The Dangers of Chess Circa 1850

TechDirt has a totally classic post today that demonstrates on of the great truths: the more things change the more they stay the same.

Today, it is common to hear everyone from politicians to parents blaming video games for making kids fat and lazy.  It turns out, back in the 1850’s the threat came from a pastime we consider nearly high art these days, chess:

chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body.

Check out the whole story here.

It’s a solid reminder that every generation faces its own demons but that those demons only change clothes, not form.

Giant Boobs, Pig-Faced Men and Shocking Violence – Now That’s a Book Promo

Publishers continue to make small forays into using short videos to promote their books.  This has taken every form from a simple talking head to an elaborate webseries.

According to AdRants, “Champagne-Fueled Jungle” a first novel by James Palumbo, is:

…about a society gone wrong. A society in which reality channel Shit TV (yes, that’s what it’s called) has overtaken the small screen and filled it with “homicidal dwarfs on rollerblades and obese mamas in tutus.” Title character, Tomas, has had enough and with the help of his tommy gun, he hopes to eradicate the world of this filth.

And if that doesn’t sound good enough for you, check out the lavishly animated promo video.  Beware, while entirely in black and white, the violence is quite graphic:

It’s great to see this level of attention and artistry dedicated to a book promotion.  Currently creeping near 4000 views, if just ten percent of viewers go get his book it would seem worthwhile.  Of course, that might be asking a lot from your average YouTube viewer.

Still, the combination of great animation and a violent, sexy story make this a video that could catch on and spread to some potential new readers Palumbo would never reach through traditional marketing.

Persepolis Lives on in Fight for a Free Iran

Persepolis was an amazing graphic novel and animated feature film by Marjane Satrapi that recounted her experiences in Iran as a child during the Islamic revolution.

Now, some talented artists and fans of the original have taken the characters and style of Satrapi’s original and placed them in the world of the most recent unrest in Iran.

The result is striking and effective, much like the original.

As one would hope, Satrapi does not seem to be crying copyright violation or trying to have this blatantly derivative work taken down from the web.  Perhaps this is only because Satrapi supports the message.  Perhaps it would be a different story if her style and characters were used by those backing the Supreme Leader to spread propaganda.

Either way, you can be sure if someone in the US made a graphic novel depicting Mickey Mouse overthrowing the government you can bet Disney would be all over it.

Morning Fun – Winston Churchill Remixed

Maybe because the sun is out and the sky is blue but I thought it would be nice to start the day with a great example of how the art of the remix deserves to be recognized as original art and not just a series of thefts.

I present to you, Winston Churchill, Remixed:

Meet CinemaCube – An MPAA Nightmare

The device pictured to right is BrightView’s CinemaCube and, if they are aware of it’s existence, it is giving those in the MPAA nightmares.

The device plugs directly into a user’s TV and uses any USB storage device (from thumb drives to external hard drives) to store data. On the surface, that means you could watch your home movies or view photos.

The CinemaCube is also comes with a built-in BitTorrent client, meaning users can access the online file sharing service. It’s also networkable, letting users can grab files (ranging from music to video to photos) from a remote PC to view on their television.

The device, which supports HD content up to 720p and comes with an HDMI port, is on sale now for $89.99.   LINK

I don’t have much to add except that it’s one more reason the MPAA and the major movie studios should be spending more time a new distribution model than on suing sites like The Pirates Bay

The CIA, LSD, the Return of Urkel and Still No Viewers

A few years ago, the hot topic was web series being created by Hollywood outsiders.  This was going to be the big revolution where the little guys could finally show the big guys how it was done. After decades of sitting at home and screaming at the TV for being so dull and lifeless, fresh minds and cheap equipment combined with nearly free distrubtion was going to cause an entertainmain revolution.

Well, it didn’t quite happen that way. With a few exceptions such as LonelyGirl15, these series generally came out of the gates fast and fell off the cliff even faster.  Many failed simply because they were not entertaining.  While it is easy to criticize much of what is on TV, it is far harder to produce a superior product.  Others failed simply due to lack of exposure.  After pouring everything you’ve got into making your webseries, there is often little left over for marketing or PR.  Hoping to go viral was, and still remains, the way most webseries hope to find an audience.  This is not proving to be working.

The past year has seen a vast rise in the next wave of webseries: those being produced by professionals from the world of film and TV.  While still working with negligable budgets, experienced pros are getting together to make their own shows free from the contraints of major networks or unions or guilds.

Two examples of this are out right now.  “Road to the Alter” is a mockumentary starring Jaleel White, once the hottest kid on TV as Urkel on “Family Matters.”  The other is “Operation Midnight Climax,” a highly stylized fictionalization of the CIA’s early top secret LSD research.  Check out sample episodes of both below.

What’s more amazing than the amount of work and time that must have gone into these pieces, is just how few people are watching them.

“Road…” is only averaging 2000 views an episode on YouTube while “Operation…” has yet to crack 500 views.

Now, maybe it isn’t fair to judge the success of a webseries on its number of YouTube views but there is little else on which to judge popularity right now.

Either way, it is safe to say that neither is a runaway success.  This forces the question, what will it take to make a webseries into a popular success.

