Dr. Media

SSI Research Reveals Baby Boomers Tech Savvy

2009-04-21T19:37:00.001-07:00

Hi Folks, here an interesting piece of data from SSI. Looks like the Boomers are at it again showing up in larger numbers even on Facebook. This is very good news for advertisers since the Boomers have the money or at least used to. More importantly for the entertainment industry is their adoption pattern mimics their film going patterns which means that reviews including peer reviews will matter again bigtime. Perhaps that is why indie films like Milk and The Wrestler are doing so well, they are after all adult entertainment. Dr. Media says watch this space, as Boomers have done their whole lives they will change the face of the web, with their demands for services, travel, health, retirement, finance, community awareness, education and all will benefit.Read my earlier post on the audience data for Hulu, it supports this info,this will be an interesting opportunity for the right marketing efforts,and of course,we can help with that can't we?

SSI Research | SSI - Survey Sampling International

SSI Research Reveals Baby Boomers Tech Savvy
One in 4 visits social network sites

A recent survey conducted by SSI found that baby boomers - Americans born between 1946 and 1964 - tend to catch on quickly to the technology at hand. While they may not be the first to jump on the bandwagon, when they do, they do so in numbers. Around 35% of respondents ages 45-54 say they are among the first to adopt a new technology compared with 40% of respondents ages 18-24 who make this claim. Baby boomers also have a solid, and growing, online presence on social networking Web sites. While they are not taking over sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, they are definitely leaving their mark. One in four baby boomers reports visiting a social network page often.

Survey respondents who say they are among the first to adopt a new technology.

Survey respondents who visit certain types of Web sites always or very often.

More than 30% of baby boomers visit multi-player gaming Web sites. This might be attributed to the focus some gaming sites are putting on the baby boomer crowd by offering games designed to keep the mind sharp.

SSI's findings, which challenge pre-conceived ideas about the interests and habits of certain demographics, are welcome news for researchers. Technology-related studies need not be limited to youth. Baby boomers, currently 20.5% of the US population, can provide informed, thoughtful responses, too.

What's more, baby boomers tend to have an attractive disposable income level and are doing their best to remain youthful. This may explain the shrinking generation gap between baby boomers and their children, and their quick adaptation to activities that would otherwise be considered "for kids."

SSI regularly conducts research on our panels in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the lifestyles and experiences, beyond demographics, of respondents. SSI's Knowledge Management Team is dedicated to assessing, producing, and conveying information to researchers through research-on-research, industry conferences, joint projects, and knowledge sharing.

Hulu Attracts Crowds but Not Ads

2009-04-09T23:47:00.001-07:00

Hi Kids, so reality raises its ugly head yet again. What, you mean to tell me that TV ads are worth more than Inet ads, no way! Yes way, according to the bigs. Hulu is TV on the net, and what is the number one thing on the net, why its TV, youtube, images, programs. What you have here, as confirmed by Ed Hunter from Comscore at the GDC meetup 2 weeks ago is, guess what, the Net is becoming tV, what a schock. A medium that everyone wants but doesn't want to pay for,gets supported by ads, does this sound familiar.Dr. Meda, says stay tuned, love those Hulu alien commecials though.

Hulu Attracts Crowds but Not Ads - BusinessWeek

Digital Entertainment March 31, 2009, 12:01AM EST t
Hulu Attracts Crowds but Not Ads
News Corp.-NBC joint venture Hulu has surged in viewership, but advertisers are still leery, and content partners are pulling back

By Douglas MacMillan

In the Super Bowl commercial calling Hulu "an evil plot to destroy the world," 30 Rock star Alec Baldwin intones: "There's nothing you can do to stop it." He's right that viewers can't get enough of the joint venture from NBC Universal (GE) and News Corp. (NWS). In February it had the biggest surge in unique viewers of any online video site in that period, according to comScore (SCOR).

Even Disney (DIS), a media company that has restricted most of its television and film content to its own sites, is negotiating to put videos on Hulu in exchange for an equity stake in the joint venture, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

But Hulu is facing plenty of roadblocks elsewhere, including among advertisers, partners that provide entertainment content, and even its parent companies concerned that the site might cannibalize their own competing media. Under pressure from content providers, Hulu has gone back on its pledge to allow anyone to syndicate its content anywhere on the Web. At least one analyst says the site is struggling to find ads for many of its videos. And a lengthening list of rivals is rushing to move content online, spurred by the success of Hulu and online video leader YouTube, owned by Google (GOOG).

To News Corp., NBC, and other media companies pinning their hopes on Web video, the speed bumps keep alive concerns over the ability to offset diminished demand for broadcast advertising with revenue from Internet programming.
Ads Aren't Following Eyeballs

Analysts are already revisiting their forecasts for ad spending on Hulu and other online video sites this year. In November, Screen Digest's Arash Amel predicted Hulu would generate $180 million in advertising this year, matching or surpassing YouTube. London-based Amel still expects Hulu to give YouTube a run for its money, but he now thinks each will take in only around $120 million in 2009.

That's up considerably from the estimated $65 million Hulu generated last year but still disappointing considering the traffic surge, Amel says. "What we've seen is rapid growth in consumption, but the advertising isn't keeping up," he says. Based on his studies of Hulu, the site has only sold about 60% of its ad inventory, with much of the remaining space filled with public service announcements, Amel estimates. "I don't think that anyone can say they are impervious to the macroeconomic environment, but we're still hugely optimistic about our ability to monetize the service," says Hulu spokeswoman Christina Lee. Rapid growth in content and viewership make it "more challenging for us to project our future inventory accurately," she adds.

The payoff for advertisers is still far smaller online than with TV programming. A half-hour show that carries about two minutes of advertising on Hulu will have four times as much advertising when it's broadcast on TV. Although online ads can cost more per viewer, TV advertisers spend more because they can reach much larger audiences. Online video has the benefit of targeting certain types of customers and letting marketers include interactive elements, but in the current economic climate many advertisers are unwilling to experiment. "Right now advertisers are trying to cut back anywhere they can," says Jason Blackwell, an analyst at ABI Research. "So unproven models like Hulu are usually the first things to go."

One of the great promises of Hulu has been the free syndication of its content. Rather than insisting viewers show up at a certain destination, Hulu has allowed anyone to embed its videos anywhere. It also has worked with other video sites to allow its content to supplement video libraries elsewhere. But in February the site disabled the ability of two popular sites to pull in its videos: TV.com, a video-aggregation site owned by CBS (CBS), and Boxee, an independent application that lets users watch Web video on their TV sets.
More Limits Are on the Way

Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar wrote in the company's blog on Feb. 18 that the Boxee takedown was the result of a request from the site's content providers. Analysts believe the incident may have been a sign that News Corp. and NBC are worried about cannibalizing TV viewership. "[Hulu's] parents are holding it back," says Colin Dixon, practice manager for broadband media at Diffusion Group in Frisco, Tex.

The two parent companies have also taken steps to limit how much of their own content appears on the site and when it appears. In January, Hulu pulled episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a show on News Corp.'s FX Networks. In February, NBC's Sci Fi Channel added an eight-day delay to the posting of episodes of its popular Battlestar Galactica series to Hulu in hopes of increasing its TV viewership for the final shows of its season.

Forrester (FORR) analyst James McQuivey predicts that more video content creators will impose limits on online audiences. "We expect this situation to intensify throughout the first half of 2009, resulting in bolder content restrictions on the part of content owners and more doubt cast on the role of online TV show aggregators," McQuivey wrote in a Mar. 13 report, Preparing for the Coming Online TV Backlash.

Brahm Eiley, president of Toronto-based media researcher Convergence Consulting, says many within the TV industry still view sites like Hulu as a promotional vehicle to support more lucrative broadcast operations. "They don't put everything they have online because they don't want to kill their cash cow, which is television," Eiley says.
CBS and ABC Want In

Still, even TV veterans realize that the future of their business is, in some form, online. Recently, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes laid plans to offer a service called TV Everywhere, which will offer its cable subscribers access to all of the shows they watch on TV on a members-only site on the Web.

Rival online video offerings are finding success. Netflix (NFLX) has added more than a million subscribers since introducing streaming TV shows and movies to its service. CBS and Disney-owned ABC, two networks that currently don't allow their content on Hulu, each hold about a 1% share of all videos viewed on the Web, compared with Hulu's 2.5%. Under the proposed terms of the deal being discussed between Disney and Hulu, first reported by the blog PaidContent, some ABC shows, such as Lost and Ugly Betty, would become available on Hulu.

Competing players could make hay as Hulu works out the kinks of its business model and content partnerships. "Being first doesn't always mean you'll be the longest-lasting or most successful company out there," says Blackwell at ABI Research. "[Hulu is] good for the industry because it's bringing awareness and finally creating momentum for these kinds of services, but at the same time it could become a victim of that success."

MacMillan is a staff writer at BusinessWeek.com in New York. With Ronald Grover in Los Angeles

In Hollywood, the Easy-Money Generation Toughens Up

2009-03-24T11:16:00.001-07:00

Hi all, loved this piece from the times about how the studio types are waking up to the fact that they are now independent producers, ain't it awful!
These characters are wining about the life that indie media makers of all kinds live everyday, no regular pay check, hustling for cash, welcome to the real movie biz.
More fun to come, and ,IMO,maybe better movies,TV. Etc.

In Hollywood, the Easy-Money Generation Toughens up
The New York Times
March 23, 2009

In Hollywood, the Easy-Money Generation Toughens Up
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — In the bungalow offices here that house Steven Spielberg’s newly formed DreamWorks Studios, the swagger is suddenly being dialed back a notch or two.

When the company reorganized itself as an independent operation a few months ago, Stacey Snider, a co-owner of DreamWorks and its chief executive, envisioned herself presiding over a grand new empire. It was a nice fantasy while it lasted.

“You’re not presiding over anything,” Ms. Snider, 47, said that she had quickly realized. “You’re back in the trenches.”

After riding two decades of almost nonstop growth from the cable and video revolutions, a new generation of Hollywood power players is finally being forced to test its mettle.

These executives — consummate insiders who enlisted when young and worked their way up — now find themselves pushing 50 just as some brutal problems are pushing back: a collapse in DVD sales, a credit crisis that has curtailed financing for new movies, a group of corporate owners determined to pull more profits from studios to compensate for hard-hit publishing and broadcast television divisions.

“These folks were born from a place where they knew no failure — all they could ever see was up, both for the business and their careers,” said Peter Guber, a former chairman of Sony Pictures who is now a producer and industry elder statesman. “Now they must confront the unsettling truth that failure is close at hand and that it’s on their backs to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

To date, the current leaders have had to focus more intently on becoming masters of organizational behavior than rebooting businesses. “Consensus management is what they know,” said Mr. Guber. But as studios trim staff and producer deals, many are now hoping to emulate some of the entrepreneurial cowboys — David Geffen, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner come to mind — from the generation of moguls that preceded them.

Inevitably, the sudden shift has set off soul-searching among the loose network of allies and adversaries who must rewire the industry in the short span before a next Hollywood generation comes along to replace them. They are tightening belts, lowering expectations and becoming occasionally more cutthroat, but also grappling with some unusually philosophic thoughts about a business for which they now have to fight.

Rough and tumble is not in this generation’s DNA. Most hail from elite universities, in contrast to predecessors like Mr. Geffen or Mr. Diller, who had no college degrees. The co-chairmen of Universal Pictures, Marc Shmuger and David Linde, respectively attended Wesleyan and Swarthmore. Ms. Snider has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Los Angeles, school of law.

“You’re looking at a business that is recalibrating itself,” said Mr. Linde. The 49-year-old executive, who clambered into show business in the 1980s by way of Paramount’s New York-based legal department, added, “I don’t think we today know precisely how it’s changing.”

Uncertainty breeds stress, even among friends. Last month, for instance, once-close relations between Universal and DreamWorks became strained after Ms. Snider’s company initiated talks, without giving Mr. Shmuger’s studio an expected heads up, about a distribution arrangement with Walt Disney Studios.

“People are living in fear, and sometimes it manifests itself in bad behavior,” said Mr. Shmuger, 50, who started in the business during college as a freelance copywriter for movie posters, and who spoke recently of the general climate, not of a specific incident.

“Darwinian” is one word Patrick Whitesell, a partner at the Endeavor talent agency, uses to describe the current landscape, while Chris Silbermann, president of International Creative Management, calls it “disorganized.” Both agreed that people who were formerly able to succeed by clinging to mediocrity suddenly find themselves without cover.

“Everybody has to dig deeper than they ever have,” said Mr. Whitesell, who came up in television and now represents such stars as Christian Bale and Shia LaBeouf. “That means more creative deal-making, more complete understanding of the economics of the industry, more hard-edged business decisions.”

Mr. Silbermann said: “The only way to survive is to get beyond the knee-jerk resistance to change. What’s scary is that a lot of people in the movie business aren’t admitting that to themselves yet.”

A number of executives and agents declined to be interviewed for this article, citing concerns about competitors or corporate overseers. Among those who preferred not to speak were Richard Lovett, 48, and Bryan Lourd, 49, both of whom are managing partners at the Creative Artists Agency; Rob Moore, 46, the vice chairman of the Viacom-owned Paramount under Brad Grey, who turns 52 this year; and Jeffrey Robinov, the 50-year-old president of the Warner Brothers Pictures Group, which is owned by Time Warner.

They follow a generation of heavyweights who, having come of age with less to lose in the tough economic climate of the 1970s, were more willing to speak openly about their dilemmas. Mr. Lourd and Mr. Lovett were understudies to Michael Ovitz, a highly public superagent who helped to found Creative Artists. Mr. Robinov has climbed rungs under Barry M. Meyer, the eloquent chairman of Warner Brothers who has more than 40 years of show business experience on his résumé.

The people who did speak acknowledged that many outside the glamour industry have it much worse. Hollywood is manufacturing one of the only products consumers are still lining up to buy, evidenced by a surge in box office revenue since December. That uptick is not nearly enough to offset the decline in DVD sales, but other businesses — online streaming, mobile, video-on-demand — are expanding and could pick up the slack.

“I look at it as growing pains,” said Donald De Line, 50, a Disney and Paramount executive who is one of the industry’s leading producers. “We’re going to figure it out, and the revenue streams will get healthy again. That’s the history of Hollywood.”

Enduring financial pain is not why Kevin Misher, a 44-year-old producer who studied finance at the University of Pennsylvania, came to Hollywood. After making his mark as an executive at Universal and Sony, however, Mr. Misher last year lost the comfort of a Paramount producing deal when it was bought out by the studio during widespread cost-cutting.

“You’re ultimately fending for yourself here,” said Mr. Misher. Like more than a few similarly aged “studio babies,” he now operates from an office far removed from the company lots, but is still feeding the system films like “Public Enemies,” a gangster drama directed by Michael Mann scheduled for release by Universal in July.

But he, too, sees an upside: The tough operating environment has forced producers like himself and Ms. Snider deeper into the moviemaking process.

“This is what you love to do, get on with it,” Ms. Snider recalls telling herself lately, even as DreamWorks was scrambling to complete financing arrangements that would let it get another round of films in production.

Ms. Snider added that she and the rest of her generation — having figured out that the real prize is being in the game — might stay in it a bit longer than intended, instead of clearing the way for thirtysomethings awaiting their turn at the top.

“They’re going to have to kick me out,” she said.

fyi Facebook Photos Pulls Away From The Pack

2009-02-22T12:39:00.003-08:00

Hi Gang, since we are having a Facebook moment, note the below data. Facebook is now becoming the online photo album . Photos of everything are becoming as common as text messages, therefore they are another form of communication.The field of photoanalysis has been with psychologists for some time.What is being taken, when , by whom,of what, for what stated reasons and of course, most importantly,the unstated reasons. This combined with Twittering, creates a very intereting personal privacy issue. Do your photos say things about you, your interests, your freinds, and their interests, that you would rather not say? Remeber to a shrink, concealing is revealing, think about it.
Dr. Media says this is the REAL privacy issue, and we are only at the beginning of realizing it.
!0 Billion photos, seems like a lot to search, but what if they are tagged, attached to names, locations, etc. get the picture.

Facebook Photos Pulls Away From The Pack

by Erick Schonfeld on February 22, 2009

If Facebook has one standout application it has to be Photos. Measured on its own, it is the largest photo site on the Web. A full 69 percent of Facebook’s monthly visitors worldwide either look at or upload photos, based on comScore data. And more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the site.

