I want one of these:

You can get it for me from the Tenori-On website for a mere $1200. Not so much when you consider how long it's been since you bought me a gift.

My favourite web series is back for it's second season:

Thanks to Robbo for giving me the heads up. I'm happy to report that Donnie Hoyle is as bitter as ever. One of these days, I may have to get Photoshop to try out some of what I've learned.

Take Me Back, the web series by "Joe and Seth"; Joe Baron and Seth Mendelson is a mysterious, moody feature mascarading as a 10 part web series. It's very entertaining; beautifully shot with a haunting score and very nice performances.

The shape of the story leant itself reasonably well to the kind of episodic storytelling that the traditional webisode web series wants. Storywise there's one big secret held back through the whole thing and as a viewer you keep pushing through to see it revealed. But nothing too much happens in either of the two major storylines that run parallel throughout. I thought the love story was particularly unsuccessful since Al is so passive through it. It makes the final reveal in episode 10 unbelievable. But that's a retrospective criticism. Watching the series was a pleasant way of spending an hour and a half of an afternoon.

And that leads to my other thought about the series. It's smart, entertaining, well shot, well acted etc etc, but it isn't a great use of the medium. This is more a case of the web serving the filmmakers than some creative types making great use of the web.

For Joe and Seth, the web gives them an inexpensive way to get their work to a large audience. They have shot what amounts to a low budget feature. It't feature length. Even though it's presesnted in ten "episodes", it's just one long story. And now that all the epsiodes are up on the net, you may as well watch it in a single sitting, making it more like a feature than ever.

Even the web site is very simple, offering opportunities to comment, but no forum or discussion area and very little in the way of a blog.

So Take Me Back is nice piece of entertainment that's worth your time, but it's not the great white hope when it comes to the future of drama on the web.

According to Judy Berman writing for Salon:

If you're an oversexed teen, a harried parent or a frustrated office worker, you are well represented on prime-time television. But if you're a 20-something, like me, you are out of luck. For some reason, the networks just aren't scripting shows about us -- which seems strange, given that networks live and die by their success with the 18-to-34 demographic.

According to Berman, forsaken by the networks, the post-college set has turned to the Web for revealing shows (full-frontal coed nudity!) about people just like them. Her article Where the 20-somethings are has great links to a number of "internet TV" series, including Young American Bodies, We Need Girlfriends and iChannel.

I didn't go to the Banff Barbeque on Wednesday night. After days of pitching and hand shaking and card exchanging, I was longing for some alone time.

I got multiple cell calls from Tunnel Mountain telling me what a great party it was with delicious food and bands that had everyone up dancing. But I pulled on my new TV, eh ball cap and went out to explore the awesomeness that is Banff National Park.

I followed the Spray River to where it meets the Bow River and then went back up the Bow to the falls. It was a gorgeous night. Just the right temperature and the sky was finally clearing after a day of drizzle mixed with rain.

There are a lot of places in the world you could choose to live and some of them are probably better places to make a living if you're a storyteller. But as I sat on a rock at the edge of the river and stared up at Bow Falls, flanked by fir trees with the majesty of snow covered rocky mountains rising up behind it, I remembered why I have never been tempted to leave this country.

The NextMedia08 conference ended yesterday and I’m continuing on in Banff to spend the next few days at the Banff Television festival so the fun isn’t over. But I’m sad that Next is over. I really enjoyed it.

#nm08 has been the best new media conference I’ve been to this year. The panels were great and the environment was warm and enthusiastic. A lot of people with experience were spending lots of time advising anyone who asked. It was easy to make great contacts.

But what I really want to talk about is the Nokia n95 phone give-away because it illustrates many of the things we talk about when we talk about using the web’s social spaces.

For those of you who weren’t there, Deborah Day stood up during lunch on Saturday partly to promote Just Comedy and partly to announce that Nokia was giving away four really great phones over the course of the conference. One of the guys at my table Riel Roussopoulos got really excited. He’d been lusting after that phone for months and hadn’t been able to get his hands on one. Deb told us that the first phone would be given away right now to the owner of the oldest, grungiest phone.

