A License to Shoot (Photos)

Saw this on BoingBoing.  It is a response the over-zealous cops and security guards who seem to think that anyone with a camera is a suspected terrorists and that they have some jurisdiction of what free citizens decide to photograph.

A template for the card can be found here.

Feel Safer Now, Episode 124563 – Eye-in-the-Sky

In yet another ridiculous attempt to make us “feel safer”  BoingBoing is reporting:

“European airlines are prototyping a Panopticon-in-the-sky: cameras trained on every passenger in flight, married to some kind of snake-oil “terrorism detection” software that will be able to tell if the guy in 11J is planning to rush the cockpit.”

Having just finished Cory Doctorow’s awesome book Little Brother (go buy this book NOW!) this is a timely mention of just how far, and how misguided, our war on terror has become.

Legos Learn a Lesson About Stealth Vids…FAIL

Over on BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin was all excited about a video on YouTube featuring what she thought was a great homemade remake of the famous Indiana Jones boulder scene but…

“Jacob Appelbaum was one of many folks who went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, and hated it. About this internet video, in which a giant Lego-covered styrofoam boulder hurls towards hapless victims, he says, “I was happy to see that someone else was as nostalgic as me.” UPDATE: oh nooooooes, we have been duped by a sneaky viral marketing campaign. I HATE YOU INTERNET MARKETERS. Take this conversation and shove it.”

Yes, Lego was trying their hand at the viral marketing game and it looks like they’ve been burned.  How did they get burned, you ask?  Well, it turns out that a lot of internet users have lots of free time to poke holes in any alibi:

“The YouTube account holder google’s to an “office food blog” which shows him in the background of BSSP. They have the LucasArts games account. They’re located on Liberty Way which I’ve worked in the same building and recognized it from the photos.”

Let that be a warning to all those marketers out there hoping to go stealth.  The real question is whether or not this revelation actually hurts the potential of this campaign.

Oh, here’s the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFGVzt7c5bY&hl=en]

Why We Steal Songs

Short little post over on BoingBoing where Cory Doctorow mentions that he heard a great song on a podcast, found the band’s MySpace page and “ripped” the song for his personal collection.

As one who has also acquired music in this way, I am not mentioning this to say what Cory did was wrong but instead to look at why he did it.

1) He loved the song.

2) He wanted to be able to listen to the song whenever and wherever he wanted.

3) The MySpace page for the band, The Weather Station, does not allow users to download their songs nor was their an obvious place for one to go and purchase the song.

So, once again, we see that piracy happens not out of a desire to break the law or get out of paying for something but because it is simply the easiest and most direct way to acquire something.

Would Cory have ripped the song if the band provided a simple, clear and reasonably priced way to legally download the song?  Well, I don’t want to speak for him but I suspect he would have gone the legal route – especially if he knew the music was going directly to the band.

Of course, the value of Cory mentioning the band on BoingBoing is worth far more than what he might have spent buying their music.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Graham Stairs who tells me that “FYI, the Weather Station EP can be bought at Soundscapes in Toronto and will soon be available digitally on Zunior.”  Thanks!

Terminator ARG

BoingBoing has what they are calling part of a Terminator/Sarah Connor Chronicles ARG.

The “footage” claims to have been recovered from the wreckage of the EniTech Research Lab.  Their website has a bunch of videos about opening up their research to the public.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atl6DcL3cwQ]

The comments are great as people try to determine whether or not this is real.

Clearly, this sort of blurred reality is part of the fun of ARGs.  I don’t think they lose value when the underlying sponsors are revealed as long as the game itself is compelling and well conceived.

NIN Pirate Booty

Well, the numbers are already rolling in on the Nine Inch Nails self-release and things are looking pretty good.

BoingBoing: “it only took the band two days to exceed the typical net from a massive-selling traditional CD release. The band sold $750,000 worth of “limited edition deluxe sets,” plus an unknowable further sum from sales of the regular CDs and merch.”

And both TechDirt and Mike Linksaver draw a correlation between the NIN success and Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” concept.

Mike: “The ultra deluxe success seems to me to validate the encouragement by some to pursue large revenue from rabid fans and collectors willing and able to pay for personalization, authenticity, embodiment, etc., rather than attempting to suppress zero cost distribution to the masses.”

