Tweet #treat.

Tweet #trick.

...wait and then more zombies populate your home page.

Today's Google logo:

Click on it:

Click again:

And again:

One more time:

Tweet #treat.

Tweet #trick.

...wait and then more zombies populate your home page.

Today's Google logo:

Click on it:

Click again:

And again:

One more time:

Toyota developed an iPhone app that lets you interact with the features of a new car they are selling. The app also has a sketching feature which was part of promo to get people to download the app. Users could put their iPhone sketches up on a Times Square Billboard. Pretty cool.

The billboard is live again tomorrow - October 30, 2009.

• Sustainable
• Potentially profitable
• It’s a growing industry, not a dying one
• Jobs
• Culture meets business
• Potential to reach a global audience

In early 2008, I launched my first webdrama. It was small experimental and massively fun.

I have devoted many months since to figuring out a business model for creating web drama, a thorny problem especially for someone who has spent her life on the creative side of things. I would have preferred to spend the last couple of years experimenting with the medium, creating drama on the web, building an audience, but it’s hard to find even the small amounts of money I need for creating web drama.

There are various funding agencies who hand out money to producers of TV or film and even to help create cross platform components for old media productions. But finding money to kickstart stand alone digital is much harder.

I fear Canada is getting left behind. Other countries are turning out cool stuff hand over fist. We who were poised to lead the revolution just a year or two ago are just standing around watching the massive explosion of original digital entertainment getting made outside our country.

Every day I hear about new projects that are ready to go but for the financing. We’re not talking a lot of dough here. The average development budget for a TV series would produce a full cycle of a cutting edge digital drama with the potential to reach a global audience.

That global audience is one of the reasons the funding agencies should jump in here. In TV, our reach has been limited. With digital production, our potential audience is massive.

When I ran boymeetsgrrl, the first drama I created under the Story2.OH banner, within days, I had active participants from Indonesia, England, China, Israel, Australia. In a single week, my story spread far and wide. I didn’t have a distributor, a broadcaster, a funding agency, anyone helping with promotion or even very much content, but I was able to reach thousands of people on four continents. Imagine what I could do if I had some money and the resources it would buy me.

I was in the audience at NextMedia in the fall of 2007 when an executive of one of the ISPs argued against giving artists subsidies comparing it to getting them hooked on crack. I think an influx of government money will have exactly the opposite effect. We’re hooked on crack now. Television isn’t a sustainable industry, the Canadian audience isn’t large enough. On the other hand, a digital entertainment industry could be very profitable. It will help to turn art into business and make artists self-sustaining. If we can get into this marketplace while it’s still young, we can build a successful self-financing industry.

Without an early injection of cash though, we’ll have to continue working in the old media which will continue to cling to the funding life support systems.

With digital we have a real chance of building an industry driven by market forces. If we can reach 100 thousand… a million… 30 million of the 2 billion people currently connected to the web, we can make money, hire workers, pay taxes and entertain the world.

We just need a little seed money to get started.

The price of entry is still low, but it’s rising daily. Now is the time for government investment in digital at three levels: development, production and promotion.

We don’t want the digital boat to sail without Canadians on board.

According to Tubefilter:

In a multimillion dollar deal announced today, Michael Eisner’s three year-old web studio Vuguru just landed a major investor and distribution partner in Canadian-owned Rogers Media. For Rogers, it means a multi-year exclusive on Canadian rights to Vuguru properties on all platforms including web, TV and mobile.

The report in Tubefilter has quite a few quotes from the Vuguru side but no word from Rogers on the reasons underlying their investment in a content production company. But it sounds like a vote for content creation as a viable digital industry from where I sit.

Nina Paley is my new hero. She made a film called Sita Sings the Blues and distributed it for free on the Internet. She makes her money from selling dvds and merchandise. Her first distribution report is available for you to read, but basically she made about $40 000 in the first two months.

Definitely check out her essay Understanding Free Content on the QuestionCopyright site. Here are some excerpts:

Content is an unlimited resource. People can now make perfect copies of digital content for free. That's why they expect content to be free — because it is in fact free. That is GOOD.

Think of "content" — culture — as water. Where water flows, life flourishes.

