Undead and Loving It I'm fascinated by the complexity of this. Every time I think about just staying in the financial comfort of corporate marketing (screw the useless Radio-TV-Film...
Music has always played an important role in my life, and one of the draws of moving to New York was the opportunity to experience brilliant artists live. Tonight, Mark Eitzel played with his band, American Music Club, at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, and the show was amazing. There may be more popular bands in town, but there aren’t any as great as AMC at their best.
Here’s a little AMC mixtape for those of you in the dark, and if you regret missing tonight’s show you can catch them at Mercury Lounge Sunday night — look for me there!
I’m speaking on the following panel tomorrow at PSFK Conference New York:
Tomorrow’s TV
How has digital changed the delivery, content, sponsorship and future of television? Florian Peters leads a panel of industry experts that includes Mike Hudack (Blip.TV), David Cohn (Vice TV), and Mike Monello (Campfire) discuss the opportunities and challenges.
This is a fantastic conference. Everywhere you go you meet smart, inspired thinkers from diverse backgrounds. The panels have been generally excellent, but this afternoon’s Social Media Metrics panel took a dive when the moderator didn’t um… join the conversation. About 30 minutes in, the discussion, advertised as intermediate level, was still covering the same old “you need to be engaging social media” ground when someone from the audience stood up and asked the panelists to get onto the metrics portion of the program. The moderator responded “we’ll get to that in a little bit,” and this was after trying to push his question off to the end. How very old-media.
The audience soon turned on the panel, and the energy in the large room turned dark. I had no idea what was going on until just now, reading through the back channel meebo chat log. From here on out, I’m bringing my laptop to everything.
Later this evening, I schooled Jeremiah in foosball before ducking into the World Premiere of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. The organizers wrongly placed it in their midnight section, but this isn’t a goofy cult oddity. Bigfoot is a touching character study of two best friends who are passionate about Bigfoot research and crave legitimacy for their work. It’s a fantastic documentary and worth seeking out at your local film festival. Check out the trailer below.
Tomorrow I plan on more panels, meetings, and BBQ!
Yesterday’s story about Mass Effect has hit the New York Times today, with pop Psychologist Cooper Lawrence apologizing for her ridiculous characterization of the game on Fox TV after gamers bombarded her book’s Amazon listing with 1-star reviews.
In an interview on Friday, Ms. Lawrence said that since the controversy over her remarks erupted she had watched someone play the game for about two and a half hours. “I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.
“Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,” she added. “But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”
Fox, on the other hand, has yet to issue a correction.
When Psychologist Cooper Lawrence admitted to never having played the X-Box game Mass Effect immediately after ranting against it’s “full digital nudity and sex” on Fox News, she probably didn’t expect gamers to bite back with a taste of her own medicine. Fans of the game immediately flocked to Amazon and slammed her book with 1-star ratings and negative tags. [via YesButNoButYes.com]
UPDATE: Amazon has removed over 400 customer reviews as well as all the customer tags, but enough negative reviews remain to keep the book’s score at 2 stars.
Let’s follow the journey of how one blogger’s MySpace rant spread across the net, led to an official comment from Fox Interactive Media, and has now become the subject of meta-discussions about what it all means to the blogosphere in just four short days.
January 23. 2008 - In a story about MySpace’s deal to host clips of BBC content on MySpace Video, Rebekah Horne, vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand is asked to comment on the meme:
One blogger has declared January 30th “International Delete Your MySpace Account Day”.
But MySpace doubts that this will have a great impact on their network.
“This Delete-Your-MySpace day is just about being controversial,” Ms Horne said.
“MySpace is still the biggest social networking site in the world.”
January 23, 2008, 11:39 PM - Simon blogs about the reaction and notes the story has also been picked up by MSNBC, which fuels more bloggers to post the story.
2) Find reasons to nitpick something, even if they all have easy fixes
3) Say something outlandish about how it should go away
4) Reap the backlinks and media attention of “outraged” members of the blogosphere
5) Hit mainstream media as they always get amused when we dance like trained monkeys for them
We still have five more days to go, and Owens claims a wire service recently interviewed him so this story is still unfolding, and how far it goes remains to be seen.
The Library of Congress has just uploaded over 3000 images from their collection that have no known copyright restrictions to Flickr. The announcement today on the Library’s blog says:
The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.
The flickr folks are calling this a pilot for a new program, The Commons, with the stated goal of making the collections of public images more available as well as expanding the body of knowledge about the collections. It’s a fantastic start to a potentially amazing project.
Mashups are my favorite form of fan-created content, and it’s startling to me that the music industry has failed to come up with both a way to allow fans to make mashups as well as a system to monetize them. I guess when you put that much weight behind suing your customers, you don’t have much time to think about how to both encourage and benefit from their fandom.
Regardless of the RIAA’s wishes, 2007 was another great year for inventive mash-ups, and several DJ’s have put together “best of” compilations for free download. Put your high-speed connection to the test and fill your iPod with some illegal music.
First, there’s the always reliable Annual BootieUSA compilation Best of Bootie 2007. This is a continuos mix, and the perfect start for newbies.
The same network that sued YouTube was just caught stealing a copyrighted picture of a dog off of a blogger’s site, altering it slightly, and airing it in an NFL broadcast that itself was loaded with copyright warnings! [Link to full story at Sweatney.com, where I swiped the picture above to get all meta on you]
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given the potentially huge audience watching the broadcast of this stolen image and the photographer’s anger over the theft. [via boingboing.net]
It’s a nice example of how the music industry continues to both stifle innovation and leave huge amounts of money on the floor while using the courts to desperately hold on tight to the antiquated ways they’ve made money in the past.
Reznor’s post is a great read not just for his POV on the legal brouhaha but also for the way he approaches communications with his fans.