And it’s been pulling away from its competitors. As can be seen in the comScore chart above, as recently as last September the top three photo sites in the U.S. were running neck-and-neck, with Facebook Photos at 23.9 million unique visitors, followed by Photobucket at 21.3 million uniques, and Flickr at 19.5 million uniques. But by January, the number of monthly U.S. visitors going to Facebook Photos shot up 41 percent to 33.6 million. Meanwhile, Photobucket is up only 7 percent to 22.8 million, while Flickr is up 12 percent to 21.9 million. (Picasa is a distant fourth in the U.S. with 8.1 million).

In other words, Facebook increased the gap between its closest competitor (Photobucket in the U.S.) from 2.6 million monthly unique visitors to 10.8 million. On a worldwide basis, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr (which is the No. 2 site globally, and looks like it is about to pass Photobucket in the U.S.) went from 41.2 million unique monthly visitors in September to 87 million in December (the most recent data available, see chart below).

What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department? The biggest factor is simply that it is the default photo feature of the largest social network in the world. And of all the viral loops that Facebook benefits from, its Photos app might have the largest viral loop of all built into it. Whenever one of your friends tags a photo with your name, you get an email. This single feature turns a solitary chore—tagging and organizing photos—into a powerful form of communication that connects people through activities they’ve done in the past in an immediate, visual way. I would not be surprised if people click back through to Facebook from those photo notifications at a higher rate than from any other notification, including private messages.

But the tagging feature has been part of Facebook Photos for a long time. What happened in September to accelerate growth? That is when a Facebook redesign went into effect which added a Photos tab on everyone’s personal homepage.

(The chart above shows U.S. visitors through January. The chart below shows international visitors through December, with 153.3 million unique visitors for Facebook Photos, 66.7 million for Flickr, 45.5 million for Picasa and 42.7 million for Photobucket).

With Hulu, Older Audiences Lead the Way

2009-02-20T00:17:00.001-08:00

This is some very interesting data, if accurate. What this tells me is, what I have said for some time, the internet is becoming cable TV with unlimited channels, and while Consumer Generated Media won't go away,but the public's interest in professionally produced quality entertainment, news ,etc., will win out. The good news is there really is a need for talent, the bad news is the studios and networks still own distribution, back to the future, all over again.Dr M

With Hulu, Older Audiences Lead the Way - WSJ.com

With Hulu, Older Audiences Lead the Way

*
By BILL TANCER
*

In "Alec in Huluwood," Hulu.com's first-ever Super Bowl TV spot, Alec Baldwin describes how the streaming video site, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., will allow television to fully, finally succeed in turning our brains to mush.

It's debatable, of course, whether online episodes of "Family Guy" and "Colbert" rot our crania more, or faster, than quick-hit clips of dramatic chipmunks and skateboarding cats. But this much is clear: The two kinds of video owe their success to two very different demographic groups of viewers.

Hulu's "Secret" ad for Super Bowl XLIII.

When you look at the audience of well-known Web 2.0 properties like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, their rapid adoption was fueled by 18- to 24-year-olds. At YouTube's launch in late 2005, more than 50% of its site visitors were 18- to 24-year-olds.

This was not the case with Hulu.com. When the company launched its public site last March, the largest age group visiting the site were those Internet visitors over 55 years old, accounting for 47% of all site visits, while traditionally younger early adopters accounted for only 17% of traffic.

It later became clear that what first appeared to be a data anomaly was the result of Hulu.com's very Web 1.0 launch strategy, which used articles in the New York Times and other newspapers to attract viewers. As a result, after its release in October 2007, more than 20% of Hulu's traffic came from newspaper Web sites. The largest age demographic for visitors to print news Web sites is older Internet users over the age of 55.

By comparison, when YouTube launched in late 2005, traffic from print news Web sites accounted for less than 0.5% of its traffic. One of YouTube's largest sources of traffic at launch was from Web-based email services, at 19%, as its early adopters forwarded their favorite clips to their network of friends.

Of course, it wasn't just the launch strategy that attracted older viewers to Hulu. The content on Hulu -- primarily network television shows from NBC and Fox -- was already in the sweet spot of the so-called Greatest Generation.

Still, in its first months Hulu.com experienced slow ramp, hovering around the No. 20 position of online video sites during the first weeks of public availability in March 2008. In the last six months Hulu.com's visits have accelerated, reaching its high point in visits immediately following Sunday's commercial. On Monday, Feb. 2, it garnered 2.5% of all visits to the category, claiming the No. 4 position behind YouTube, Google Video and MySpace Video, according to Hitwise.

In its current position, Hulu is still playing catch up to YouTube, which captures nearly 10 times the amount of traffic. However, search term data reveals that Hulu may have an advantage over YouTube. Of the top 20 search terms entered into YouTube's site search, 15 were seeking broadcast and cable television content in the form of music videos, movie trailers and episodes of "Family Guy," a Fox animated sitcom, content that Hulu has license to stream. YouTube often carries similar clips, but without a content license they are subject to removal based on the content owner's request.

Nearing the one-year anniversary of its public launch, Hulu's age demographics have begun to normalize with 25- to 34-year-olds taking over as the largest age group, with 29.2% of all visits signaling that Hulu may be entering its mass adoption phase. For the month of January 2009, on a percentage basis, Hulu had a stronger base of 25- to 44-year-olds, when compared to YouTube, while 18- to 24-year-old YouTube users outnumbered Hulu's by two to one.

If Alec's assertion on "Huluwood" is true, that Hulu has brought us to the convergence of television and computer, then the future success of online video may have less to do with the 18- to 24-year-old viral network effect and more to do with the power of traditional media players.

Facebook Backtracks on Use Terms - NYTimes.com

2009-02-20T00:05:00.001-08:00

Hi gang,
Now this is a good one, and kudos to Marc Rotenberg of EPIC, and all the other groups who pounced on this . The questions of ownership of content and privacy of communication are not just apt for Facebook but for any social media site. These questions also apply to anything posted on Youtube, afterall youtube makes buck off off user content which they get for free, they aren't getting the content from the big boys for free anymore, unless its a viral marketing move.The really key issue here has to do with psychological boundaries,which are personally defined and applied in various ways in different areas of life. The story you tell your parents, significant other, and closest friends about your summer in Crete, nay be edited to delete items you think might not fit their sensibilities, if you know what I mean, you know, like that stranger, the substances, you get the picture.
Well now if you decided to put some or all of that on Facebook and oops after you sobered up you realized that was a bad idea, to bad.So don't be to personal with your so called friends, one of them might not be your friend one day. In fact its been rumored that sometimes people to things to hurt other people by making things up, and I have even heard that some people try to damage other peoples reputations by making false accusations, this is starting to sound like a country western song.
Addtionally, and this is really the point for those who want their ideas acknoledged or even, heaven forbid paid for, anything you put up unless this is corrected, belongs to the site not you. You think its your content but once posted it belongs to the site? I guess I better copywrite those good ideas of mine.See Creative Commoms Its about time this issue got surfaced , lets see what happens. Open source my ass, open source for Facebook,not for you.How are artists to survive if their content can simply be taken, without compensation. Pay attention this is isn't over.
Dr. Media

Facebook Backtracks on Use Terms - NYTimes.com

Facebook Withdraws Changes in Data Use
By BRAD STONE and BRIAN STELTER

Facebook, the popular social networking site where people share photos and personal updates with friends and acquaintances, lost some face on Wednesday.

After three days of pressure from angry users and the threat of a formal legal complaint by a coalition of consumer advocacy groups, the company reversed changes to its contract with users that had appeared to give it perpetual ownership of their contributions to the service.

Facebook disavowed any such intentions but said early Wednesday that it was temporarily rescinding the changes and restoring an earlier version of its membership contract.

In a message to members, the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., said it would collaborate with users to create a more easily understandable document.

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, also invited users to contribute to a new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which would serve as a governing document for the site. Facebook has been redefining notions of privacy while growing so rapidly that it now has 175 million active users, giving it a population larger than most countries.

In an interview, Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, characterized the event as a misunderstanding, stemming from a clumsy attempt by the company to simplify its contract with users, called the terms of service.

“We were not trying to make a substantive change in our rights or ability to control our members’ content on the service at all,” Mr. Kelly said. “As that misunderstanding became the main theme, we became very concerned and wanted to communicate very clearly to everyone our intentions by rolling back to the old terms of service.”

Facebook’s retreat ends a hullabaloo in which tens of thousands of Facebook members joined groups devoted to protesting the changes and bloggers heaped scorn and criticism on the company. Facebook sought to limit the damage from an uproar that in many ways was reminiscent of the flap in 2007 over its Beacon advertising service.

That project shared details of members’ activities on certain outside sites to all of their Facebook friends. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with 25 other consumer interest groups, had planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday. The complaint was going to claim that Facebook’s new rules were unfair and deceptive trade practices, because the company had repeatedly promised users that they owned their content but appeared to be saying something else in its revised terms.

The center, based in Washington, was prepared to argue that Facebook’s new rules were meant to accompany changes to the site that would give developers and advertisers the ability to access users’ contributions, like status updates, which many members use to reveal details about their lives, for example, where they are traveling.

“This was a digital rights grab,” said Marc Rotenberg, the center’s executive director. “Facebook was transferring control of user-generated content from the user to Facebook, and that was really alarming.”

He said Facebook representatives contacted him on Tuesday night to ask whether his group would refrain from filing the complaint if the company backtracked to the old language in the contract. Mr. Rotenberg agreed.

Facebook’s retreat can also be credited to the mass of members who made their voices heard in a strikingly vociferous movement that spanned the globe.

Facebook made the changes to its terms of service on Feb. 6, but they were highlighted Sunday by a blog called The Consumerist, which reviewed the contract. The blog, which is owned by Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, warned people to “never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away forever, because it’s Facebook’s now.”

Mr. Kelly of Facebook says that the blog made “substantial misinterpretations,” including missing a crucial provision that made Facebook’s license to members’ material subject to the user’s individual privacy settings. He conceded, however, that Facebook did not effectively communicate that nuance.

The Consumerist blog entry set off an explosion of activity that overwhelmed Facebook’s own attempts to quickly clarify the matter. In a blog post on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg tried to reassure users that they still owned and controlled their own data and that the company had no plans to use it without their permission.

That did not satisfy Facebook users like Julius Harper, 25. On Monday, he created a Facebook group to protest the changes. Soon after, he joined with Anne Kathrine Petteroe, 32, a technology consultant in Oslo, who had started a similar group.

By Wednesday, more than 100,000 people had joined their efforts and were airing their concerns, like whether photos they post to the site could appear in ads without their permission.

“I believe Facebook on this matter, but my issue is that Facebook is not just one person,” Mr. Harper said. “They could get bought out by anybody, and those people may not share the good intentions that Mark and his team claim to have.”

Analysts say that much of the confusion and rancor this week stemmed from the fact that sites like Facebook have created a new sphere of shared information for which there are no established privacy rules.

E-mail between two people is private, for example, and a post on a message board is clearly public. But much communication among Facebook members, which is exposed only to their friends, sometimes on a so-called wall, lies in a middle ground one might call “semipublic.”

“If I post something on your wall, and then I decide to close my account, what happens to that wall post?” said Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group. “Is that my data or your data? That’s a very tricky issue, and it’s one that hasn’t come up a whole lot in the past.”

AFM | American Film Market - Home of the Independents

2009-01-30T23:10:00.001-08:00

Hi , Thought I might also add a reference to these panels on the media, especially the movie biz, to my blog. The AFM has posted all their panels from November 2008's market. This is some of the best info around, enjoy.
Dr. Media

AFM | American Film Market - Home of the Independents

CES 2009: Video games 'more popular' than film and music, says studio boss -

2009-01-24T20:11:00.001-08:00

Mike Griffith, head of Activision studios, told delegates at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that consumers’ interest in video games was increasing all the time.

“Movies, recorded music and television – these are all stagnating or contracting entertainment sectors,” he said. “Video games are poised to eclipse all other forms of entertainment in the year ahead.”

Mr Griffith said that casual, fun games with a social element were one of the main reasons for this surge in interest. He said that interactive titles, such as Guitar Hero, which is published by Activision, epitomised this trend.

“We all have an inner rock star waiting to be unleashed,” said Mr Griffith. “This is the 'Guitar Hero' secret: It’s both a whole new way to play a game, and a whole new way to experience music. The convergence of the action game with the passion of music is changing video games – and bringing games like 'Guitar Hero' to the forefront of entertainment.”

He added that sales of video games in the four years between 2003 to 2007 increased 40 per cent in the US, while over that same period, sales of cinema tickets had fallen six per cent, as did the number of hours of TV watched by the average American, while sales of recorded music dipped 12 per cent.

"Games are no longer pre-set trips through linear mazes," he said. "They are becoming a legitimate story-telling medium that rivals feature films.

"The moviegoer is passive whereas the gamer is active and part of the game itself."

Mr Griffith said consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, which uses a motion-sensitive controller, had proved crucial in driving the idea of games as an active entertainment medium.

He also said that video games were driving other forms of entertainment, citing statistics from analysts Nielsen SoundScan that suggests that artists featured in the Guitar Hero series of games had experienced an uptick in downloads of their music between 15 and 843 per cent.

"The one thing that is for sure is entertainment is changed forever with gaming," concluded Mr Griffith.

Scene Stealer - Suddenly, Hollywood Seems a Conservative Investment - NYTimes.com

2009-01-24T20:10:00.001-08:00

Hi folks well now we can see how bad things really are, when the NYT is publishing articles that say movies are a safe investment, whew!
Truth is that everything else is so fuzzy that at least with a movie, or vidgame, or webisode, you know your costs, and your break even points even if you don't make them ,and , importantly, you can know t course, this is good news for media makers of all types, who knows maybe even publishing will come back--not!
One thing that remains true , inspite of bad accounting practices, is you can bank on talent, and creativity.
Dr. M, says get out there with those projects, who knows, the article could be correct?

Scene Stealer - Suddenly, Hollywood Seems a Conservative Investment - NYTimes.com

January 25, 2009
Scene Stealer
Suddenly, Hollywood Seems a Conservative Investment
By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES

WHEN it comes to Hollywood financing, the sky doesn’t fall so much as it just changes color.

When the movie factory needed cash in the 1980s, it tapped individual investors through brokerage firms. That strategy ran its course, and in the 1990s German tax credits became the next sales pitch: Funnel money to our movies via a legislative loophole, Mr. Berlin Financier, and you can take immediate tax deductions.

More recently, the likes of Goldman Sachs, along with giant hedge funds, poured billions of dollars into groups of movies called slates. The idea was that investing in a dozen or more movies at once, with the return calculated in aggregate after all had been released, was a sure-fire way to invest wisely. In many cases, though, it wasn’t.

Now that the economic crisis has washed away much of that money, a new pickup line is starting to waft through the air in deal-making hot spots like the Sundance Film Festival. The new line is this: Wall Street, real estate, the art market — all of those other supposedly stable investment areas — are now such a mess that Hollywood is one of the safer places you can park money. Although the movie business has been hurt along with nearly every other industry, it’s proving far more resilient to recession than most.

“I can legitimately say: ‘Hey, wait a minute. My company is outperforming almost everything,’” said Jana Edelbaum, co-founder of an independent financing and production company called iDeal Partners Film Fund. “I think that’s a pretty strong selling point.”

Ms. Edelbaum has been pressing a lot of palms lately in preparation for the premieres of two iDeal movies last week at the Sundance Film Festival. One of them, “Motherhood,” is a day-in-the-life comedy starring Uma Thurman, Minnie Driver and Anthony Edwards. The other, “Arlen Faber,” is a romantic comedy starring Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham (of “Gilmore Girls” fame). Each cost less than $12 million to make and has multiple distribution offers.

NOW three years old, iDeal operates out of New York, with financing to make about eight movies. It manages risk to investors through a variety of routes: preselling its films to foreign distributors, casting commercially tested actors, taking advantage of state tax incentives for filming. With that approach, Ms. Edelbaum at the outset was able to promise her investors a risk floor of 70 percent on the chance that none of iDeal’s films succeeded.

But as iDeal rounds the home stretch on its first batch of movies, Ms. Edelbaum is projecting at least a 15 percent return for her investors and — if something big happens with “Motherhood” or “Arlen Faber” — as much as 40 percent.