Containers — objects like books, DVDs, hard drives, apparel, action figures, and prints — are not free. They are a limited resource. No one expects these objects to be free, and people voluntarily pay good money for them.

Continuing this metaphor: copyright monopolies are an attempt to dam up and control all the rivers, reducing them to a trickle. When Big Media succeeds locking up culture, it's like in closing off water: they get a stagnant pool that turns to poison. Fish die and mosquitoes swarm, because the water has no source to flow from nor destination to flow to.

Go read the rest of the piece. It's inspiring.

Judy Shapiro has a brilliant article on monetizing the web on Ad Age Digital.

She starts by talking about some the problems with the ad-supported model that many of us hope will work as well with digital as it has with television. Shapiro points out that the digital space is unlike any other media channel:

[The internet] disrupted the basic laws of supply and demand. Before the web, content was a tightly controlled and distributed commodity -- a limited amount of content was distributed through highly controlled and limited channels. This was the ultimate "push" model.

The internet was the game changer because it is one big "pull" engine -- users pulling what they wanted, when they wanted it: services, connectivity and, yes, content. The tight control the media industry had on content was gone forever. Users could access content from a wider variety of sources and anyone could create content and distribute it at will.

This massive change has hit a lot of industries hard, particularly music and print. Now it's catching up with the film and tv industry. To survive we're going to have to figure out how to monetize and that, according to Shapiro requires a shift in thinking. Push is over, pull is the new black.

She believes that content creates community and community is what you can monetize.

This is the magic moment when content can begin to drive revenue because once you have the audience -- thanks to your content -- you have the mechanism to create compelling community experiences. The benefit of a community is that this shifts users' loyalty from just your content, available in lots of online places, to your site because of the community. The revenue possibilities expand as your community creates the all-important "sticky" user experience.

Successful communities utilize all the new social-networking tools and technology to create vibrant user interactions. They introduce technology that lets members engage in real time with each other, they permit many forms of self-broadcasting and publishing, and they provide a platform for members to connect around a shared passion or issue.

Ignite passion in your community and the content monetization engine begins to stir.

Once you have a community, you can offer services and products and maybe see some increased ad revenues. Sounds a little like kids tv, doesn't it? Essentially you give away the series in order to sell the toys and lunch boxes. Shapiro's examples are TechCrunch, Huffington Post and Mashable.

Great piece. Worth the read.

From Ad Age's Viral Video Chart, the top "viral" ad videos for the week come from Evian, Volkswagen, DC Shoes and Shake Weight. The Evian spot is part of the Live Young campaign and has 1346480 hits this week:

We've all seen Volkswagen's Fun Theory campaign with the piano staircase as evidenced by its 1319546 views for the week.

DC Shoes' Ken Block's Gymkhana Two Project isn't as well known with only 557,610 views. It's really long at seven and a half minutes.

Also on this week's list are two vids from Shake Weight, one coming in with 468,168 views and the other with 423,168 views. These two hardly fit our expectations from what we think of as viral video. They're classic late-night-style infomercials. I can only assume that there are a lot of people out there watching them for the shirtless men and the camp factor. ("Scientific studies at a prestigious California university..."!)

Don't you want to be creating for this technology?

An interview with Ford's Scott Monty on how that company is using the social media:

McAfee H Commerce is an interesting new television series on WNBC about cyber crime. There is also a website called Stop H* Commerce.

Read more about it on Mashable.

Margaret Robertson is a mentor here at Crossover Montreal 09 and a gamer -- as you can see if you checkout her links. I've included some of my notes on her presentation with each link.

World of Warcraft - Margaret has personally spent 830 hours playing it over 4 years, which is a lot more time than you might spend on a TV series. Users of WoW spend $15/month to play which mounts up to $1.8 billion a year. Players stop watching TV.

Bejeweled is a a match 3 game, the biggest commercial game in the world. It is the direct opposite of the World of Warcraft in that the game play is short and discreet, it's run by a low-tech machine and its simple to play with nothing for you to learn. Still players are known to put in 11 hour a day on the game.

According to Margaret's presentation, games are really big business. People tend to slot games into either the hardcore and casual game categories, but there is a lot of crossover between the two categories. Both are played by many people of many ages with about a 65/35 male/female split.

