Story2.OH - Blog

Anderson vs Gladwell on Free

2009-06-29T18:50:00Z

Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99) on why everything should be free:

In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.

Information wants to be free in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.

From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business. . . . The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.

Malcolm Gladwell refutes his arguments in a new piece in the New Yorker, entitled Priced to Sell: Is free the future?:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap.

Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine.

There's a lot of appeal in Anderson's argument. I do want stuff for free.

BUT I also want to get paid. And as someone who writes, creates content and generally profits from her ideas, I can't really see how I'll ever pay the rent in the future that Anderson foresees. His model tells us to build an audience and monetize it later -- by selling t-shirts, presumably. But I'm a writer and I want to make my living selling writing, not t-shirts.

Both Gladwell and Anderson are speculating, of course. Yes, lots of people are getting ideas and art for free on the web. Partly because they can. But also partly because they sick of the big corporations making money hand over fist. They feel robbed and see nothing wrong with taking a little back. If you've already paid for Sgt Pepper on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD, maybe you don't think you really need to fork out money to get an MP3. If your cable bill is several hundred dollars a month, maybe you figure that it's perfectly reasonable to download a torrent of show you watched. I think many people feel that they have already paid or that the money only goes to making big corporations bigger.

Would they be more willing to pay if they felt the money was going to the actual artists who created it? If it wasn't going to make the rich richer but would keep workers working? I think it would make a huge difference to people.

The obvious question is "why Anderson's book, Free, free?"

Hi {RAND} - Facebook Virus?

2009-06-29T17:36:00Z

What's up with these two messages I found in my Facebook inbox this morning? Is this some new virus?

Both are addressed to "Hi {RAND}" and have multiple recipients listed. Both contain a single URL followed by a 5-digit number as the message, but the URLs -- and the numbers -- are different. One message reads

bulitre.com (55355)

The other reads

junfunrun.com (95337)

Neither of the URLs is set up as a link so if you did want to check out the pages you would have to type in the address. That combined with the {RAND} in the greeting suggests this is a pretty clumsy attack. Somebody didn't test their code I guess.

On the other hand, I did receive two of these things already, one sent at close to 1 am this morning (Monday June 29) from a California based-user. The other was sent at 10:30 this morning from a Toronto-based Facebooker. So it does seem like this thing is spreading.

If anyone has more info, I'd love to hear it.

**UPDATE**

From Robert McMillan at CSO Security and Risk:

Facebook users are getting private messages from firends this morning containing the words Hi (Rand) and a link to a Web page.

Not surprisingly, this is a scam. In fact the link takes you to a Web site that attacks your computer.

Roger Thompson, Chief Research Officer with AVG Technologies say's the attack appears to be based on the Luckysploit toolkit, which throws a big whack of different attacks -- IE, Adobe, etc -- at your browser. If you're not fully patched, then it installs a rootkit on your PC.

I've seen a message that includes a link to the bulitre. com (don't go to these domains, they will attack you) and in Twitter messages Facebook users also mention the domain junfunrun . com. (which shares the same IP address).

TV on the Web: True Blood

2009-06-26T20:53:00Z

True Blood is doing some very cool stuff on the web. The Canadian HBO site has quite a bit, but the US HBO site has more, so start your exploration there. Be sure to click on the left hand side of the home page screen just to see it scroll to the right. I haven't found much to do besides click through to character information for Sookie and Bill -- and still, I like it.

The HBO site has plenty to keep you busy for a while. There are episode synopses, character, cast and crew bios (can someone explain to me why the cast and crew information is left off the Canadian site?!), a wiki, fan forums and tons and tons of video.

There's a Facebook group and two official Twittering feeds (@TrueBloodHBO and @BonTempsGossip) plus HBO is also promoting fans who are tweeting in character. That's pretty cool (as is their suggestion that you use #TrueBlood in your tweets about the show). you can also download a fan toolkit that's lots of wallpapers, profile pics, etc.