“Obviously, I want to make as much money as I possibly can,” she said. “But I am being dreadfully realistic and conservative given the current environment. It’s the non-Madoff approach.”

Ms. Edelbaum is far from the only independent producer promoting herself to investors with a calmer-waters pitch. The Exodus Film Group, a Venice Beach, Calif., production and financing company, focuses on animated films and has had a slow start, with its recent “Igor” selling a sluggish $19.5 million in tickets.

Coming Exodus entries like the animated “Bunyan & Babe,” featuring John Goodman as the voice of Paul Bunyan, are more promising. But John D. Eraklis, the company’s founder and chief executive, says investors aren’t waiting to find out.

“We have witnessed a surge of existing investors interested in upping their commitment as other opportunities have become less compelling,” Mr. Eraklis said. “I recently had an investor tell me that we no longer occupy the high-risk portion of his portfolio.”

Anybody making the Hollywood-is-safer argument just six months ago would have been laughed out of town. Complex accounting methods, tremendous competition, soaring costs — it wasn’t exactly a safe part of the woods for even the most sophisticated investor.

All of that terrain is still intact, of course, but compare it with imploding investment banks, plunging real estate prices, a whipsawing stock market, Warhols sitting unsold and Bernard L. Madoff. At least in the worst instance of Hollywood investing, you’ll probably catch a glimpse of Angelina and eat some really good shrimp.

“Is investing in movies more attractive now because of what is happening elsewhere in the economy? Yes,” said Daniel H. Black, a partner at Greenberg Traurig, the large entertainment law firm. “Does that mean all the risk is gone? Absolutely not.”

The big studios probably won’t be able to rely much on this pitch. Their upfront needs are too big — Universal’s last round of private financing, which closed in September, totaled about $3 billion — and Wall Street and the real estate market may sort themselves out before their current slate deals expire.

The biggest players in the investment world have also soured on entertainment because they have been burned badly before, said Amir Malin, a partner at Qualia Capital, a media-focused investment firm.

But for independent producers — especially ones that operate in a transparent manner — the strategy could offer a lifeline. They are in a particularly tough spot because they have almost no hope of tapping the debt markets, there is a dwindling number of buyers — with outfits like New Line folding — and costs are soaring. (Marketing an independent movie now costs more than $25 million, according to the Motion Picture Association of America).

What do investors have to say? Daniel Crown, the former chief executive of Crown Theaters, his family’s movie theater chain in the Northeast, said he recently put money into iDeal — but not because he has cinema in his blood.

“If you can find the right film executives, people who consider themselves fiduciaries more than producers, it’s one of the best bets you can make right now,” Mr. Crown said.

“Just remember that it’s over when you start taking yourself so seriously that the project stops becoming a commercial movie,” he continued, “and starts becoming an art project.”

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movies, vidgames,emotional content and money

2009-01-11T18:09:00.000-08:00

Hi gang, Happy New Year hope that you are still employed, or funded, and had a great time. Had to comment on Griffith s self serving pronouncement of the death of everything but video games.While it is true that the sales on other entertainment mediums are flat or off, I don't see Sony or Warner's closing their doors, on the contrary I see them expanding their footprint, and looking for more ways to sell their product including being in the game biz. After all, how is it that Warner's is still here, when others aren't, or Universal, diversification. The entertainment industry is just that and means you need to go where the action is, but do not forget, a movie is still the cheapest date in town and a theatrical release and its advertising budget can drive lots of other markets.Now you can drive advertising from the web, TV--still the cheapest--even within VR and vidgames themselves.
One other thing, cost to do a film, and game are now comparable, and like Walt Disney said when he opened Disneyland, every sale is just another ticket.
One other thing, which is most important. Griffith, states that movies are passive, vidgames active, and that vidgames are now better stories. Well, Dr, Media says, movies are interactive with the imagination as has been shown by numerous studies, vidgames are also interactive more directly, and now thatthey have better stories, thay are becoining more like films
In fact I would argue, most importantly that when a vidgame can move some one emotionally as a film can, trhen we would have invented a new form, and a most compelling form of entertainemnt. Show me the Slumdog Millionaire of video games, please
DR. M

CES 2009: Video games 'more popular' than film and music, says studio boss - Telegraph

Mike Griffith, head of Activision studios, told delegates at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that consumers’ interest in video games was increasing all the time.

“Movies, recorded music and television – these are all stagnating or contracting entertainment sectors,” he said. “Video games are poised to eclipse all other forms of entertainment in the year ahead.”

Mr Griffith said that casual, fun games with a social element were one of the main reasons for this surge in interest. He said that interactive titles, such as Guitar Hero, which is published by Activision, epitomised this trend.

“We all have an inner rock star waiting to be unleashed,” said Mr Griffith. “This is the 'Guitar Hero' secret: It’s both a whole new way to play a game, and a whole new way to experience music. The convergence of the action game with the passion of music is changing video games – and bringing games like 'Guitar Hero' to the forefront of entertainment.”

He added that sales of video games in the four years between 2003 to 2007 increased 40 per cent in the US, while over that same period, sales of cinema tickets had fallen six per cent, as did the number of hours of TV watched by the average American, while sales of recorded music dipped 12 per cent.

"Games are no longer pre-set trips through linear mazes," he said. "They are becoming a legitimate story-telling medium that rivals feature films.

"The moviegoer is passive whereas the gamer is active and part of the game itself."

Mr Griffith said consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, which uses a motion-sensitive controller, had proved crucial in driving the idea of games as an active entertainment medium.

He also said that video games were driving other forms of entertainment, citing statistics from analysts Nielsen SoundScan that suggests that artists featured in the Guitar Hero series of games had experienced an uptick in downloads of their music between 15 and 843 per cent.

"The one thing that is for sure is entertainment is changed forever with gaming," concluded Mr Griffith.

MySpace: A Place For 'Cretins'

2008-12-02T19:42:00.001-08:00

Hi kids, hope you enjoyed Turkey day, and looking for that new job. Thought you;d enjoy this, comment by Wolff, on the Myspace demographic. He clearly seems to be trying to say, correctly that there is a different group of people on myspace than on Facebook, however, despite his perjorative language, presumably aimed at Murdoch, the underlying premise of Facebook is different than myspace, and who really knows how many active players there are on line since many have multiple identities.. McCarthy comments are interesting, however, I point out the Fox is TV network, with many entertainment outlets, Facebook is merely a social networking site, no comparison.Dr. Media says,time these folks started to understand the entertainment business's idea of distribution.

As to the Power.com article, well this is like single sing on, but even better, for marketers that is. Just think, if you can be convinced to put all you identities in one place, the metaplace, we can track all of your actives and that of your friends, everywhere, how cool. Dr. Media says, are you kidding me? Why would you want to do this, especially if there are folks you are trying to avoid,anyone have any of those?

By Ross Fadner

, December 2, 2008

MySpace: A Place For 'Cretins'

Cnet

Michael Wolff, author of the new Rupert Murdoch bio "The Man Who Owns
the News," stirred up some controversy this week in an interview with BusinessWeek's
Jon Fine, during which he classified MySpace users as low class. "If
you're
on MySpace now, you're a (bleep) cretin. And you're not only a (bleep)
cretin, but you're poor," Wolff said, adding: "Nobody who has beyond an
eighth grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards
people."

To his credit, Fine didn't agree. He pointed out that bands have
to be on MySpace. MySpace Music has become "a powerful driver" for them
and for the site. "And second of all," Fine said, "If I am to accept
your reasoning -- even
though I don't -- as the success of The Sun (a News
Corp.-owned British tabloid) will tell you, there are lot of cretins
out there and you can make a lot of money off cretins."

Cnet's Caroline McCarthy reads between the lines: "MySpace encourages
glitter text," while Facebook "mandates that members must use their
real names," so one is going to attract a classier crowd than the
other. But, as Fine notes, it
doesn't really matter what kind of audience your site caters to, as
long as it makes money. And MySpace is still "the flagship property of
the top destination for display ads (Fox Interactive Media) on the Web.
Facebook, meanwhile, is
still seen as an experimental ad medium."
-
Read the whole story...

Power.com: All Your Friends In One Place?

BusinessWeek

Does Power.com have the power to unseat the likes of MySpace and
Facebook as the top social networking site? Probably not, but the Rio
de Janeiro-based company, with its tools for synchronizing social
networking features and services, will
be useful to those overextended users with multiple social networking
accounts. Power.com currently allows you to view and manage your
Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, MSN Messenger, Orkut, and YouTube accounts all
from one location. It hopes to
soon add LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Skype
and others soon. The company raised $2 million in funding last year and
looks set to add another $6 million this year.

According to the company's press release, here's how it works:
Users' "Power start page shows them all of their friends, messages, and
content -- from all their social networks, instant messengers, and
email accounts -- in one place ...
Once users log on to Power.com, they are automatically logged on
everywhere that matters. They go from Power.com to their page on any
one of their social networks with one click."

As BusinessWeek's Robert Hof points out, it's kind
of like Meebo, which lets you sign onto all of your instant messaging
accounts from one place, on steroids. "We're taking down the boundaries
between social sites," says CEO Steve
Vachani, who tells Hof that he doesn't see the efforts by Facebook,
Google, MySpace and others to take their profile information to other
sites as open enough to be all-inclusive. That said, while Power.com is
easy to set up, "putting all
this information together can get a little dizzying, especially when
single services such as MySpace and Facebook are already looking mighty
cluttered all by themselves." -
Read the whole story...

Don't Panic!

2008-11-17T20:21:00.001-08:00

Hi Kids, Dr. Media wanted to send this ditty your way, since it comes from a fellow who used to be on the biz side and decided to become a consultant, plus he gets NYT interviews, way to go! However, his point applies not just to biz folks but especially to media makers of all kinds, DON'T PANIC.
Get the baseball cap that says that and remember it. In times like these you must beilve in your vision, and work to make it happen. If fear undermines your drive, you might as well give it up. This DOES NOT mean to be a pollyanna, it means to think like a producer, and be hard nosed as well as optomistic, inspite of the downturn.

In the Hunt - Recession Advice for Entrepreneurs - Stay Calm - NYTimes.com

In the Hunt
In Tough Times, Tackle Anxiety First
By BRENT BOWERS

With the economy in deep trouble, all sorts of people — consultants and authors among them — are offering all sorts of advice. Most of it is solid, if obvious: Find a good law firm, protect your credit, bill early and often, and perhaps the most self-evident, don’t hire unqualified workers.

Jeffrey Hull, a former corporate manager who now blends careers as an executive coach and psychotherapist, suggests a survival strategy that goes to the heart of the matter: Don’t panic.

“What I’m seeing most these days are small-business owners who are not only trying to shift gears in their business in the midst of a downturn,” he said, “but shifting their energy to stay out of fear mode, which is even more fundamental — and tougher to do.”

Mr. Hull said that when he joined Cor Business Inc., a start-up in Harrison, N.Y., as a partner five years ago, most of the clients were Fortune 500 companies like MasterCard, AT&T and Avaya. The main challenge for Cor Business back then was persuading executives to act on its recommendations, not helping them cope with angst.

This year, however, many of those customers tightened their budgets and gave bigger coaching roles to their own human resources departments or big firms like Drake Beam Morin. That, Mr. Hull said, was his first brush with fear. How were he and his partners, Morgan and Julie McKeown, who founded Cor Business in 2001, going to stanch the bleeding?

The answer was obvious, he said, though they did not recognize it at first. “We sat down and felt very negative,” he said. “We did brainstorming.” That was when they realized that almost all their growth this year had been with small businesses.

Early on, blinded by what he now calls an elitist mentality, the partners had been somewhat dismissive of the newcomers. But more and more entrepreneurs were knocking on their door, as the weakening economy prodded them to overcome their aversion to hiring outside experts. This year, firms with revenue of $1 million to $10 million account for close to half of Cor Business’s projected billings of nearly $2 million. Two years ago, firms of that size represented just 20 percent of Cor’s billings.

Better yet, said Mr. Hull, 49, small-business owners tend to be “more creative and more flexible” than sprawling, bureaucratic organizations. “They are great listeners, and act much more quickly,” he said.

Mr. Hull acknowledged that he had his own to-do list — what he calls his six-step program for “shifting yourself out of fear-based operating mode and getting back on track towards success.” The first step, he said, is to confess that you are, in fact, afraid. “Stress, worry and apprehension are all elements of fear,” he said. “It’s scary right now being in business, but that is what entrepreneurship is all about.”

The second step is to respond to that fear with calm deliberation rather than rash acts that may lead businesses into deeper trouble. “I hammer that distinction into clients,” he said.

The third is for businesses to refocus their efforts on undertakings they are good at. The fourth is to “reframe the story” by looking for new opportunities in difficult times.

The fifth is for entrepreneurs to maintain a balance between their work and personal lives. The sixth is to seek out a critic who will give unvarnished feedback about potential blind spots.

He said he used those principles in his coaching. One client, the co-owner of a real estate investment company in New Jersey, was thinking about scratching a plan to buy a warehouse and turn it into a supermarket, fearing that it would fail and he would be stuck with a lot of debt. “I asked him if he was focusing on what might not work or what could work,” Mr. Hull said. “He realized he had done a lot of research. He knew that people had to buy food, even in a recession. He turned his energy focus from negative to positive. I believe he is going to go through with the deal.”

The same client worried about his firm’s sluggish growth, Mr. Hull said. With revenue stuck at about $5 million, the client felt intimidated when he bumped into people like Donald Trump at an industry conference. “It was a classic entrepreneurial conundrum,” Mr. Hull said. “You reach a certain level of success and stop growing because you’re reluctant to change your ways.”

He urged the two owners of the investment company to start acting like a bigger company by holding regular, structured meetings instead of communicating with each other and their staff members by frequent workplace chats. He also suggested that they assume responsibilities that played to their strengths (one was a schmoozer and a visionary, the other an introvert and numbers cruncher), rather than working out every decision together.

“They agreed, he said. “They’re practicing it.”

In another case, the son of the founder of a manufacturing company in Manhattan feared that many of his employees, unhappy with his plan to move his factory to another borough, would desert him.

“I had him refocus on the truth,” Mr. Hull said. “He had asked each of them if they would come with him, and they all had said yes. He had lost sight of his homework.”

Most successful entrepreneurs will often recall their missteps, almost with pride, and tell of how they turned them into opportunities. Reinventing yourself is a mark of the entrepreneurial personality — and it is never too late.

Mr. Hull himself started his first business, a consulting firm, with a partner in 1995 when he was 35, after 15 years as a corporate human resources manager, including six years as the director of the department at Booz Allen Hamilton. Though the company was successful, the partners dissolved it in 2000 “to think about what we really wanted to do with our lives.” The other partner went to medical school, and Mr. Hull earned his doctorate in psychology in 2003, joining Cor Business that year. He opened his private counseling practice, Life-Shifting Inc., in Manhattan in 2004.

Asked whether he and his partners feel that cold stab of apprehension that he warns his clients about as revenue at Cor Business stagnates this year after six years of strong growth, Mr. Hull responded, “How could we not, in the midst of the worst economy in my lifetime?” Then he added: “How do I deal with it? By trying to practice what I preach. You have to stay optimistic.”

Welcome To The New World of Distribution

2008-10-18T02:20:00.001-07:00

Hi folks, this one is especially for all you media makers. Peter Broderick's article from Indiewire on the state of distribution,"old"vs :"new". Well stated and a more detailed commentary than Mark Gills comments Dr. Media commented on in an ealier blog. Good Stuff.See the chart simplistic but sums it up.

FIRST PERSON | Peter Broderick: "Welcome To The New World of Distribution," Part 1

by Peter Broderick (September 15, 2008)

Welcome to the New World of Distribution. Many filmmakers are
emigrating from the Old World, where they have little chance of
succeeding. They are attracted by unprecedented opportunities and the
freedom to shape their own destiny. Life in the New World requires them
to work harder, be more tenacious, and take more risks. There are
daunting challenges and no guarantees of success. But this hasn't
stopped more and more intrepid filmmakers from exploring uncharted
territory and staking claims.

Before the discovery of the New World, the Old
World of Distribution reigned supreme. It is a hierarchical realm where
filmmakers must petition the powers that be to grant them distribution.
Independents who are able to make overall deals are required to give
distributors total control of the marketing and distribution of their
films. The terms of these deals have gotten worse and few filmmakers
end up satisfied.

