Ok, Judge Wapner is actually still alive but he’s definitely getting on in years.
The point is that The People’s Court (man, that show has been on forever!) has created a pretty neat little online version of the show called People’s Court Raw.
According to ReelPop:
“The site exhorts pairs of viewers to upload their arguments — my GF should pay for her own birth control, my office mate shouldn’t burp — which are reviewed by the site and, if accepted, published to the site for viewers to judge. Judging is open for a limited time (10, 20, or 30 days, depending on the site’s admins), at the conclusion of which a winner is decided by audience votes.”
I think this is a pretty great idea. Although not a way to solve serious legal conflicts this could be a great argument settler, assuming both parties agreed to abide by the decision of the random people who decide to vote on their case.
Either way, I think this is a smart way to engage viewers in this chestnut of a brand in a way that feels fresh and takes full advantage of the web.
This will be one to watch.
According to the NYT a group of music labels are suing the website Project Playlist:
“The website compiles a vast index of songs on the Internet and users can “quickly and easily search the index for recordings by their favorite artists. At the click of a mouse, Project Playlist instantly streams a digital performance of the selected recording to the user, who can listen to it on his or her computer or mobile device,” the lawsuit said.
So, to be clear, they are suing this one particular site because they are doing a really good job pointing people to where music (copywritten or otherwise) is already being stored for public access somewhere on the internet.
Isn’t that basically what Google does?
Fremantle Media, the makers of little-known reality show American Idol, is putting its collective talents together with Heavy.com for a new online dating show:
“In the show, women compete for dates, vacations, and page views by contributing to video blogs and interacting with viewers. Heavy’s young dude audience will vote for the finalists, and post their own videos in hopes of being selected for dates.”
What I love most about this “show” is that there really isn’t much of an actual “show” at all. Almost all the actual production is done by hopeful contestants. This means all Fremantle really has to do is set up the guidelines for the contest and let some kid design them a nice 2.0′y website.
(via SAI)
TorrentFreak has a bunch of interesting comments from authors about the value of having their books “available” on bittorrent sites.
“More and more authors seem to recognize the power of BitTorrent as a means to generate more sales, and actually upload free copies onto BitTorrent themselves.
Best selling author Paulo Coelho posted several of his books on BitTorrent, which boosted his sales significantly. The success of Coelho later inspired Leander Kahney, the author of “The Cult of Mac” and “The Cult of iPod”, to do the same.”
My anecdotal evidence – talking to an eBook publisher and a lit agent in the past few days – leads me to believe that, much like the music industry, it seems to be everyone BUT the authors who are afraid of the pirates.
Of course, all parties have a lot at stake in the next few years and it would seem foolish to believe that the ways in which publishers and agents make their moeny (or IF they make money at all) will be changing drastically.
For the authors there are lots of changes ahead, too. Already, there is an arm of a major publisher that is simply not offering an advance – a trend likely to grow. We are also seeing more authors find ways to make money without a publisher at all, taking advantage of all the web has to offer.
Big changes ahead for all.
There is a lot of buzz around the net about a new online series from NBC called “Fears, Secrets and Desires” that is going to encourage people to share these intimate details with the world.
The majority of the buzz is of the extremely negative kind and it is being driven by fans of the (deservedly) popular website PostSecret. For the unitiated, PostSecret is a site that people send in annonymous postcards with life secrets and some of cards are posted to the site. it is a strangely voyeristic yet moving site.
The thing is, some the sites most ardent fans seem to think NBC has “stolen” the idea for their webseries. As much as I am a fan of the little guy and of PostSecret, I just don’t see it . Keeping and revealing secrets is not something PostSecret invented nor does it sound like the format of the NBC show is anything at all like PostSecret.
The magic of the PostSecret is really the cards themselves – clearly handmade and personal and so human and telling. Presented with little or no commentary these cards are both works of art and social commentary. Will the NBC site be either of those things? I doubt it.
Warner Bros. Studios is launching a new website in May that will be a home for all their old shows as well as the place for new, original, web seriers.
ReelPop has the breakdown of what they have planned. What I found interesting was who was behind the projects_ 2 from big time commercial/film director McG and one from Josh “The O.C.” Schwartz.
I wonder if the budgets for these projects are in line with what I hear most new webseries are getting – down around 5-10K/ep – or if the big names are drawing bigger dollars?
