I’ve been fascinated watching the surprising effect of some clearly popular StumbleUpon user linking to my post about the negative experience my folks had at a screening of American Teen.
Check out this chart at of 10AM this morning:
That represents total views. My average post receives 3-10 unique pageviews a day. This post is close to 5000 today alone. The funny (bummer?) thing is that the spike on this single post has had no appreciable effect on the number of people viewing the rest of my blog. They come for this post, scan it and leave.
Oh well. Still neat.
Fresh of the pages of dead-tree media elite NYT comes news of a new media partnership:
“Mr. Lee, the director, is teaming up with Nokia, the cellphone maker, to direct a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones.
By hiring Mr. Lee for the project, Nokia is seeking to combine the populist appeal of user-generated content with the power of a famous director’s pedigree. The film will have three acts, each three to five minutes long, with the theme loosely based on the concept of humanity.”
This is far from the first time a mobile carrier has tried the filmmaker approach. I remember watching a bunch of shorts made for VCast by well-known filmmakers.
Obviously, Spike Lee’s involvement ups the ante, but the big question is whether or not this kind of social-network/crowd-sourcing method can lead to truly entertaining content. It is all well and good to have a cool method for creation but the creation itself has to live up to the process.
Tags: Lee, mobile, nokia, nyt, spike, spike lee, spikelee, vcas, verizon, video
Uncategorized | admin | 
April 24, 2008 6:38 pm | 
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Chris Albrecht, the one-time head of HBO who was fired after being arrested for hitting his girlfriend, has done something which I can only describe as a sort of corporate midlife crisis.
According to WSJ:
“Now, Mr. Albrecht is trying for a comeback. And he’s staking much of it on a bizarre, futuristic sport called SlamBall, which failed to break out in an earlier debut. With the feel of a live-action videogame, SlamBall is essentially basketball combined with rugby and trampoline gymnastics, and if Mr. Albrecht is right, it will become a phenomenon as successful and profitable as the latest sports craze, ultimate fighting.”
I actually remember watching (or trying to watch) SlamBall during its brief and poorly-viewed run on Spike TV – it reminded me of the kind of sports that are created for futuristic sci-fi movies set after some kind of apocalypse.
Now, aside from all the obvious reasons why one might not want to try to launch an entirely new sport on the world, one has to wonder why a guy with Albrecht’s experience in the business would invest in such a patently absurd and juvenile sport like SlamBall?
I can only imagine he thinks it makes him look hip or cool. See, he’s with it! He loves SlamBall!
Oh, dear lord, it’s actually sadder than wearing a toupee…
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