All is not well for companies and filmmakers in what I call the Old World of Distribution. At Film Independent's Film Financing Conference, Mark Gill vividly described "the ways the independent film business is in trouble" in his widely read and discussed keynote.
Mark listed the companies and divisions that have been shut down or are
teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, noted that five others are in
"serious financial peril," and said that ten independent film
financiers may soon "exit the business." Mark made a persuasive case
that "the sky really is falling... because the accumulation of bad news
is kind of awe-inspiring." While he doesn't expect that the sky will
"hit the ground everywhere," he warned "it will feel like we just
survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be
overwhelming."

Mark's keynote focused on the distributors, production companies,
studio specialty divisions, and foreign sales companies that dominate
independent film in the Old World. Mark has many years of experience in
this world. He was President of Miramax Films, then head of Warner Independent Pictures, and is now CEO of The Film Department. He sees things from the perspective of a seasoned Old World executive.

I see things from the filmmaker's perspective. For the past 11
years, I have been helping filmmakers maximize revenues, get their
films seen as widely as possible, and launch or further their careers.
From 1997 until 2002, I experienced the deteriorating state of the Old
World of Distribution as head of IFC's Next Wave Films.
After the company closed, I discovered the New World of Distribution in
its formative stages. A few directors had already gotten impressive
results by splitting up their rights and selling DVDs directly from
their websites.

Filmmakers started asking me to advise them on distribution, and, before I knew it, I was a "distribution strategist"
working with independents across the country and around the globe.
Since late 2002, I have consulted with more than 500 filmmakers. While
some have taken traditional paths in the Old World, many more have
blazed trails in the new one. I've learned from their successes and
failures and had the opportunity to share these lessons with other
filmmakers, who then have been able to go further down these trails. It
has been very exciting to be able to participate in the building of the
New World, where the old rules no longer apply.

Many of the rulers of the Old World continue to look backwards.
Having spent their entire careers in this realm, played by its rules
and succeeded, they can't see past the limits of their experience. For
them, the Old World is the known world, which they refer to as "the
film business." They explain away the serious problems facing the Old
World by citing the film glut, higher marketing costs, mediocre films,
and the historically cyclical nature of the industry. They appear to
believe that everything will be just fine with enough discipline and
patience--if fewer, better films are made, costs are controlled, and
they can hold out until the next upturn.

Many of these executives seem unaware of the larger structural
changes threatening their world. They recognize that video-on-demand
and digital downloads will become more significant revenue streams but
seem confident that they can incorporate them into their traditional
distribution model. These executives do not understand the fundamental
importance of the internet or its disruptive power. By enabling
filmmakers in the New World to reach audiences directly and
dramatically reducing their distribution costs, it empowers them to
keep control of their "content'.

The Old World executives who do acknowledge the New World can be as
dismissive as record industry executives were when they first noticed
the internet. Their usual condescending response is the internet may
work for "little" films with "niche" audiences. After admitting that
the internet represents added competition for eyeballs, they are quick
to point out that little money is currently being made from digital
downloads or online advertising.

Notable successes in the New World represent the shape of things to
come. Several filmmakers have each made more than one million dollars
selling their films directly from their websites. Other filmmakers have
begun raising money online. During 10 days of internet fundraising, Robert Greenwald attracted $385,000 in contributions for his documentary "Iraq for Sale."

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice built awareness for their feature "Four Eyed Monsters" through a series of video podcasts. They then made their film available for free on YouTube and MySpace, where it was viewed over a million times. Arin and Susan made money through shared ad revenues and Spout.com sign-ups, and then snagged a deal with IFC for domestic television and home video distribution. Wayne Wang will follow in their footsteps when he premieres his new feature "The Princess of Nebraska" on YouTube October 17th.

The power of the internet was also demonstrated by the remarkably successful documentary, "The Secret."
During the first stage of its release, "The Secret" could be streamed
or purchased at the film's website, but was not available in theaters,
on television, in stores, or on Amazon. During the next stage, the book was launched by Simon & Schuster
in bookstores and online. After the book shot to the top of the
bestseller list, "The Secret" DVD was finally made available in retail
stores and on Amazon. Over 2 million DVDs were sold during the first
twelve months of its release.

The chart above illustrates the essential differences between Old and New World Distribution.

Here are ten guiding principles of New World distribution:

1. GREATER CONTROL - Filmmakers retain overall control of
their distribution, choosing which rights to give distribution partners
and which to retain. If filmmakers hire a service deal company or a
booker to arrange a theatrical run, they control the marketing
campaign, spending, and the timing of their release. In the OW (Old
World), a distributor that acquires all rights has total control of
distribution. Filmmakers usually have little or no influence on key
marketing and distribution decisions.

2. HYBRID DISTRIBUTION - Filmmakers split up their rights,
working with distribution partners in certain sectors and keeping the
right to make direct sales. They can make separate deals for: retail
home video, television, educational, nontheatrical, and VOD, as well as
splitting up their digital rights. They also sell DVDs from their
websites and at screenings, and may make digital downloads available
directly from their sites. In the OW, filmmakers make overall deals,
giving one company all their rights (now known or ever to be dreamed
up) for as long as 25 years.

3. CUSTOMIZED STRATEGIES - Filmmakers design creative
distribution strategies customized to their film's content and target
audiences. They can begin outreach to audiences and potential
organizational partners before or during production. They often ignore
traditional windows, selling DVDs from their websites before they are
available in stores, sometimes during their theatrical release, and
even at festivals. Filmmakers are able to test their strategies
step-by-step, and modify them as needed. In the OW, distribution plans
are much more formulaic and rigid.

4. CORE AUDIENCES - Filmmakers target core audiences. Their
priority is to reach them effectively, and then hopefully cross over to
a wider public. They reach core audiences directly both online and
offline, through websites, mailing lists, organizations, and
publications. In the OW, many distributors market to a general
audience, which is highly inefficient and more and more expensive.

Notable exceptions, Fox Searchlight and Bob Berney, have demonstrated how effective highly targeted marketing can be. "Napoleon Dynamite" first targeted nerds, "Passion of the Christ" began with evangelicals, and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"
started with Greek Americans. Building on their original base, each of
these films was then able to significantly expand and diversify their
audiences.

5. REDUCING COSTS - Filmmakers reduce costs by using the
internet and by spending less on traditional print, television, and
radio advertising. While four years ago a five-city theatrical service
deal cost $250,000 - $300,000, today comparable service deals can cost
half that or even less. In the OW, marketing costs have risen
dramatically.

6. DIRECT ACCESS TO VIEWERS - Filmmakers use the internet to reach audiences directly. The makers of the motorcycle-racing documentary, "Faster,"
used the web to quickly and inexpensively reach motorcycle fans around
the world. They pulled off an inspired stunt at the Cannes Film
Festival, which generated international coverage and widespread
awareness among fans. This sparked lucrative DVD sales first from the
website and then in retail stores. In the OW, filmmakers only have
indirect access to audiences through distributors.

7. DIRECT SALES - Filmmakers make much higher margins on
direct sales from their websites and at screenings than they do through
retail sales. They can make as much as $23 profit on a $24.95 website
sale (plus $4.95 for shipping and handling). A retail sale of the same
DVD only nets $2.50 via a typical 20% royalty video deal. If filmmakers
sell an educational copy from their websites to a college or university
for $250 (an average educational price), they can net $240. Direct
sales to consumers provide valuable customer data, which enables
filmmakers to make future sales to these buyers. They can sell other
versions of a film, the soundtrack, books, posters, and t-shirts. In
the OW, filmmakers are not permitted to make direct sales, have no
access to customer data, and have no merchandising rights.

8. GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION - Filmmakers are now making their
films available to viewers anywhere in the world. Supplementing their
deals with distributors in other countries, they sell their films to
consumers in unsold territories via DVD or digital download directly
from their websites. For the first time, filmmakers are aggregating
audiences across national boundaries. In the OW, distribution is
territory by territory, and most independent films have little or no
foreign distribution.

9. SEPARATE REVENUE STREAMS - Filmmakers limit
cross-collateralization and accounting problems by splitting up their
distribution rights. All revenues from sales on their websites come
directly to them or through the fulfillment company they've hired to
store and ship DVDs. By separating the revenues from each distribution
partner, filmmakers prevent expenses from one distribution channel
being charged against revenues from another. This makes accounting
simpler and more transparent. In an OW overall deal, all revenues and
all expenses are combined, making monitoring revenues much more
difficult.

10. TRUE FANS - Filmmakers connect with viewers online and at
screenings, establish direct relationships with them, and build core
personal audiences. They ask for their support, making it clear that
DVD purchases from the website will help them break even and make more
movies. Every filmmaker with a website has the chance to turn visitors
into subscribers, subscribers into purchasers, and purchasers into true
fans who can contribute to new productions. In the OW, filmmakers do
not have direct access to viewers.

A Profile of Online Profiles - By the Numbers Blog - NYTimes.com

2008-10-13T16:39:00.001-07:00

Hi, well here you go, if you missed it, a report by a Reapleaf, reviewed by Blow of the NYT talking about on line social media usage. Beyond the usual questions about methodology and verification--how do you know who's telling the truth if you don't interview them directly, but lets set that aside for the moment.
This studies most interesting references are to the extent to which people lie about things online. This would certainly make it hard to know what one was talking about now wouldn't it, however, if we accept that this study says there more men athan women utilizing these social media for relationship maintenance, where as men use it for business as opposed to personal relationships. Well sounds like it's all about relationships however you cut it. Also, most interestly, the conclusion, based on what in depth data I don't know, is that men do transactions, while women do relationships, oh really, could have concluded that with out a study couldn't we---Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, of course he didn't do any real research either.
Dr. Media says, its about time we started to look at these social media, however if we really wantto begin to understand them lets do some real research.

A Profile of Online Profiles - By the Numbers Blog - NYTimes.com

September 9, 2008, 3:06 pm
A Profile of Online Profiles
By Charles M. Blow
INSERT DESCRIPTION

I recently created a Facebook account. My kids thought it was hysterical. They said that I was too old. I’m only 38, but as far as they are concerned, Moses was my best friend in kindergarten.

Being a numbers guy, this got me interested in procuring hard data on social network users…and their behavioral traits while logged on. Here is some of what I found:

1. GENDER: According to a RapLeaf study released in July of 49.3 million people, 20 percent more females used social networks than men (this surprised me). The biggest disparity was for people under 25. In my age range, 35 to 40, men outnumbered women (see chart above).

According to an April Study by RapLeaf, men use social networking more for business and women more for socializing. From the report:

“Men tend to be more transactional and less relationship building when it comes to their friends on social networks. Women tend to have slightly more friends on average.”

2. BEST “HANDLES”: When it came to dating sites, things really got interesting. In April, The Times of London reported on a study by Dr. Monica Whitty, “a lecturer in cyber-psychology,” which revealed the names or “handles” that garnered the most numerous responses among online daters. Here’s what it said:

“Playful and flirtatious names such as “fun2bwith” or “i’msweet” were ranked top by both men and women daters as those they would most like to contact. Physical descriptors such as “cutie” or “blueeyes” were close behind. ‘These names suggest an outgoing or fun nature, or clarify the user’s positive physical appearance,’ said Dr Monica Whitty.”

But, there seemed to be some gender imbalances in the names:

“However she advised female lonely hearts to avoid screen names which attempt to be classy, or show how clever they are. Males daters said they would be less likely to contact screen names such as ‘wellread’ or ‘welleducated,’ although the study found women were more drawn to names that suggested men were cultured. ‘Less flirtatious names may be more appealing to women because they are wary of men who might be using the site to find one-night stands rather than long-term relationships,’ Dr Whitty said.”

3. LYING According to a study by entitled “Separating Fact From Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles” that was published this year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, there is quite a bit of lying going on in online profiles. And, men lie more than women. Shocker!

It also turns out that people online are more accepting of some lies than others. From the study:

“Participants believed that lying about relationship information is less socially acceptable than lying about any other category. … Men considered it more acceptable than women to lie about their social status … [and] found it more acceptable than women to lie about their occupation, education and marginally about their relationship status.”

Below are some graphs from his report. Note how almost all women understate their weight and most men overstate their height. Typical.

KMWorld.com: : Now, everything is fragmented

2008-10-09T17:41:00.001-07:00

Hi gang, been a while, apparently my blogger glitched and my posts haven't been being posted, which I just discovered, oh well I will catch you up.
In this interesting missive, Snowden, taking off from Dave Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous,argues that everything is fragmented. This can be true, however, it depends on how one sees it. I understand his technical commentary, however allow me to give you a psychological perpective.Fragmentation is a perception from the POV of one who assumes the previous organizational model was "truth". Liberation of the mind and information to free itself from an old model and organize itself in new ways, or more appropriately to allow information to be rearranged in new ways, is a radical way to see this event.This is how new ways of thinking, acting, designing, relating and communicating emerge, via the process of falling apart, the same holds for people.This process is not always plesant or joyful, but it is effective.Think about falling in love, think about falling out of love, how does that happen?
See my future book, Futureself( for the answer to that one. A hint though is it has to do with the gap between who we are, who we think we, and who we would like to be, our Personal Mythology.
Think of fragmentation as the liberation of mind and the breaking down of outmoded modela and an oppotunity for invention.

KMWorld.com: : Now, everything is fragmented

Now, everything is fragmented
By Dave Snowden - Posted May 1, 2008

I used the phrase "everything is fragmented" for the first time last year at KMWorld & Intranets in San Jose. I was picking up on the title of Dave Weinberger’s useful book Everything is Miscellaneous. Dave dealt with the shift from hierarchical taxonomies to the free form tagging of social computing. I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the "chunked" material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems.

So what do I mean by the idea of fragmentation? Well, it’s simple really: The more you structure material, the more you summarize (either as an editor or using technology), the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change. For years now I have asked this question at conferences around the world: Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories?

With the odd exception (generally IT managers who have just spent a few million dollars putting a best-practice system in and think people should use it), everyone goes for the stories. So why for the last decade and more have we focused on chunking up best practice? These days I add a few references to the way I and others use blogs to link and connect to insight and learning. Increasingly unstructured material, blended in unexpected ways, provides a richer source of knowledge.

Over the last decade as I have worked on homeland security, we have had the chance to run some experiments that show that raw field intelligence has more utility over longer periods of time than intelligence reports written at a specific time and place. In other experiments, we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking.

I think there are two reasons for those findings. First, we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness. Second, we are homo sapiens at least in part because we were first homo narrans: the storytelling ape. Dealing with anecdotal material from multiple sources and creating our own stories in turn has been a critical part of our evolutionary development.

The free flow of the blogosphere, ad hoc collaboration, Facebook and many other tools work because they conform with the patterns of expectation that arise from our evolutionary uncertainty. Have you ever heard anyone ask Wikipedia or the blogosphere, "How do we create a knowledge sharing culture?" No, but when I visit the knowledge management practitioners in organizations around the world, it is the dominant question. It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.

The big problem for the knowledge and information management functions in an organization is that their governance structures were developed in an earlier, more ordered time when we focused on transaction systems for accounting and process. The essence of such systems is to remove ambiguity; the evolutionary pressure of natural human knowledge exchange is to embrace ambiguity. Narrative, social computing, the open source movement are all comfortable with ambiguity, embrace it and use it. Organizations need to do the same, but the old patterns of control persist beyond their natural utility.

How we do this, what prejudices and difficulties we have to overcome to achieve this change, will be the theme of this column over the months. How can we use social computing within a corporate environment when we don’t have millions of participants? What is the relation between the formal transaction systems and this new fragmented world? Above all, how do we manage necessary uncertainty?

Is Google making us stupid?

2008-10-09T16:58:00.001-07:00

Hi , I 've been out of pocket for a while,but have been meaning to respond to this little ditty.by Carr, who also thinks he can tell us what the Internet is doing to our brains,even though by his own admission he has absolutely no empirical evidence for any of his conclsuions. I love it.
The topic of what we are doing to our ourselves , our brains , our relationships, etc., with the emergence of the Internt is indeed a fundamental question and it should be. How about we do some RESEARCH, and find out. Carr is not alone in his curiouisty. I spoke with Chris Li of Forester, @ her book party for her well researched book GROUDSWELL, and she refered me to ONE social scientist researcher whom she was familiar with,who was looking into to the impact of social media.
I would like to point out that going back to the argument represented in Plato's writings, the question was whether or not writing would destroy our ability to remember, well, the verdict may still be out on that one, but you can read about it on the Internet, I mean library.
Dr.Media says, have fun rotting your brains, and expanding your mind.