I was taken by a post on Adverganza about a site run by AT&T called The Blue Room that features interviews with very big names in music like Madonna and Mariah Carey (ok, I said big, not cool). There is no way to know how many views the site is getting (that I know of) but I certainly haven’t been hearing anything about it…
The videos are syndicated to YouTube but as Adverganza points out:
“…it’s surprising how little play they get on YouTube. It’s not as though the interviews are that fabulous, but as one example, a Mariah Carey video put up a week ago has less than 400 views. I’m not sitting on pins and needles waiting to hear about her creative inspiration, but I was under the impression a few other people were.”
Here’s the question: Are people just not all that interested in yet another interview with these people or is it that AT&T has simple not done enough to promote their promotion. Promoting a promotion raises all sorts of issues – like what the hell is the point of a promo if you need to advertize it…
Have you heard about the video-rich, multi-layered interactive site promoting Honeycombs cereal (without any use of that catchy jingle!)?
Well, I certainly hadn’t until I caught a brief mention of it on AdRants.
Turns out the campaign is about Bernard the Bee Boy, a wild-child raised by bees. The site is pretty well designed and some of the content is actually funny.
Here’s the curious part: You can’t easily tell anyone how much you like the site while you are there. There is no link to email links to the videos, let alone any sign of embed code. There doesn’t seem to be a place for feedback or communication of any kind – and if it’s there it is not featured prominently.
Why put all that hard work into a marketing campaign and then cripple it in that way?
After some digging I actually found a single clip from the campaign on YouTube:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-QxOk2G97s&hl=en]
If you are so inclined you can go and listen to Madonna’s new album, Hard Candy, streaming in its entirety on her MySpace page before the album has been officially released for sale.
This would appear to be a pretty digital-age savvy move but as Mashable points out:
“If it actually helps sales is a difficult thing to measure, but it could also be seen as a rather large gamble to expose an entire work to the public before sales. I must say as each track plays, I am finding myself less enthralled with this particular outing from the Material Girl.”
This is an interesting question – until recently there was really no good way to hear an artist’s album unless you went out and bought it. You might get to hear one or two songs on the radio, if you listen to the radio, but most of the tracks would be a complete surprise. I remember many occasions buying an album after hearing one great track on the radio only to be totally disappointed by the rest of the album.
Now, the question is, do customers deserve the chance to hear an album in its entirety prior to purchase? That would be a pretty huge change to the way things have been for decades.
Last night I was at a great birthday dinner downstairs at the “chefs table” at Blue Ribbon. Lots of cool people there and I got into a chat with a guy who works for an eBooks publisher.
Our conversation started with the Kindle – an eReader that is promoted by Amazon and the first one to make a bit of a splash. He was a fan of the device but agreed it looked a bit lame. He loves that it has wifi and allows users to download new content basically anywhere.
We both ended up feeling that it was tough to convince people to carry around another device. Eventually, something like the iPhone will be all we carry. Screen-size is an issue and maybe the coming of the flexible screen will do something about that. I really think recent advances in circuits on contact lenses will lead to a fulltime “heads-up display” but I am kind of a futuristic optimist.
Where things got a bit contentious was on the subject of DRM (Digital Rights Management) – the piece of code that, in theory, stops those who “purchase” an eBook from copying and disseminating it throughout the universe. He literally couldn’t imagine how the digital publishing industry could survive without DRM. He admitted that he no longer pays for any music because he can find it for free (illegally) on torrent sites largely thanks to the lack of (or cracked) DRM on music files. He couldn’t imagine why the same wouldn’t happen to the eBook world if DRM was removed from the equation.
I asked if there were circumstances under which he would pay for the music he found online. Turned out there was. He wanted to be able to be able to sample it first, in its entirety, not 30 second clips, and then decide if he wanted to pay for it. Not unreasonable. He also felt the price-point was high and wanted to know his money was going to the artists. I agreed. I asked him if the same might not be true for eBooks. He thought they might.
So, the real issue turned out not to be that nobody would pay for books if they were free on pirated sites but that the publishers of eBooks were not providing their potential customers with a system that was better. Imagine a site where DRM-free eBooks were available to be read for free. After you owned the book for a certain amount of time you would be asked if you’d like to pay the author for their book. If you decide not to pay maybe the file gets locked, maybe not. Maybe you decide how much to pay.
By the end of the chat I think I might have at least convinced him that fighting for better DRM was never going to be the way to beat the pirates.
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April 30, 2008 8:01 pm | 
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