Now, at the time we were in a huge booming room filled with dozens of big round tables – the ones that are so big that talking to the person across from you is hopeless. You have to content yourself with the people on either side. But suddenly everyone was pulling out phones and comparing them. Somehow the gulf across the table didn’t seem so big. And that’s because we had something in common, something to talk about. And that is how this little four part contest helped turn the nm08 participants into a community.

It was kind of cool because this little phone give-away was suddenly resembling what we do try to do with our digital projects: create community by starting conversations. And like much of what we want to do with new media, it was built around a brand. And in a pretty ideal way, I think.

Nokia was central to the experience but there was no need for Deb or Gavin McGarry or their fellow NextMedia ambassadors to do a sales job. The community took care of that. I had barely exchanged names with the people across from me at the beginning of lunch, but by the end Riel’s love affair with that phone had made us into friends and he did a better job selling the phone than any ad could, which is another one of those big social networking ideas: You don’t need to sell the product once you’ve built community. The community will do the job for you.

And here’s another classic new media lesson brought to life by the phone give-away: you can’t control community. The nm08 participants got to vote on how two of the phones were given away and their/our choices were unexpected. We were told that one phone would go to the person who offered the five NextMedia ambassadors the best bribe. Riel was so mad for the phone that he went far. He offered all the judges a free web site design, free web hosting for a year and -- courtesy of his lawyer wife, Juliet Smith, of Fraser Milner Casgrain -- an hour of time with an entertainment lawyer. For each of the five ambassadors. A sure win, right?

It would have been if I was deciding and probably if the five judges had kept the decision to themselves. But instead they turned to the community, introducing what they called the top bribes: Riel’s, an offer of an hour of free hypnotherapy and an offer to make a poster for each judge turning them into superheroes from Matt Toner of Zeroes 2 Heroes. I forget the fourth choice but you get the idea.

The contest was supposed to be for the best bribe, but the community for whatever reason, chose to go another way. They gave the phone to Matt Toner.

But these things happen when the community is involved, you give up control and maybe if you’re one of the ambassadors you have to give up your shot at a free web site design. But you do get something back in return. You get community which is an awesome and powerful force.

If I were Nokia, I’d be over the moon about that give-away. If I were Deb Day and the rest of the organizers, I’d be pretty chuffed about creating such an effective low-tech event at a high tech conference. And as one member of the newly created community, I’m delighted by the lesson and totally engaged.

The only real loser in all this was Riel and if Nokia is smart they'll find a phone for him and give it to him because frankly he's the best salesman for that phone they could ever find.

We're pairing our television writing and production experience with our love for the web, finding new ways to entertain audiences. Our stories will bear some resemblance to television drama and comedy series, but we'll roll them out very differently.

Our characters blog. They have profiles on sites like Bebo and MySpace. They use Twitter, upload photos to Flickr and bookmark sites they like on Del.icio.us. They are video bloggers and podcasters.

Their stories emerge through their activity on these platforms, day-by-day. Each blog post, video or status update is like a scene in a movie or book. It is a couple of minutes of entertainment, providing you with a laugh, an emotional hit or a story beat.

Story2.OH digital drama is meant to be enjoyed at your computer, which might mean you're at work or school. And there's a very good chance it's during the day. It's that extra something to do besides checking your email and playing a game of solitaire. It comes in chunks just the right size to keep you entertained while you're on hold or in the few moments that you have to kill before a meeting starts or or during an afternoon procrastination break.

A handful of new story chunks are posted daily, through out the day, giving our digital dramas a sticky-twitchy quality to keep you coming back, over and over, day after day.

Between chunks of story, you'll find our characters are very friendly. They want to be your interactive fictional friends. They'll joke or even flirt with you, play Scrabulous, comment on your blog and participate in all kinds of web communities in meaningful, funny and entertaining ways.