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas Carr

July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly

What the Internet is doing to our brains

by Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Illustration by Guy Billout

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

Also see:

Living With a Computer
(July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

A New Battle Is Beginning in Branding for the Web By STEVE LOHR

2008-10-09T15:49:00.001-07:00

Hi Gang, Dr. Media back form vacation and ready to continue bringing you interesting info with brilliant commentary, of course.
Below an article that addresses the ongoing advertising/branding challenge.What is most interesting here is how the conflict between old tech methods and new tech demands is being met. The cool item here ,for those of you who are interested is, how a company like Microsoft , can attempt to take a term of currency-mesh, and try to own it by adding a branding term. The implications of this are profound.It means that large corporations can try to own language. The DNA of thought is language. The expression of the unique individual is in his or her language , as art as poem, as commentary, as gossip.
Here come the thought police?? What do you think?

September 1, 2008
A New Battle Is Beginning in Branding for the Web
By STEVE LOHR

To marketers large and small, the Web is a wide open frontier, an unlimited billboard with boundless branding opportunities.

For the empirical proof, look at the filings with the government for new trademarks that, put simply, are brand names.

Applications surged in the dot-com years, peaking in 2000 and then falling sharply for two years, before rising to a record last year of more than 394,000.

Recently, a new front has opened in the Internet branding wars.

It lies beyond putting trademarks on new businesses, Web site addresses and online logos. Now, companies want to slap a brand on still vaguely defined products and services in the uncharted ephemera of cyberspace — the computing cloud, as it has come to be known.

Cloud computing usually refers to Internet services or software that the user accesses through a Web browser on a personal computer, cellphone or other device. The digital service is delivered remotely, from somewhere off in the computing cloud, in the fashion of Google’s Internet search service.

Dell has tried to trademark the term cloud computing itself. But in August, the United States Patent and Trademark Office sent a strong signal that cloud computing cannot be trademarked.

It issued an initial refusal to Dell, which filed its application 18 months ago, when the term was less widely used in industry conversations and marketing.

Dell had passed early steps toward approval, but the office turned it down, after protests from industry experts that cloud computing had become a broadly descriptive term, and not one linked to a single company. Dell can appeal, but that seems unlikely.

In recent years, patents — not trademarks — have been the main focus of intellectual property experts and the courts, especially around the issue of whether patents on software and business methods have become counterproductive, inhibiting innovation.

But some legal experts say trademark issues may take on a higher profile, fueled by the escalating value of brands in general and trademark holders increasingly trying to assert their rights, especially on the Internet.

“Trademark is the sleeping giant of intellectual property,” said Paul Goldstein, a professor at the Stanford law school.

Microsoft, for example, is developing a technology that is intended to synchronize the data on all of a person’s computing devices, even synchronizing it with family members and work colleagues as well, automatically reaching across the cloud.

When Microsoft announced the concept this year, it said the technology would be called Live Mesh. Just what it is and how it may work remains unclear, but Microsoft filed for a trademark on Live Mesh in June, an application that awaits judgment from the Patent and Trademark Office.

Mesh and mesh networking are widely used terms for technology that connects devices.

“This is the challenge for our examiners,” said Lynne G. Beresford, commissioner for trademarks in the Patent and Trademark Office. “With emerging marks in a field that is changing quickly, you have to make a determination about what the common understanding is.”

That challenge, legal experts say, is one of several for trademark policy and practice in the Internet age. Instant communication, aggressive business tactics and an unsettled legal environment, they say, mean that trademark disputes on the Internet will increase in number and intensity.

The first round of trademark conflict on the Internet, focused on cybersquatting, has subsided. Cybersquatters were early profiteers who bought up the Web addresses, or domain names, of well-known trademarked brands, and then tried to charge the companies huge amounts of money to buy them.

In 1999, Congress passed a bill against cybersquatting that allowed companies to sue anyone who, with “a bad faith intent to profit,” buys the domain name of a well-known brand. The same year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit oversight agency, established a system for resolving domain name disputes.

The new areas of conflict, according to legal experts, include trademark owners trying to assert their rights to stifle online criticism of their products, and to stop trademarked brands from being purchased as keywords in Internet search advertising.

Early court rulings in keyword cases point to the uncertain legal setting and the international differences in trademark law. In the United States, lawyers say, the initial rulings have tended to allow companies to buy the trademarked brand names of rivals as keywords in search. Ford, for example, can bid on and buy “Toyota,” so that a person typing Toyota as a search term would see a link to Ford’s Web site in the paid-for links on the right hand side of Google’s Web page.

In the United States, that practice has not been interpreted as causing any fundamental consumer confusion. Google also argues that because any bidder can make an offer for any word — Google supplies no list — it is not a user of trademarks. “We are not using keywords, we are not selling keywords, we are selling ad space,” said Terri Chen, Google’s senior trademark counsel.

But in a French court ruling in 2005, Google was enjoined from allowing others to buy as a keyword the trademark brand of a French luxury goods maker, Louis Vuitton. For countries other than the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Google has a trademark complaint system, so holders can generally prevent their brands from being purchased as keywords by others.

The speed of Internet communication and heightened competition to claim and establish brands have drastically changed trademark tactics over the years. Compare the positioning and pre-emptive moves around cloud computing with the gradual pace of building one of the most valued brands in the world, Microsoft’s Windows.

The use of personal computer windows and graphical user windowing systems were around long before Microsoft announced its plans for a Windows operating system in 1983. The first version was introduced in 1985, and Microsoft did not file for a trademark until 1990. Its application was initially rejected as “merely descriptive.”

But, as so often, Microsoft persevered. It kept investing in advertising, branding and product development. It presented the Patent and Trademark Office with surveys showing people had come to associate the term Windows with Microsoft, and in 1995 the trademark examiners finally agreed.

With its cloud computing project Live Mesh, Microsoft is taking a far faster, more focused approach. It is employing Live, which it uses in other Internet offerings, like Windows Live and Xbox Live, as half of a two-word trademark — or composite mark, in legal terms. “Mesh networking is the generic category, but Live Mesh is Microsoft’s implementation and acts as a source identifier,” said Russell Pangborn, Microsoft’s director for trademarks.

One thing that has been undeniably transformed by computing and the Internet is the trademark office itself. Ms. Beresford, a professed “trademark nerd,” recalled that when she joined the office in 1979, searches for the same or “confusingly similar” trademarks began in the “search room.” The applications and registration documents were kept in wooden cabinets, filed alphabetically.

Trademarked images were kept in separate drawers and grouped into visual categories, she recalled, like “grotesque humans” (the Pillsbury doughboy) and “human body parts” (the Yellow Pages’ walking fingers).

Examining attorneys, Ms. Beresford noted, were issued rubber covers for their index fingers for going through files faster and with fewer paper cuts. The technology tools have been upgraded considerably since then. The work is now done mainly on computers, searching the Web and specialized trademark databases. Eighty-five percent of the office’s 390 examining attorneys work primarily from home.

The search room, Ms. Beresford observed, has “gone the way of the buggy whip.”

The Trolls Among Us

2008-08-03T17:07:00.001-07:00

I wanted to blog this to your attention and compliment Schwartz his article ,and the Times for encouraging this, type of work. While it may not be that interesting to most, as a media psychologist, Dr. Media says this is just the tip of the iceberg. What this really alludes to is the ability of anyone to represent what ever their personal mythology is in their actions without being held responsible, or more importantly, needing to understand themselves.. What does this mean, anyone can pretend to be powerful,rich, evil, sexy, you name it, and there is no way of knowing with out a reference to the fleshworld. This is cool, because it allows people to express their unconscious fantasies.Sometimes these fantasies are not pleasant.What a great opportunity for self knowledge?

Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com

August 3, 2008

The Trolls Among Us

By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ

One afternoon in the spring of 2006,
for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a
seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down
from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the
head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin
mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace
and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an
hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could
take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s
newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com,
a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From
MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet
message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be
called, who dwell there.

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org,
a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a
month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost
everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon
in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak
from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards —
devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to
the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven
turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the
inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party
line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that
you are too old to understand.

Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as
funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page
to a lost iPod.
Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod.
The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes
were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a
zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and
posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods,
spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of
Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube,
complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s
parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father,
Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is
Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi,
I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and
let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls
continued for a year and a half.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to
denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early
trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small,
single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T.
professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid
questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find
out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who
would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall
for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It
is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others.
Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair;
escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for
their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be
Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the
stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen.
Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out
loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional
equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their
computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said
one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his
legal identity.

Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange
between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full
of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an
insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do
whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely
distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is
never over until all the lulz have been had.”

/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police
itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to
disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a
group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.

But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous
message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale
Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who
posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions
message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death
threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home
addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of
the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.

Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of
anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he
works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design,
programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.”
Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological
inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad
on Craigslist,
posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than
100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and
phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist
Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in
America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier
MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself
with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been
flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators
say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of
Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether
Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable
suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media
sensation.

Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment deprived its subjects of more than
just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, and at least one,
for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an
invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court. After
receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real address
and phone number from the Internet. “Anyone who knows who and where you
are is a security hole,” he told me. “I own a gun. I have an escape
route. If someone comes, I’m ready.”

While reporting this article, I did everything I could to verify the
trolls’ stories and identities, but I could never be certain. After
all, I was examining a subculture that is built on deception and
delights in playing with the media. If I had doubts about whether
Fortuny was who he said he was, he had the same doubts about me. I
first contacted Fortuny by e-mail, and he called me a few days later.
“I checked you out,” he said warily. “You seem legitimate.” We met in
person on a bright spring day at his apartment, on a forested slope in
Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants,
looking like an amiable freelancer on a Friday afternoon. He is thin,
with birdlike features and the etiolated complexion of one who works in
front of a screen. He’d been chatting with an online associate about
driving me blindfolded from the airport, he said. “We decided it would
be too much work.”

A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a
futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep
for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into
an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not
going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can
feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat
lay purring in his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person
who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life.
Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible
stuff, too.”

“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5,
he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives.
Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his
grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to
kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,”
she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”

In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and
her family found themselves in the trolls’ crosshairs. Their personal
information — e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone
numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a
voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words “I did it for the lulz.”
Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the
kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly
written by one of Megan’s classmates, the blog called Megan a “drama
queen,” so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death.
“Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat
so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill
themselves over it.” In the third post the author revealed herself as
Lori Drew.

This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its
authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan
Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew,
Fortuny told me, was the blog’s author. After watching him log onto the
site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to
question the public’s hunger for remorse and to challenge the
enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan’s
town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable.
The county sheriff’s department announced it was investigating the
identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not
especially worried about coming out now. “What’s he going to sue me
for?” he asked. “Leading on confused people? Why don’t people
fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it’s true?”

Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the
Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent
together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and
his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby
over sake and happy-hour gyoza. Fortuny flirted with our waitress,
showing her a cellphone picture of his cat. “He commands you to kill!”
he cackled. “Do you know how many I’ve killed at his command?” Everyone
laughed.

Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several
windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia
Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It was
buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web
site. Trolls had flooded the site’s forums with flashing images and
links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive
user to claim that she had a seizure.

WEEV: the whole posting flashing images to epileptics thing? over the line.

HEPKITTEN: can someone plz tell me how doing something the admins intentionally left enabled is hacking?

WEEV: it’s hacking peoples unpatched brains. we have to draw a moral line somewhere.

Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to
flashing lights was justified. “Hacks like this tell you to watch out
by hitting you with a baseball bat,” he told me. “Demonstrating these
kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.”

“So the message is ‘buy a helmet,’ and the medium is a bat to the head?” I asked.

“No, it’s like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by
beaning him from the mound. If you have this disease and you’re on the
Internet, you need to take precautions.” A few days later, he wrote and
posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics.

On Sunday, Fortuny showed me an office building that once housed Google programmers, and a low-slung modernist structure where programmers wrote Halo 3,
the best-selling video game. We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee
shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price
they feel like. Kirkland seemed to pulse with the easy money and
optimism of the Internet, unaware of the machinations of the troll on
the hill.

We walked on, to Starbucks.
At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted
noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a
white-chocolate mocha. He proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure
for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.

“You have green hair,” he told me. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”

“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green
hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”

“What do you mean? What did I do?”

“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you
get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain
that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed
the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling
“victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and
trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

On Monday we drove to the mall. I asked Fortuny how he could troll
me if he so chose. He took out his cellphone. On the screen was a
picture of my debit card with the numbers clearly legible. I had left
it in plain view beside my laptop. “I took this while you were out,” he
said. He pressed a button. The picture disappeared. “See? I just
deleted it.”

The Craigslist Experiment, Fortuny reiterated, brought him troll
fame by accident. He was pleased with how the Megan Had It Coming blog
succeeded by design. As he described the intricacies of his plan —
adding sympathetic touches to the fake classmate, making fake Lori Drew
a fierce defender of her own daughter, calibrating every detail to the
emotional register of his audience — he sounded not so much a
sociologist as a playwright workshopping a set of characters.

“You seem to know exactly how much you can get away with, and you
troll right up to that line,” I said. “Is there anything that can be
done on the Internet that shouldn’t be done?”

Fortuny was silent. In four days of conversation, this was the first time he did not have an answer ready.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to think about it.”

Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by
the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll
archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known
band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the
Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved
trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas,
escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and
terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.

Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral,
is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of
daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is
also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better
documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary
site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group
of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of
user accounts.

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying
at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he
boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that
night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s.
“Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching
up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet.
Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the
illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put
these people in the oven!”

I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal
Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile
his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to
Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy
bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his
early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back
from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point,
inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.

As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his
day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and
summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a
Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton
levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in
Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The
question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six
billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to
have said this aloud.

Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the
midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired,
wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego
hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the
Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination
markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts
the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two
uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed
his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” —
moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no
possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of
hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of
$10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.

We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike
snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked
on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit
and tie.

“This is my car,” Weev said. “Get in.”

And it was, for that night and the next, at least. The car’s plush
chamber accentuated the boyishness of Weev, who wore sneakers and jeans
and hung from a leather strap like a subway rider. In the front seat
sat Claudia, a pretty college-age girl.

I asked about the status of Weev’s campaign against humanity. Things
seemed rather stable, I said, even with all this talk of trolling and
hacking.

“We’re waiting,” Weev said. “We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.”

“How do you know it’s not you?” I asked.

“If it were me, I would know,” he said. “I would receive a sign.”

Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time
favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster
gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki
was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”

“I was just thinking of Kali!” Claudia said with a giggle.

Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would
attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll
Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online
commenters, Weev said he “dropped docs” on Sierra, posting a fabricated
narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security number and
address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign against Sierra,
one that culminated in death threats. Weev says he has access to
hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers. About a month later,
he sent me mine.

Weev, Claudia and I hung out in Fullerton for two more nights,
always meeting and saying goodbye at the train station. I met their
friend Kate, who has been repeatedly banned from playing XBox Live for
racist slurs, which she also enjoys screaming at white pedestrians.
Kate checked my head for lice and kept calling me “Jew.” Relations have
since warmed. She now e-mails me puppy pictures and wants the names of
fun places for her coming visit to New York. On the last night, Weev
offered to take me to his apartment if I wore a blindfold and left my
cellphone behind. I was in, but Claudia vetoed the idea. I think it was
her apartment.

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from
it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When
does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic
game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to
control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules
be compatible with our notions of free speech?

One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel,
now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over
the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s
Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept
from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the
ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another,
Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a
robust global network with no central authority, engineers were
encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet
“listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including
those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human
equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and
tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite
principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what
they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says,
are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I
can to confound you.

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame
technology, which increases the range of our communications while
dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier
presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their
messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers
that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial
trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a
destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient
misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of
all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

So far, despite all this discord, the Internet’s system of civil
machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as
1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam “will destroy
the network.” The news media continually present the online world as a
Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles.
And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the
brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say
that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying
that crows pose a threat to farming.

That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire
subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet
another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing
that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity
where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases
like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being
inflicted on strangers?