Parking Wars is a game funded by A&E US as an accompaniment to a television series about traffic cops. The games uses information about your Facebook friends and your strategy will depend on what you know about those friends. It has had a huge following in face there has been a far larger audience for the game than for the TV series it compliments and has engaged the audience for far more hours than the show. In fact it has served up more pages than the entire A&E website.

Routes is the web component of an educational television series about social and ethical implications of genetic research. For 14 year olds -- not exactly a topic this age group would be expected to jump at. The game begins as a documentary about a women who undergoes genetic testing. But then her scientific advisor is found dead in Peru and it turns into an ARG -- a thriller about who should own genetics.

Sneeze was made for 10-20 thousand pounds and became absolutely massive with over 15 million plays.

1066 is a game developed to go with a Channel 4 series on Vikings. The game takes a very different approach than the TV component

Kingdom of Loathing is a game built created by Zack "Jick" Johnson a guy with few programming skills. It's written in html -- not flash. He drew the images himself. The game has a big community of devoted players who support the game with donations and by buying merchandise. If you donate $50, he'll personally draw you an avatar to your specifications. He's making some serious coin off the enterprise.

Jane McGonigal's Top Secret DanceOff isn't exactly a game. It's a community engaged in "dance quests" and dance offs which they record and upload. Very cool, participatory, funny. It was built without sponsorship or funding just for the pure love of the idea.

A couple of days ago here at CrossoverMontreal 0'9, Richard Adams shared a collection of sites with the group. He emphasized the simplicity of each them; they are each built on a very clear and simple concept. That was one of Richard's big messages: avoid unnecessary complexity.

These are the sites Richard shared:

The audio content site, Big Finish.

The branded content site In The Motherhood

Crowd-sourcing for film making, Massify

Promote your band and crowd source the money for recording on Sell A Band.

Find a mentor at Horsesmouth.

Mashup BBC open content at Welcome Backstage

Audioboo is a twitter-like app for audio.

Recording artists who used to have a label can promote themselves and find a new label at Awal.

Programmableweb.com is a site you'll have to see for yourself because I haven't really digested what is there yet.

Cross-posted on Running With My Eyes Closed.

I’m at Crossover Montreal 09 this week, a cross platform brainstorming workshop run by a team from the UK. I took the lab as a participant in March of this year thanks to the CFC and NBC Universal. This time the program is sponsored by Telefilm and is part of the festival du nouveau cinema. I am not here to develop a project and pitch it this time but to act as a mentor helping the participants develop their ideas.

Most of the first few days of the workshop is spent leading the dozen or so participants through brainstorming exercises, but Frank Boyd, Margaret Robertson and Richard Adams -- the other mentors -- each present some of their favourite sites during the course of the week.

First up was Frank, the dynamic and inspiring leader of Crossover. He presented a variety of multiplatform projects. Frank emphasizes the need to make things that are "user-shaped"; design centred around understanding how people behave and use things.

He talks about different screens and the modes people are in when they use them:

• Desk screen
• Sofa screen
• Palm screen

Frank points to different digital spaces that are used in different ways:

• Secret spaces IM, mobile, sms, text
• Group spaces: bebo Facebook, twitter
• Publishing spaces: flickr, blogger livejournal
• Performing spaces: second life, world of warcraft,home
• Participation spaces: marches, ebay, meeting, markets, events
• Watching spaces: television, theatre, music gigs

In approaching projects, Frank tells us to understand our users, our competitors, ourselves. He advocates creating user personas; inventing people who are archetypical users. In creating a persona, create some biographical background, imagine their technological abilities, attitudes toward technology, interests, goals fears and the triggers that would bring them to the project. It's important to get some insight into the Once you have a clear idea of who the persona is, create a usage scenario, walk them through the experience of the project, always asking how can we this a better expireence? how can we make the site more sticky?

Below are some of the links Frank shared with us:

Channel 4 commissioning editor Matt Locke’s blog. Read his 3-part post Commission for Attention. Also, check out one of the projects he commissioned called Battlefront .

Some multiplatform projects with TV components:

PBS's Latin Music USA

Channel 4's Embarrassing Bodies

Swedish television's Emmy award winning program, The Truth About Marika.

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