”.
Personally, I think ‘Reahmicks’ is a little to close to ‘Rednecks’ for me to comfortably use it myself but its an interesting movement. But is there something better than Reahmicks?
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