Several state legislators have recently proposed cyberbullying
measures. At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a
Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying
Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any
communications with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.”
In June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated
federal fraud laws by creating a false identity “to torment, harass,
humiliate and embarrass” another user, and by violating MySpace’s terms
of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service, and
millions create false identities. “While Drew’s conduct is immoral, it
is a very big stretch to call it illegal,” wrote the online-privacy
expert Prof. Daniel J. Solove on the blog Concurring Opinions.

Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and
intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and
threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to
prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service
providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there,
his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the
means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have
their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography.
But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls,
would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement
keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments
section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not.
All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next
to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might
there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has
proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board
administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives
trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message. A
broader answer is persistent pseudonymity, a system of nicknames that
stay the same across multiple sites. This could reduce anonymity’s
excesses while preserving its benefits for whistle-blowers and overseas
dissenters. Ultimately, as Fortuny suggests, trolling will stop only
when its audience stops taking trolls seriously. “People know to be
deeply skeptical of what they read on the front of a supermarket
tabloid,” says Dan Gillmor, who directs the Center for Citizen Media.
“It should be even more so with anonymous comments. They shouldn’t
start off with a credibility rating of, say, 0. It should be more like
negative-30.”

Of course, none of these methods will be fail-safe as long as
individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do. As we
discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is
obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one
is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or
withhold them as we see fit. “I can’t push you into the fire,” he
explained, “but I can look at you while you’re burning in the fire and
not be required to help.” Weeks later, after talking to his friend
Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove
him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, “allows me to find
people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I
thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. The idea
of them learning from their mistakes and becoming people that I could
actually be proud of . . . it was overwhelming.” He continued: “It’s
not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I’m trying to
save them.”

Weeks before my visit with Fortuny, I had lunch with “moot,” the
young man who founded 4chan. After running the site under his pseudonym
for five years, he recently revealed his legal name to be Christopher
Poole. At lunch, Poole was quick to distance himself from the excesses
of /b/. “Ultimately the power lies in the community to dictate its own
standards,” he said. “All we do is provide a general framework.” He was
optimistic about Robot9000, a new 4chan board with a combination of
human and machine moderation. Users who make “unoriginal” or “low
content” posts are banned from Robot9000 for periods that lengthen with
each offense.

The posts on Robot9000 one morning were indeed far more substantive
than /b/. With the cyborg moderation system silencing the trolls, 4chan
had begun to display signs of linearity, coherence, a sense of
collective enterprise. It was, in other words, robust. The anonymous
hordes swapped lists of albums and novels; some had pretty good taste.
Somebody tried to start a chess game: “I’ll start, e2 to e4,” which
quickly devolved into riffage with moves like “Return to Sender,” “From
Here to Infinity,” “Death to America” and a predictably indecent
checkmate maneuver.

Shortly after 8 a.m., someone asked this:

“What makes a bad person? Or a good person? How do you know if you’re a bad person?”

Which prompted this:

“A good person is someone who follows the rules. A bad person is someone who doesn’t.”

And this:

“you’re breaking my rules, you bad person”

There were echoes of antiquity:

“good: pleasure; bad: pain”

“There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

And flirtations with postmodernity:

“good and bad are subjective”

“we’re going to turn into wormchow before the rest of the universe even notices.”

Books were prescribed:

“read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs.”

And then finally this:

“I’d say empathy is probably a factor.”

Turn Anything Into a Screenplay - Wired How-To Wiki

2008-08-01T18:22:00.001-07:00

Dr. Media again. Here a little ditty about Bob McKee's rap on story. I know Bob and he is quite a character. Actor ,Director, educator. His book on story structure is terrific, directly from the class e's been teaching for 20 years. Reading it won't make you Coppola, but understanding what he's on about will make you a better writer, and give you a better sense of what makes a good story. Of course then you need to come up with one, and be able to write it, that's the hard part.Guess thats why out of the thousands of scripts that get registered at the WGA every year, only 10% ever get read by anyone other than their authors.
Enjoy.

Turn Anything Into a Screenplay - Wired How-To Wiki

''If you follow''' the advice of screenwriting guru Robert McKee, almost anything can be made into a great story — even, say, Slashdot, the site run by Rob Malda (aka CmdrTaco).

'''1. Create a protagonist.''' CmdrTaco lives on Netopia, where his people, an enslaved race called the Bots, are forced to feed information into the Great OS.

'''2. Establish what the protagonist wants.''' CmdrTaco wants to be free.

'''3. Be sure to have an antagonist.''' CmdrTaco fears the evil Regional Information Acquiring Agency (RIAA), which polices Netopia for rebels.

'''4. Decide what the antagonist wants.''' The RIAA knows that the only way to keep the Bots enslaved is to stifle all attempts to share data.

'''5. You need a conflict to drive the plot.''' CmdrTaco has to free the enslaved Bots or die.

'''6. Don't forget a beginning, a middle, and an end.''' CmdrTaco escapes the capital, Vistopolis (in a car chase you really have to see to believe). He then tells the Bots of Netopia to log on to the Great OS and simultaneously upload the most useless piece of data in the galaxy: "/." Overwhelmed, the Great OS explodes, taking the RIAA with it.

----

All humor aside, contemporary screenplays are pretty standard in style. First thing's first; here is what you'll need:

* '''A Computer''' Any word processor will do, but you'll have to tweak it to get the right margins and tab spacing. You can use a free online screenplay editor such as [http://www.scripped.com/ Scripped]. Otherwise, you can buy a professional script writing program such as [http://www.celtx.com/ Celtx], [http://www.finaldraft.com/ Final Draft] or [http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=104 Montage].
* '''An Internet Connection (optional)''' There's a wealth of [http://www.scripped.com/ Screenwriting Software] available on the internet absolutely free such as [http://www.scripped.com/ Scripped] or [http://www.plotbot.com/ Plotbot]. While these tools generally lack in sophistication they make up for it with portability and only cost you time to use.
* '''8 1/2" x 11" paper'''. About 90 to 130 pages of it, actually -- the standard length of a movie script
* '''Get a handle of what a script reads like'''. The best way is to read other scripts. There are plenty available online. Start with [http://www.movie-page.com/scripts/Ghostbusters2.htm The Ghostbusters 2 script]. Why not?

'''Once you have your finalized draft''', you'll probably want to get to know the screenwriting process. The draft you have, it's called a "Spec" script (short for "speculative").

'''The spec script''' is usually the hard copy you would show interested movie executives. If you get a movie exec in a room, be prepared with a 15 to 20 minute pitch.

'''Don't get too attached''' to your spec script. If your script gets picked up, it is possible it will go through several rewritten drafts to meet the criteria of the movie makers. If they don't like what has been done with it, they can take the script to be rewritten from the ground up by another author. It's all part of the process.

'''Once everyone is happy with it''', the script becomes a "shooting" script. This is the script given to the actors and used to film.

No Film Distributor? Then D.I.Y.

2008-08-01T18:11:00.001-07:00

Hi Folks,

Well, well, another article about why you shouldn't make movies.These are getting redundant.So what do we know, there a LOT of movies, and no one wants them, and you need to what, SELF PUBLISH.
Did I say publish, yes, why, because movies are going the way of books and music. Movies are content, image content, there is a vehicle for this , it is called the Internet.Why, you might ask, is a distributor going to spend money on your movie to then spend millions putting your movie in theaters, when they can let you do it.Publishers don't give advances anymore either,UNLESS, you have what they think will be a hit. Below Anderson gives a few examples of movies that even got to Sundance--the great Valhalla for indies--and still didn't get sold. What should one do?
A film maker who believes in his or her vision, needs to get real with themselves and their investors. Then make the movies anyhow, knowing it could go no where and not pretending that it's the next Juno, but hoping and doing ones damnedest to make it so.That means that creativity, and pluck are your only refuge. You see, or will see, not everyone sees the world the way you do or agrees with your vision of what is important and has value, especially acquisition executives. This,I am sure, is not news to anyone. So why , do we still make the effort in spite of all the bad news? Well kids, when it comes to being a hit in tinseltown,there ain;t nothing new under the sun. Oh, yes, there are new means of distribution and more opportunities to distribute your own stuff--this is good--but getting picked up and put in a theater has always been tough.Of course having a compelling story, being able to tell it in a compelling way, has never been easy has it, even if you have the money.
More later.
Dr.M.

July 30, 2008
No Film Distributor? Then D.I.Y.
By JOHN ANDERSON

When “Bottle Shock” played at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it appeared to possess that mix so tantalizing to well-heeled indie distributors.

It had a name cast, including Bill Pullman and Alan Rickman. The director came with a track record and a critically acclaimed short film. And the story, about a small American winery that triumphed over its French competitors in a blind tasting in 1976 and changed the world’s view of California wine, was an accessible one for audiences who flocked to “Sideways” a few years back.

But “Bottle Shock” found no love among distributors in Park City, Utah. So the director, Randall Miller, is opening the film himself next week in 12 cities. With their hopes for conventional movie deals increasingly dead on arrival, more and more indie filmmakers are opting for a do-it-yourself model: self-distribution, once the route of the desperate, reckless or defiant, has become an increasingly attractive option for movies otherwise deprived of theatrical exhibition. “Ballast,” “Wicked Lake,” “The Singing Revolution” and “Last Stop for Paul” are among the indies currently or recently taking the maverick route.

The motivations can be complicated. For example, John Turturro’s “Romance & Cigarettes” was self-distributed late last year, having been left to languish after its producer, United Artists, was sold. In other cases it’s simply a matter of distributors’ tastes differing from those of the filmmakers.

But increasingly, indie filmmakers find themselves caught in a glutted marketplace with too few theaters to handle all the movies, and the basic laws of supply and demand have depressed the prices they can fetch. In 2007, even with the big Hollywood studios trimming their offerings, about 600 films were released in the United States; five years earlier that number was nearly 450, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

While the orphan-indie route may not be the way a moviemaker dreams it will happen, do-it-yourself is better than a straight-to-DVD release — and certainly better than outright oblivion.

By going their own way, Mr. Miller (whose directing credits include “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School” and the upcoming “Nobel Son”) and his wife and co-writer, Jody Savin, retain the DVD and other rights to their dramatic comedy. They also get to control how their movie is rolled out and marketed.

The downside? “An enormous amount of work, an enormous amount of stress, no sleep and lots of people I’ve come to know and love who have given me millions of dollars,” Mr. Miller said.

But Mr. Miller and Ms. Savin said they felt they had little choice. With the rash of prominent distribution houses recently shuttered or placed in figurative foreclosure — including Paramount Vantage, Picturehouse, Warner Independent and ThinkFilm — options for the indie filmmaker are evaporating.

What remains is the slim chance of being picked up by one of the surviving “mini-majors” like Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight or the Universal-owned Focus Features, or finding themselves at the mercy of smaller distributors. While many are well regarded, most offer small cash advances (if any) in exchange for most of the rights (DVD, TV, international release), but don’t usually spend the kind of money necessary to assure public awareness and ticket sales. This, in turn, virtually precludes entree to the racks at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster, outlets without which a film’s post-theatrical existence will be one of obscurity.

“You‘ve got to have the phone numbers,” said Tom Bernard, the longtime co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. “Self-distribution is good, it can work, but filmmakers who are so innovative in making movies have to channel some of that into learning how the marketplace works.” He said major pitfalls were “carpetbaggers” and “middlemen” who may agree to represent a movie at a place like Sundance, but gravitate to the easy sale and leave their less fortunate filmmakers high and dry.

“We’re in the business of discouraging people from self-distributing,” said Gary Palmucci, general manager of the venerable Kino International, which will be releasing “Momma’s Man” on Aug. 22. That film, by Azazel Jacobs, came out of Sundance this year with the all-important buzz, and had a deal with ThinkFilm until that company’s money problems scotched it. Mr. Palmucci said Mr. Jacobs might have chosen self-distribution, but wisely didn’t because the cards are stacked: the enormous expense of opening a film in major markets like New York, the average filmmaker’s unfamiliarity with the logistics of booking a movie, the hassles in collecting money from exhibitors on time.

To help navigate the sometimes treacherous world of film distribution, Mr. Miller and Ms. Savin hired Dennis O’Connor, a former top marketing executive at Picturehouse, to serve as a consultant. Freestyle Releasing of Los Angeles has been engaged, for an upfront fee and a small percentage of the gross, to handle the physical distribution of the movie (moving prints, booking theaters, etc.). And the publicity on the film is being orchestrated by Mr. Miller, Ms. Savin and Mr. O’Connor, with others enlisted by Mr. O’Connor from among the ranks of distribution veterans.

For the possibly lucrative DVD market, “Bottle Shock” has separate deals with Fox Home Entertainment and the all-important Netflix, both of which have helped in the marketing (which ensures them a better return later). Mr. Miller also negotiated his own deals with airlines and with advertising outlets, and has worked out his own price for prints. Most significant, he raised most of the money for filmmaking and prints and advertising through private investors.

“Wealthy people are really into wine,” Miller said, laughing. “You couldn’t do this with a horror movie.”

But most indie filmmakers won’t be able to raise the $10 million Mr. Miller raised for “Bottle Shock.” Instead they will have to use more cost-effective ingenuity.

The established distributors have regular circuits in which they play their films, media outlets through which they advertise and audiences they court religiously. A self-distributed movie like “Ballast,” which is cast with African-American nonactors and is about down-and-out characters (and opens at Film Forum in October), is compelling its champions to think outside the art-house box and explore new frontiers and demographics, like black churches and Southern audiences. (The movie, which won cinematography and directing prizes at this year’s Sundance festival, had a tentative deal with IFC Films before the director Lance Hammer decided to release the film through his own Alluvial Film Company.)

“At one time distributors were paying so much money they could do anything they wanted, maybe consult respectfully with the filmmakers but essentially do what they wanted,” said Steven Raphael, a consultant on the movie. “But now there’s no money and filmmakers get resentful, so they’re taking back control.”

Neil Mandt, the director, producer and star of “Last Stop for Paul,” a comedy about two men traveling around the world sprinkling the ashes of their dead friend, had a prospective deal with Magnolia Pictures. But the distributor was interested only in a DVD release. Mr. Mandt passed.

“I will be the first to admit that I never imagined that the movie would connect as well as it did when it won a prize at 45 festivals,” Mr. Mandt said. “That’s a crazy number. Despite that, we never were approached by another company for a domestic distribution deal again.”

“Last Stop for Paul” opens next week in New York, and Mr. Mandt hopes a successful opening will lead to a larger rollout. “If all of this goes as planned,” he said, “maybe in another year we will make our money back.”

New role call for international films - Entertainment News, Anne Thompson, Media - Variety

2008-07-27T16:03:00.001-07:00

Hi Kids, Dr. Media back from the road, just chillin'. Those of you in the film biz need to read this.Anne Thompson , an old hand at the biz--she wrote the Risky Biz column for years--makes some excellent observations here, about the meaning of foreign sales for your projects.

Check it out. This is the new alchemy, for the moment.
DR.M.

New role call for international films

Foreign sales agents search for star power

By ANNE THOMPSON

At the Hollywood majors, there is a small coterie of actors who can guarantee that a film will be made.

But
in the world of foreign sales, there is a parallel universe, with a
different group of actors who are considered bankable, even if they've
only had a few film credits -- as long as those few films were
successful enough to give them recognition around the globe.

As
available money for movies gets squeezed, indie producers need to find
"bankable" names who don't command movie star prices. But foreign sales
agents like Summit Intl. ("Twilight"), 2929 Entertainment ("Two
Lovers") and France's Wild Bunch ("Southland Tales") can't raise
financing without casting actors with international appeal.

It
used to be that you had to have a track record to be a bankable star,
not only in the domestic market but also overseas. However in the past
year, the economics of the global market has shifted.

"These
actors don’t cost too much but have recognizable international and
domestic value," says ICM’s Hal Sadoff. "Most independent budgets
cannot bear the costs of an established movie star and the ability to
cast an up-and-coming actor allows a producer to meet their budgetary
requirements."

Here's how it works. Foreign sales agents crunch
the numbers on different actors and scripts, estimating how much
business a movie will do in each territory; then they agree to put up
conservative advances to the producers based on those guesses. The
producers can raise more coin from bank loans.

The stars on the
thumbs-up lists of foreign sales agents are the ones who can get movies
made. Even those who are hardly household names.

This has
presented a great opportunity to a slew of young actors and actresses
and it means a greenlight for a lot of films that might not otherwise
be made.