My money is on marketing.

13-Year Old Reviews 1st Gen Sony Walkman. Hilarity Ensues.

This is just about the most fun thing I have read in a while.  BBC Magazine had a 13-year-olp boy give up his iPod  in exchange for a 1st generation Sony Walkman. Yes, the one that used cassette tapes.

Here are just a few gems from his report on the experience:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Genius!

He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

Totally true!  Read his whole review here.

UK Music Label CEO Still Doesn’t Get It

In yet another attempt by a major music label to justify it’s continued existence, the CEO of the UK label BPI has written a rather pathetic, rehashing of the same old arguments against file-sharing masked as a look back on the ten years since Napster changed everything, forever:

Many critics have argued that the music industry could have avoided some of the problems it faces today if we had embraced Napster rather than fighting it. That’s probably true, and I, for one, regret that we weren’t faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the internet.

Ok, I’m listening.  Tell me what how your new vision and understanding will translate into a new busines model that takes advantage of, instead of fights futilely against what the internet does best:

But this innovation, and the vital investment by labels in new music, is constantly undermined by the various P2P successors to Napster. These companies take and exploit what musicians and artists create, without being honest enough to reward them. And the publishers of books, journalism, films, TV programmes and other media are now lining up with us in the fight against illegal downloading.  Like us, they see how it will destroy their ability to create new content. So we are united in calling for ISPs to play a more positive role in steering consumers towards digital services that reward creators.

Oh, wait, you don’t want to change anything AND you aren’t even remotely listening to the issues and complaints by some of music’s biggest acts including Radiohead and NIN.

Well, maybe you’ve at least moved beyond thinking that the future of the music business will be driven by album sales:

It is true that some people use P2P for music discovery and spend more on music as a result, but in the aggregate they are heavily outweighed by the number of people whose downloading substitutes for purchases. If the reverse were true, our business would be booming and not contracting right now.

Christ, you still think you’re business is collapsing because of pirates?! How about your insane treatment of fans as criminals?  How about your insistence on raising the cost of an album even while the cost of making and distributing that album has plummeted?  How about all the artists that have been screwed by devious contracts and cheating accountants?

Once again, the music industry demonstrates why they will not be long in this new world.

AOL Could Be King on Online “Magazines”

There is a very smart, clear, article in TBI that looks at one of the cornerstones of AOL’s plans now that they’ve been spun back off of Time Warner:

The model goes something like this: Find a vertical with an audience attractive to advertisers, brand it (Daily Finance, Asylum, Lemondrop, Politics Daily), hire five to seven people to run it and plug in AOL’s traffic fire hose. Repeat.

It’s not like isn’t being done by others. Nick Denton’s mini-empire has a very similar model and, guess what, it remains profitable while the traditional dead-tree magazines are dropping like so many flies.  The main reason to think AOL might succeed here is that they are building a digital-age system from the ground up, not trying to shoehorn an old business model into a new universe.

They’re the antithesis of the kind of quality standards Time Inc. and Condé Nast tout, relying largely on aggregation, blogging and traffic-goosing tricks such as provocative slide shows. But unlike the print publications trying to port their cost structure to the web, these publications can be cash-positive from the start. In fact, one could argue these sites cropping up represent today’s version of the magazine launch — after the old, splashy kind died with Portfolio.

And, as TBI finally points out:

Then you’ve got an economic environment tailor-made to building this business. Traditional magazines are in disarray, talent is cheap, and audiences are splintering and accepting of new brands. AOL has more than 300 people producing these sites in New York and has contracts with about the same number of freelancers. In the past six months, AOL has hired more than 50 journalists from places such as the Associated Press, Washington Post and USA Today.

If you are looking for the future of news, you might get a good idea by paying some attention to that old internet warhorse, AOL.

Let’s just hope they don’t starting sending out those damn CD-ROM’s again.

Michael Jackson Dead. Britney Spears Not Dead – the Reporting Power of Social Media

One of the major arguments put forth by the big newspaper companies is that if we stop paying them huge sums of money then we will no longer get trusted, vetted and researched news – that so-called “citizen jouralists” just can’t be trusted since we aren’t paying them for their work.

It was interesting to see, last week, that the very first place I saw word of Michael Jackson’s death was on Twitter.  I immediately went over to CNN.com to see what they were saying but they were still talking about Michael Jackson being in a coma.  In fact, it was literally more than two hours after I’d seen multiple confirmations of his death on Twitter, that any of the major news organizations would report the information.  I think that TMZ.com is actually being credited as the first “official” confirmation.  Now , if that isn’t a smack in the face to the so-called professionals…

Meanwhile. this sad death, and that of Farrah Fawcette, led to a slew of fake death reports.  What I found fascinating here was that the same loose network of minds that had confirmed Michael Jackson’s death worked just as quickly to confirm that, in fact, Britney Spears, was still alive even though someone hacked her Twitter stream and annoucned “Britney Spears has died.”  Twitter users also speedily debunked the fake deaths of Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldbloom.

Now, all that is left for the pro’s is to endless rehash all of this while those of us on the bleeding edge are on to the next breaking story.