TD: “It’s an excellent framework for any content creator getting started. Certainly, you may not be able to build up enough True Fans if the content isn’t good enough (or unique enough, in some cases), but you’re certainly unlikely to be able to build up those True Fans from scratch by keeping your content locked up and hoping that someone important “discovers” you and makes you a star”

I’m SO Into ARGs

For my money, ARGs as a way to deliver compelling storytelling and solid marketing seems like a slam-dunk, with the obvious caveat that they are incredibly complex and challenging to design and implement.

For now, I’m just going to keep pointing out posts of interest.  In this case, the world-trotting Cory Doctorow has super kindly posted his notes from a talk given by one of the main ARG inovators, Elan Lee.

The notes are rough but there are some super cool nuggets:

"ARG: Edoc (Push)

	* A clothing company

	* Good looking clothes, every item has a secret (Edoc is CODE backwards)

	* Find secret by folding, infrared light, washing, etc

	* If you solve the shirt, you go to the website and a movie plays

	* One movie/shirt

	* The movies piece together a murder mystery, told exclusively through
	clothing

	* Started by designing an online story, but delivered the story offline by
	pushing it out through clothes

	* People who wear the shirts have a connection with each other

	* When they pass in the street, they have a story to discuss"

So cool.

The Human Internet and Phillip K. Dick

BoingBoing has a totally cool story about a rural internet implementation:

“The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley’s Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it’s like those “executive assistant” telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).  ”

There is a book by Phillip K. Dick called “The Galactic Pot Healer” in which everyone uses their telephone to call various computers to answer questions orally.  The characters would only be allowed so many queries a day and much information was censored or limited.

I love when ideas in fiction show up in real life, especially when the results are so compelling and successful.

More on the project here.

More on Books in the Digital Age

BoingBoing has a quick post about the on-going free book discussion:

“Bottom line: low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors, and the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading books, not people reading for free.”

They point to a post from Neil Gaiman, (who’s book, American Gods, is “available” for free online) who responds to an bookseller unhappy that Gaiman is allowing his book to be given away:

“The books you sell have “pass-along” rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don’t.

When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.

Just as a bookseller who regards a library as the enemy, because people can go there and read — for free! — what he sells, is missing that the library is creating a pool of people who like and take pleasure in books, will be his customer base, and are out there spreading the word about authors and books they like to other people, some of whom will simply go out and buy it.”

There are certainly similarities between the publishing industry and the music industry and it is interesting to see the responses from readers, authors, sellers and distributors as both groups are pushed into the digital age.

Publishing, Pirates and Profits

A couple of posts about the world of books caught my eye.  First, over on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a scathing review of Harper-Collins “free” version of Neil Gaiman’s book “American Gods”:

“I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They’ve put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book — but that’s only because practically no one is going to read this version, period.”

He goes on to say that, in fact, he was able to jump onto Google and locate a pirated version of the book online and download it to his computer in the time it takes the Harper-Collins page to fully load.

His point is that, as an experiment in the value of releasing a free digital versions of a book, this is a complete failure.  As Mason points out many times in “The Pirate’s Dilemma”, you can’t compete with pirates if what you offer isn’t nearly as good as the pirated version.  Just because the Harper-Collins digital version doesn’t charge you money to read it doesn’t mean it’s free.  It’s completely chained to a cumbersome interface and impossible to enjoy properly.

In a similar vain, TechDirt has a cool look at another result of free digital releases.

“SciFi author John Scalzi just participated in publisher Tor’s recent effort to offer up free ebooks, and discovered an almost immediate boost in sales. He admits that there could be other factors involved, but tries to account for all of them, and concludes that it’s almost definitely the free ebooks that are driving the noticeable increase.”

In the interest of science, I headed over to Tor books to find out just what one had to do to get a free ebook.  As it turned out, it wasn’t completely obvious on their homepage so I had to do a bit of digging.  To get the free book the ask you to sign up for their newsletter – I tried to do that but the website just seems to be hanging…

The point is that this is more proof that the traditional distributors and distribution methods are changing and along with that is going to come a whole bunch of new ways to promote and sell “books” that might never actually be published in hard form.