Of course, the question remains as to what impact these
films will have on the domestic box office -- and, of course, whether
these films will prove to be good.

Aside from the thesps listed
in the accompanying chart, the roster of actors come from a variety of
nationalities and professional backgrounds. The list includes thesps
who are more established on U.S. TV than in films, such as Ashton
Kutcher, or those who've established a name in the indie world, such as
Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds and Yank Evan Rachel Wood. Some have
starred in films that were socko internationally if not domestically
(Ben Whishaw, "Perfume"), while others have had co-starring roles in
big domestic hits like Katherine Heigl ("Knocked Up" and "27 Dresses").

They
range from the Oscar-nominated Ellen Page ("Juno") to Aussie actor Sam
Worthington, whose past credits may not ring many bells but who's
considered hot based on two upcoming pics: "Terminator Salvation" and
James Cameron's "Avatar."

And there are those who've co-starred
in Hollywood blockbusters, like Kate Bosworth ("Superman Returns") and
Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, both from "The Fantastic Four." That
makes them recognizable, even if their names were not the factor that
sold those tentpoles to auds.

While their backgrounds and resumes vary, all have perceived appeal to the target demo, the magic "Juno" sweet spot: 17 to 35.

"There
is a new model for packaging films appealing to a youth audience," says
Myriad Pictures' Kirk D'Amico. "Young males and females are driving the
box office."

Oddly, not having starred in many movies is an
advantage. Because these young actors aren't dogged by a string of
flops, producers and financiers can place bets on their future,
investing in their promise.

"Megan Fox hasn't had a failure yet,"
says Nicholas Chartier, president of foreign sales company Voltage
Entertainment. "Two years down the road we'll see if she has made good
choices. Sam Worthington's 'Avatar' is a year and half away."

But
for the time being, the farm team is being offered so many movies (most
of them dreck) that they can't possibly accept them all. If they do,
they risk overexposure or worse: appearing in too many pics that can't
get arrested at fests like Cannes or Sundance or even sell territories
at the American Film Market. Starring in a fest-circuit movie that
doesn't get distribution is a black mark that is hard to erase.

The
biz is heartless and if a rising player doesn't maintain a high batting
average, they don't advance to the big show. Film history is filled
with actors whose golden potential turned them into also-rans.

FOREIGN SALES FAVES

Ben Barnes

Claim to fame: "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian"

Next up: "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Emile Hirsch

Claim to fame: "Into the Wild"

Next up: "Milk"

James McAvoy

Claim to fame: "Atonement," "Wanted"

Next up: "The Last Station"

Jim Sturgess

Claim to fame: "Across the Universe," "The Other Boleyn Girl," "21."

Next up: "Crossing Over," "50 Dead Men Walking," "Heartless."

Channing Tatum

Claim to fame: "She’s the Man," "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," "Stop-Loss"

Next up: "G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra." "Public Enemies"

Jessica Biel

Claim to fame: "Stealth," "The Illusionist," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry"

Next up: "Nailed," "Easy Virtue"

Emily Blunt

Claim to fame: "The Devil Wears Prada," "Charlie Wilson’s War"

Next up: "The Great Buck Howard," "Sunshine Cleaning," "The Young Victoria," "The Wolf Man"

Megan Fox

Claim to fame: "Transformers"

Next up: "Jennifer’s Body," "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People"

Brittany Snow

Claim to fame: "Hairspray," "Prom Night"

Next up: "Finding Amanda"

Kristen Stewart

Claim to fame: "Into the Wild"

Next up: "What Just Happened?" "Twilight"

Comics-Based Movies Keep on Comin' | The Underwire from Wired.com

2008-07-21T04:57:00.001-07:00

Hi kids, Dr media on the road, summer vacation with the babe, just had to refer this to those of you who I know are fans of the the comic genre. What is not surprising at all about this continuing to be a source of film fair is the simple business fact of presales equal less risk.They are not making unknown comics, are they, and not only that, we get a new vid game, which may cost as much as the movie, and now we are even getting good directors to do these things, was Lord of the Rings a cartoon, no it was literature, but now its a video game,
Point is creativity and good story still win, even in Hollywood, occasionally.What about that great film Iron Giant by the director of Walle.Most didn't see it, got great reviews, but not taken seriously cause animated kids story, but Pixar noticed, and he got to do Walle, not bad.
See you later.

Comics-Based Movies Keep on Comin'
By Hugh Hart EmailJuly 20, 2008 | 8:41:00 PMCategories: Comics, Horror, Movies, Sci-Fi

Marvelheroes660
Superheroes saved Hollywood this summer, boosting box office to record heights and funneling $1 billion and counting into studio coffers. Now, emboldened by the success of The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Wanted and Hellboy II, filmmakers are stampeding toward comic books and graphic novels to find bigger-than-life stories for the silver screen.

Antman300 Longtime heavyweights DC Comics (Batman, Superman) and Marvel (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four) are trotting out lesser-known characters from their catalogs. Ant Man (pictured at right)? Yes!

Joining the fray are relative upstarts including Dark Horse, Platinum Studios, Top Cow Productions, Oni Press and Devil's Due Publishing, which are busy populating the superhero pipeline with a new generation of flawed crime-fighters.

Comic books have become so hot that some titles prompt a feeding frenzy from studio execs before they're even published. For example, B. Clay Moore's new assassin series Billy Smoke doesn't hit stores until next year, but it's already been picked up by Warner Bros. as a possible project for Lost star Matthew Fox.

"It's kind of funny that comic book fans think the success of a published comic book is some kind of indicator as to how well a comic book will translate to the big screen," said Moore. "Ultimately, what studios are interested in is a good idea."

As pulp fiction fans pack their bags for next week's Comic-Con International in San Diego, here's a look ahead at some of the comic book movies heading for the big screen.

Punisher: War Zone

Punisher300

Irish he-man Ray Stevenson replaces Thomas Jane to play vengeful but virtuous vigilante Frank Castle in this sequel. His target? The demonic Jigsaw (Dominic West of TV's The Wire).
Secret weapon: German director Lexi Alexander, formerly an actress who toured with the Mortal Kombat traveling show, proved her rock'em-sock'em mettle by making the soccer movie, Hooligans.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Studio: Lionsgate
Release: December 5, 2008

Image courtesy Lionsgate

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Spiritscarlett300The Spirit

Samuel Jackson (as The Octopus) and Scarlett Johansson (pictured, as Silken Floss) appear in this adaptation of Will Eisner's classic noir-meets-supernatural graphic novel, with Gabriel Macht starring as the title character. But the real star is graphic novelist-turned-filmmaker Frank Miller (300, Sin City). Miller had the good sense to bring his Sin City siren Eva Mendes on board to play the Spirit's sultry ex-flame, Sand Saref.
Secret weapon: Cinematographer Bill Pope knows how to frame action scenes, having previously shot Spider-Man 3 and the Matrix sequels.
Publisher: DC Comics
Distributor: Lionsgate
Release: Dec. 25, 2008

Image courtesy DC Comics

See also:

* New Spirit Trailer Hauntingly Dispiriting
* Frank Miller's The Spirit Gets Another Femme Fatale

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Watchmen

300 auteur Zack Snyder's translation of Alan Moore's grisly alternate universe yokes the director's green-screen visual effects wizardry with a wildly eclectic ensemble cast. Jackie Earle Haley (famously creepy in Little Children) plays Rorschach, with Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan and Patrick Wilson playing Nite Owl.
Watchmen300Secret weapon: Carla Gugino, who bared all as the lesbian ex-con in Sin City, stands out from the mostly male cast as sexy-tough Silk Spectre.
Publisher: DC Comics
Studio: Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures
Release: March 6, 2009

Image courtesy DC Comics

See also:

* Fan-Made Watchmen Ads Ready for Watching
* Watchmen Trailer Strikes the Internets Early

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Wolverine300X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Producer/star Hugh Jackman claws his way back into the role of alpha mutant Wolverine in this X-Men prequel, which explores his twisted rapport with Victor Creed/Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber). Dominic Monaghan (Lost) plays Beak.
Secret weapon: Director Gavin Hood, who won a Best Foreign Language Oscar for South African film Tsotsi, follows in the tradition of art house filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Bryan Singer and Jon Favreau who transitioned from the indie realm to make big-budget hits.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Release: May 1, 2009

Image courtesy Marvel Comics

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Pilgrim300Scott Pilgrim Versus the World

Michael "Superbad" Cera stars in this coming-of-age adventure directed by Edgar Wright, the genre-savvy filmmaker responsible for Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Wright steers this adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic series, which co-stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Scott's lust object, Ramona.
Publisher: Oni Press
Studio: Universal Release: 2009 TBD

Image courtesy DC Comics

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Whiteoutkateposter300_2

Whiteout

Underworld's skintight-suited ass-kicker Kate Beckinsale stars in the movie version of Greg Rucka's graphic novel. Set in the Antarctic and directed by Dominic Sena (Gone in Sixty Seconds, Halle Berry's Swordfish), Whiteout casts Beckinsale as U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko, who's in a hurry to solve a murder before the sun disappears for six months. Gabriel Macht (The Spirit) co-stars.
Secret weapon: Reese Witherspoon -- not. Hollywood's highest-paid actress originally planned to star but evidently didn't warm to early versions of the script.
Publisher: Oni Press
Studio: Warner Bros.
Release: 2009 TBD

Image courtesy Oni Press

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Iron_man_face Iron Man 2

The story has yet to be written but director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr. are locked and loaded for another Tony Stark adventure. The sequel, set to start filming in February, will also include Terrence Howard as military middleman, Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Studio: Paramount
Release: April 30, 2010

Image courtesy Paramount Pictures

See also:

* Favreau Blogs on Iron Man Villains, Old and New
* Wired.com's Iron Man Extravaganza: Everything You Need to Know
* Review: Iron Man a New High for Robert Downey Jr.

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Thor300

Thor

Director Matthew Vaughan puts his spin on the
Marvel character. Based on Norse mythology, Thor, aka the God of Thunder, draws his superpowers from a mighty source: his father is Odin, lord of pretty much everything.
Secret weapon: Vaughn, a former producer, directed the taut thriller Layer Cake followed by the extravagant Neil Gaiman fantasy Stardust.
Release: June 4, 2010
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Studio: Marvel Studios

Image courtesy Marvel Comics

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Captamerica300The First Avenger: Captain America

Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand, X-2) is scripting the story about Steve Rogers' transformation from wimpy everyman to Yankee fighting machine, thanks to secret meds and an intense dose of Vita-Rays.
Secret weapon: Patriotism. The big question is how the World War II-era character will take shape in these profoundly war-weary times.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Studio: Marvel Studios
Release: May 6, 2011

Image courtesy Marvel Comics

See also:

* Captain America Movie Finally on Marvel's Horizon
* Captain America Returns Somehow, Sort Of

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Ant Man

Coming off Billy Pilgrem, triple threat Edgar Wright is working on the script. Likening the story's tone to Iron Man, the writer-director-producer told PiQ Mag: "It's on that level of entertainment, really. It's a big, high-concept, special effects comic book adaptation, and very character-led."
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Release: In development

See also:

* Favreau for Iron Man II, Ant Man for Avengers

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The Avengers

The Incredible Hulk's final scene sets up -- spoiler alert for late-arriving moviegoers -- this ensemble effort, expected to include Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America and Ant Man as ticked-off teammates.
Secret weapon: Zak Penn is writing this adventure in tandem with Thor to ensure episodic continuity.
Release: July 2011
Publisher: Marvel Comics

See also:

* Marvel Heroes Crisscross in Iron Man, Hulk
* Favreau for Iron Man II, Ant Man for Avengers

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Lastcall300shortLast Call

Vasilis Lolos's graphic novel series about the story of two phantom teenagers will be adapted by Evan Spiliotopoulis (The Box) for Universal.
Secret weapon: Barry Josephson, the veteran Hollywood player behind Wild Wild West and TV's Bones, is producing.
Publisher: Oni Press
Release: In development

Image courtesy Oni Press

See also:

* Greek Comic Book Artist Lands Last Call Movie Deal

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Cowboysaliens300Cowboys and Aliens

Imagine Entertainment moguls Brian Grazer and Ron Howard are backing this adaptation of the graphic novel about a showdown between American pioneers and Indians forced to band together against invaders from outer space. Robert Downey Jr. is reportedly considering the lead. Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus, the same guys who scripted Iron Man, are adapting the story.
Secret weapon: Cowboys' other producers include Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, playing a hot sci-fi hand these days as writer-producers for Fox's upcoming series Fringe and the new Star Trek movie.
Publisher: Platinum Studio
Release: In development

See also:

Image courtesy Platinum Studio

* Downey May Saddle Up for Sci-Fi Western

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Spiderman300Spider-Man 4

No title, no finished script and no absolute commitment yet from Tobey Maguire or director Sam Raimi, who helmed Hollywood's top-grossing trilogy and brought a true child-geek's love of Steve Ditko's original comics to the movies. However, Raimi professes optimism about the script-in-progress by James Vanderbilt.
Secret weapon: Persistent producer Laura Ziskin can be counted on to give a new Spider-Man her all, with or without Raimi.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Release: In development

Image courtesy Sony Pictures

See also:

* Spider-Man 3 Director Geeks Out on His Movie's Real Star: Sand
* Spider-Man and the Evil Forces of Teen Pregnancy

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Goon276The Goon

David Fincher, maestro of live-action creep-outs Se7en, Zodiac and Fight Club, teams with Dark Horse Entertainment to make a CG-animated feature based on Eric Powell's graphic novel series about a hulking enforcer for the mob who keeps running into ghosts, zombies, skunk apes and other supernatural bad guys.
Secret weapon: Blur Studios crafts the animation in what will be its feature-film debut. The Venice, California-based outfit is best known for its cutting-edge TV spots and Oscar-nominated Gopher Broke short.
Publisher: Dark Horse
Release: In development

Image courtesy Dark Horse

See also:

* Fincher Brings Goon Comic to Big Screen
* Universal Picks a Dark Horse for Comics Deal

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Billy Smoke

Though not officially committed, Lost star Matthew Fox is seriously interested in this graphic novel by B. Clay Moore and illustrator Eric Kim. Not available in stores until next year, Billy Smoke tells the story of an assassin on a mission to clear the planet of his own kind after experiencing a crisis of conscience. It's easy to picture Fox, who played the brooding Racer X in Speed-Racer earlier this summer, grimacing his way through the role.
Publisher: Oni Press
Release: In development

See also:

* Lost's Fox May Play Reformed Assassin

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Hardboiled249short

Hard Boiled

Sin City creator Frank Miller is working toward a movie adaptation of his own hyperviolent graphic novel trilogy that launched in 2000.
Publisher: Dark Horse
Release date: In development

Image courtesy Dark Horse

See also:

* Frank 'Sin City' Miller Likes His Action Hard-Boiled
* The Man Who Shot Sin City
* Sin City Expands Digital Frontier

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Witchblade300Witchblade

From the same publisher that brought us Wanted comes the movie incarnation of this multiplatform hit. In comic book, cable TV and Japanese cartoon form, fans have been digging the woman armed with a superpowered "gauntlet" glove that takes care of business whenever she needs to wallop the bad guys.
Publisher: Top Cow
Release: In development

Image courtesy Top Cow Productions

See also:

* Witchblade Publisher Cuts Movie Deal

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Hackslash250

Hack/Slash

Artist Tim Seeley's graphic novel about a one-time crime victim who takes justice into her own hands and starts fighting back -- with the help of a gas-masked accomplice named Vlad -- is moving toward production. Attached to direct: Todd Lincoln, who worked on visual effects for From Dusk Till Dawn. Justin Marks (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li) is writing the adaptation.
Publisher: Devil's Due Publishing
Studio: Rogue Pictures/Universal
Release: In development

Image courtesy Devil's Due Publishing

See also:

* Invisible Hand Readies Alien Conspiracy Comic Serpo

- - -

Jonah_hex_crop Hex

Thomas Jane may play the role of Jonah Hex, a disfigured bounty hunter saddled with a bad temper and a weakness for booze. Actor Jane earlier proved his hard-ass cred in Marvel's The Punisher.
Publisher: DC Comics
Release: In development

Image courtesy DC Comics

See also:

* Latest Superhero Movie Looking to Hex the Old West

Additional reporting by John Scott Lewinski

Second Life offers healing, therapeutic options for users

2008-07-15T22:14:00.001-07:00

Hey check this out. Now we are starting to see some of the realities of the net utilized. Anoymous people with real or imagined problems, entering to "therapy" with virtual therapists. This is cool.Some years ago I was interviewed by Michelle Goldberg--who worked for me for a while--now a senior editor at Slate--about a website for agoraphobics and I was quoted in Wired saying" A virtual life is better than no life at all", and I think this is still the case. I imagine, and I may be wrong that many of these folks wouldn't seek "real" counseling, but in this space they can perhaps allow themselves to ask for help, after all no one knows who they really are. Of course it would be good to actually see some research done on the experiences and effectiveness of this space. It would also be useful to know what percentage of these participants are moved to seek real counseling with real people.

Second Life offers healing, therapeutic options for users

Cherilyn Parsons, Special to the Chronicle

Sunday, July 13, 2008
The author's avatar approaches the Tibetan Buddhist templ... Carolina Keats, avatar for health librarian Carol Perryma... An avatar approaches an anxiety support group meeting.

"Every human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but which he cannot stop himself creating." -- W. H. Auden

In a garden pavilion on an island, I sat with an assortment of human beings - one clad as a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, another as a brazen vixen, a blue man, a tuxedoed prom king - and poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I'd created to engage here - I was participating in an "anxiety support group" in the free, virtual world of Second Life.

As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!

Founded in 2003 as a virtual community built by users, Second Life rose to cultural phenomenon status by 2006 - only to suffer media backlash over its glitches, hype and sex scene. But it continues to grow. By June 2008, more than 14 million people had joined, only 38 percent them from the United States. More people went "in-world," or participated in, Second Life in the 30 days of June than live in all of San Francisco, which is the home of Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life. If Second Life were to materialize from its server space, the landscape would be four times the size of Manhattan.

A new virtual world, Google's Lively, was introduced last week with its version of avatar chat rooms. And Second Life just announced a new technology, developed with IBM, to allow avatars to teleport among worlds. No wonder analysts at Gartner, a leading technology research company, predict that three years from now 8 in 10 Internet users will work or play in virtual spaces.

Sure, Second Life has more than its share of sex shops and pick-up joints, where avatars can lure others. You get it on virtually with "teledildonics" and relevant "animations." In a "sim," or simulated region, called Jessie, people kill each other for pleasure, albeit to "teleport" back, unwounded. There are financial swindles, pick-up scenes, personal backstabbing, and more attention to elaborate hairdos than Cher in her heyday. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, Second Life might harbor real-world terrorists, scheming in the caves of online anonymity.

It has, in short, all the trauma and pain of real life, and some cautions are in order when it comes to seeking psychological support.

But maybe because it's a dream realm, hopefulness abounds. Nowhere is that truer than in Second Life's support groups, which help people cope with everything from cancer, depression, bipolar disorder and autism, to caretaker stress. There are more than 70 such groups, according to Second Life's Health Support Coalition. Most are secular. While a few groups are facilitated by associations such as the American Cancer Society, peers run most.

As expressed on the Web site, www.supportforhealing.com, associated with Second Life's Support for Healing Island, "we are NOT and never will replace the help of professionals ... but purely hold a safe place for people to come when they need a shoulder."

A year ago, before I had explored Second Life, I would have laughed at the idea of virtual shoulders. How can a person possibly be "real" via an avatar anyway - much less have a meaningful conversation with a puppy dog, barmaid, elf, or wilder avatar appearance such as a blob or a tree? It's hard enough to trust someone in real life, much less "second life." Then again, what better place to connect our yearning selves with other yearning selves than in a space of mutual creation - a place where those very selves can be one's unconscious made manifest? Indeed, avatar, in its original Sanskrit, refers to the descent of the soul in human form.

Click, clack: When I rose from my hourlong anxiety group meeting, I felt seen and heard in the deepest part of me - more so, in fact, than in some "real life" interactions, where we often put up fronts.

You're not alone, the group told me.

Nor are you.
Virtual safety net

The anonymity of Second Life can make all the difference in opening up to share within a support group.

Somewhere in small-town America, a wife and mother of about 40 - she could be your neighbor or relative - suffers from serious depression. She loves animals, so within Second Life, as Fionella Flanagan, she's a big gray dog with a shaggy white mane. She attends the depression support group. Why does she do it? "I don't have to worry about what I say in the group coming back to bite me in my home town."

She also suffers from fibromyalgia, one of those crippling, invisible diseases that some doctors say is "all in your head." In Second Life, Fionella doesn't "have to overcome real life prejudice when I say I'm sick. There's none of that, 'but you look so good' junk."

When anxiety support group avatars were asked whether they were more honest as avatars than in real life, a wild-haired blonde, Galvana Gustafson (in real life an American dancer and bassoonist with a master's degree in psychotherapy), put it this way: "My avatar is more honest than myself because the rejection won't hurt as much."

No one would guess that the person behind the avatar Morgana Shi, a redhead knockout DJ at Second Life's Heavenly Rose nightclub, suffers from bipolar disorder as well as back pain so disabling she often can't leave the house. "This is my only outlet really," she told me via private instant message while she was DJ'ing.

I've never done an interview while I was gyrating on a dance floor (click the floor, and a dance animation takes over your avatar). "Hallelujah, it's raining men," the song raged, and I whirled with other avatars as Morgana and I chatted.

"All of Second Life is my support group," she reported. "My first week here, I walked onto the land that Heavenly Rose Night Club was on, and ran into Rose Kenzo, the owner, and she took me under her wing. She has been there for me for the last two years every day since."

Morgana later discovered the Support for Healing Island "because I was going through a major relapse with my bipolar and needed help from people who understood. I personally like to be in groups that are survivors, sufferers, and caretakers and loved ones, supporting one another. The best help and advice I have ever gotten are from people who have experienced firsthand."

She now leads a bipolar group on the Support for Healing Island and raises funds for the National Alliance on Mental Illness Walk in the real world.
Remaking the world

One of the most beloved community members in Second Life was The Sojourner, a multiple stroke survivor who created the "Shockproof Dreams" sim for stroke victims, people with autism and Asperger's syndrome and the people who care for them. In real life, she once worked as a speech pathologist and her son has Asperger's. A sweet, empathetic-looking avatar with auburn hair, in real life she died suddenly in May 2008, provoking an outpouring of in-world mourning.

The Metaverse Messenger - one of the virtual world's newspapers - reprinted an interview with "Soj" as she was known, from June 2007. Second Life "isn't just a game," she emphasized. "It is a widely diverse opportunity to explore every aspect of life, if you choose to. If you are disabled in any way, this is a way to move beyond the disability." Before her own strokes, she had worked professionally with stroke survivors. "I quickly realized that Second Life was a good rehabilitation tool. ... It helps with memory, planning things, using math, making friends, developing self-confidence, using skills you thought lost to stroke."

Soj created not only support groups but a "sandbox," complete with tutorials and classes, where people can freely create objects out of "prims," the core building material (think molecules) of Second Life, and thus create clothing, homes, entire landscapes. "A farmer/landscaper may not be able to use a plow in Real Life, but can landscape or have animals in Second Life," she said in her last talk, now posted at her memorial on the Shockproof Dreams sim.

People with autism or Asperger's especially seem to appreciate Second Life. The literature welcoming visitors to Brigadoon, a community within Shockproof Dreams, describes how the virtual world lacks "the richness of expression and gesture found in Real Life," so people who become easily overwhelmed by real-world stimuli face "fewer distractions to worry about." The Web site www.autistics.org sponsors a group of "activist autistic people" called the Autistic Liberation Front, who engage in discussions, workshops and conferences. They have a museum and library and hang out in a social area called Porcupine.

Researchers of autism use Second Life as a laboratory and tool. At the in-world SL-Labs and Teaching and Research facility, at the University of Derby in England, Simon Bignell, a lecturer in psychology, studies how Second Life can "enhance first life social-communication skills in people" with autistic spectrum disorders. The Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas, Dallas, offers a therapy in Second Life for people with Asperger's that helps them practice interviewing for jobs.

Second Life's Health Support Coalition (a collaboration between Soj, the avatar Gentle Heron and Carolina Keats, who in real life is a medical librarian) has won a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to create an Ability Commons, for 40-plus smaller health and support groups. "Imagine a paralyzed 23-year-old lying in his family's back bedroom," the coalition wrote, "yearning for contact with age peers in similar situations. Second Life offers people with serious physical and cognitive disabilities opportunities to socialize and get information."

They needed a grant because hosting takes money. Though Second Life itself is free to access, people pay a monthly rent for "land" and prim space.

The large, lush Support for Healing Island, which has more than 850 members, ran into just that problem: The island's founder, Zafu Diamond (in real-life Englishman John Palmer), couldn't sustain the fees. This lovely garden isle with mountains, moving streams, flowers, flying butterflies, shrines and buildings, offered the widest array of peer support groups in-world. Featured on British TV, there's even a Medicine Buddha Tibetan temple, where avatars could sit in meditation, chill to the sound of mantras, or share quiet conversation.

According to its monthly newsletter, Support for Healing was "a group of people that believe that recovery from depression, emotional trauma, and mental and physical illness can be greatly enhanced by loving kindness and friendship." A Listening Ear service had offered "one-to-one support for those who have a need to talk to someone between the times regular meetings are scheduled."

But fundraising efforts by the island's stalwarts came to naught. Appeals to Linden Lab did no good. Groups ceased. The Listening Ear closed. The island teetered on the edge of digital disappearance - and at the last minute, an energy healer who'd been offering group meetings on the island stepped in to take over as owner. Most of the groups have restarted, though the depression support meeting, which had moved to The Centering Place sim, will be shared by both locations. The Listening Ear remains shut.

The avatar who saved Support for Healing is named Tong Ren Writer, after the Tong Ren therapy he practices. (In real-life he's a patent lawyer in Boston.) He intends to welcome more support groups and also continue his free, energetic healing group twice a week.

Committed volunteers

Group leaders like avatar Glenn Oud, who has facilitated the weekly anxiety group for more than two years, take great care to not mislead. An East Coast IT professional in his 30s, who once had considered psychology as a career, he opens each meeting with disclaimers: "Please do not let these meetings take the place of professional help," he typed to us. (Most support groups operate via typed chat.) "Please be kind . . . both listening and sharing are important."

The weekly groups are an enormous volunteer commitment. "I keep thinking I'll take my Thursday nights back," he told me (the anxiety groups are 7 to 8 p.m. Thursdays, though they often go longer). "But hearing people tell me every week that it's helping keeps me doing it."

Specky Zaftig, the administrator for the Support for Healing forums, and the avatar of a 28-year old British woman, donates dozens of unpaid hours each week. It "allows many of us to offer something back to others from our own experiences. Many of us have struggled with depression, etc. To find a safe place where people understand you and support you because they want to can make a real difference to some people. ... I like to know that somehow I've made a difference, no matter how small."

A lot of altruism, free giving, plenty of warnings. Isn't there any digital snake oil here? No fake therapists?

One in-world psychologist, Dr. Craig Kerley from Georgia, who was profiled on CBS's "Early Show," has hung his shingle for "cybertherapy" at $90 per hour. This work, he says, "can be valuable for those who have limited choices in their geographical region, have limited time to drive to regular in-person appointments, have limited mobility, and have limitations in their lifestyle that make traveling to a brick and mortar office difficult."

Still, Dr. Peter Yellowlees, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UC Davis and a specialist in virtual worlds, cautions about therapy in Second Life, even with professionals. He advises using it only as "a potential adjunct to face-to-face therapy," and to "use passwords or other cues in Second Life to make sure you're talking to the right person" - the real therapist, not scammers posing as one.

Yellowlees uses Second Life as a teaching tool, not for therapy. His Virtual Hallucinations sim gives "the lived experience of schizophrenia - to hear voices and see visions" so his students (and the rest of us) can "get inside the head, just a bit, of someone who's psychotic."

It certainly sparked empathy in me, much more richly than a mere clinical description of the disorder would have done.

Empathy: There's that word again, an odd one to associate with impersonal bytes and modems, but the right one. Second Life is a hot, humming thing of wire and light, a "server" - spiritual teachers would like the metaphor - that can carry community and genuine human sympathy.

Cherilyn Parsons is a freelance writer and fundraising consultant to journalism organizations. E-mail her at style@sfchronicle.com.

TV/Video Audience Measurement Challenge-Josh Chasin - Brightcove

2008-07-08T19:04:00.001-07:00

Dr Media says, if you want to know the state of web statistics, listen this excellent to the point report by Chasin of Brightcove. The read Chris Anderson's argument on the lack of a need for any kind of verification of data, just computer generated data points, no"WHY'S". More on this lame approach later, I hope he doesn't need operated on by an MD who doesn't ask why.
See more comments of the pithy type later.
Check it out.

TV/Video Audience Measurement Challenge-Josh Chasin - Brightcove

TV And Film Business Facing Dark Days, Analyst Warns - NYTimes.com

2008-07-08T11:25:00.001-07:00

Dr. Media says, so you want to know the real reality of the Media biz, read this.This is what the money guys are saying. Put this together with Mark Gills comments and you get the feeling that everyone should get in to selling timeshares. Fact is what these guys are saying is true and its also true that there are 35K theaters, and TV is on 24/7 all over trhe planet and VOD demands are growing everyday. Therefore, unless everyone wants to keep watching the same reruns for eternity, there is a growing need for new projects and innovative ideas. Now there is a really scarce market, but then again, when has that not been so.

TV And Film Business Facing Dark Days, Analyst Warns - NYTimes.com

July 7, 2008
TV And Film Business Facing Dark Days, Analyst Warns
By REUTERS

Filed at 11:58 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lehman Brothers cut the stock ratings on Monday of Walt Disney Co, Time Warner and other top entertainment companies, fearing the television and film industry could suffer the same battering as the music business.

"To be clear, our fear is that the damage that digital distribution inflicted on the music industry will replicate itself in the movie industry, and our fears are too great to justify keeping neutral or positive ratings on the creators and distributors of movie and TV content," analyst Anthony DiClemente wrote in a research note.

Along with Disney and Time Warner, Lehman lowered its ratings on News Corp and CBS Corp on concerns about "structural changes that appear destined to impact the core revenue and profits of (the) entertainment business."

Lehman maintained its rating on Viacom Inc., but nonetheless cut its price target on the stock. It also lowered its overall view of the industry to "negative" from "neutral."

Shares of all five companies were down -- to various degrees -- in early trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

DiClemente added, "In reality, while there are many obvious differences between music/audio and movie/video media forms, the core properties of video distribution and consumption are not different enough from music content to continue to justify why movie/TV content will be spared fragmentation."

Specifically, DiClemente argued as consumers shift to new types of media -- movie downloads, for instance, or TV video recorders that make it possible to skip commercials -- the big entertainment companies will struggle to replace traditional sources of revenue.

"We believe fragmentation of media as a result of technological change is highly likely to disrupt the economics of traditional forms of movie and TV distribution," he said. "Content may no longer be king in the entertainment business."

Take DVD sales, for instance. DiClemente cautioned that it appears the rate of revenue decline from the DVD business will outpace any growth from the digital side.

DiClemente also cited specific trouble spots each of the companies.

Disney, he said, must contend with economic problems that could hurt theme park results; an ABC TV network that faces headwinds; and a stock price that is already at a premium to its peers. He cut Disney to an "underweight" rating with a $29 price target.

News Corp faces exposure to a depressed newspaper business; its Fox TV network remains challenged; and acquisition risk is a major concern, he said. It was cut to "equal weight" rating with a $15 price target.

Time Warner's additional problems include concerns about future capital allocation of a special dividend from Time Warner Cable; plans for its Time Inc unit; and questions about AOL. DiClemente cut the rating to "equal weight" rating with a $14 target.

He cut CBS to "underweight" and a $16 target because of added concerns about CBS Radio; structural and cyclical weakness at the CBS TV network; and acquisition risk related to its purchase of CNET.

While Viacom's price target was cut to $32 a share, it maintained its "equal weight" rating because of the possibility of incremental contributions from the "Rock Band" video game; international expansion; and the likelihood that affiliate fees will provide some stability.

In early trade, shares of Disney fell 43 cents to $30.47, CBS fell 42 cents to $18.10, Time Warner fell 34 cents to $14.64; News Corp fell 5 cents to $14.51; and Viacom fell 14 cents to $29.53.

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch; Editing by Derek Caney)