But the best part of True Blood's web presence is the way they've built out the reality of the show on separate sites and through video. You'll see logos in the bottom right of the HBO homepage that should link you to other sites. I haven't been able to get onto the sites for the American Vampire League, The Fellowship of the Sun or Tru:Blood lately, but BloodCopy is going strong with new blog posts most days. It also has a YouTube channel with a 148 videos!

All this content does a tremendous job of enhancing the series, which is exactly what I'm looking for as a TV fan when I turn to the web. And I have the sense that there may be more content out there that I haven't discovered yet.

True Blood has also done some foreword thinking product integration to promote the second season. You can read more about it at MultiBrain.

Satan Launches

2009-06-22T12:16:00Z

My pal Dennis Heaton's web series My Pal Satan launches today. Here's a teaser for episode 1, go over to the site to watch the full version:

Among the cooler things you'll find over on the site are downloadable scripts for seven episodes. You can also download MP3s of the theme song.

My Pal Satan is a project from the CFC.

Weeds on the Web

2009-06-18T21:21:00Z

Weeds the TV series has a digital component called the University of Andy featuring the character of Andy Botwin (played by Justin Kirk). It's not a big website. There's minimal content: a signup (your email address is such gold to them, isn't it?), a link to the Weeds store and five videos. Judging by the fact that it only takes five classes to earn a degree from the University of Andy, I'm not holding my breath for anymore videos. But the ones that are there do the trick:

It's a cute idea. It doesn't totally build the Weeds brand but it definitely gives fans that extra hit of Andy everyone craves. Now where's the additional content for Kevin Nealon's Doug Wilson?

Back on Showtime's site, the Weeds component isn't fancy but its very effective. There's plenty of content to give the series' fan a little more digital entertainment to keep them going between episodes and seasons. There's a podcast, a blog with posts by guest bloggers, including Televisionary and TheTVAddict.

The Showtime site also has content that avid fans can grab and spread which is free promotion for the series. There are customizable cards you can send to friends and tons and tons of embeddable video and clips.... Sadly the video is geoblocked, so it's not embeddable here in Canada. I can watch it on the Showtime site, but I can't seem to bring it over to this blog.

By comparison to the Showtime site, Showcase's digital offerings for Weeds are just lame. Yes, you can watch streamed episodes, but there are no extras save a few meagre actor bios. I don't get it, shouldn't a license to broadcast the series get you the web extras too?

The geoblocking notwithstanding, the Weeds site on Showtime, combined with University of Andy makes for a good example of what television producers and broadcasters should be offering their fans on the web. It's added content aimed at TV viewers, not particularly expensive and share-able (at least within the US).

Art From Bacteria

2009-06-08T17:22:00Z

"Life didn't take over the globe by combat but by networking."

This pronouncement from Anna Dumitriu who investigates "the relationship of the emerging science of bacterial communication to our own digital communications networks".."using images of live bacteria and of actual internet web traffic to show the similarities in the beauty and networking present in both."

Art from bacteria is a pretty cool idea on its own. But when it reflects back at us the patterns of human activity on the web, it starts to send chills up my spine. Is networking a basic biological function? And if, as Dumitriu suggests, life prevailed through networking and not war, does that make social interaction and connectivity the opposite of war? The antidote to it?

Anna Dumitriu is one of the very cool speakers at subtle technologies, a festival of arts and sciences taking place from June 10th to 14th in Toronto. Four days of symposia, workshops, exhibitions, performances and parties are all built on exploring the theme of networks in art and science.

The topics are diverse, cutting edge and challenging. Ine Poppe will screen part of her film Hippies from Hell, which documents an Amsterdam-based group of hackers, techies, artists and writers who setup the Netherlands first internet provider, xs4all(!). Ryan Stec is Artistic Director of Artengine. He'll be talking about how networked based technologies can help develop artistic communities -- something Canadian screenwriters know a lot about. Katja Mayer from the University of Vienna uses visual networking schematics to better understand how we communicate through media, politics and science. Sebastien Lasserre's symposium promises a "beautiful and epic" trip through the human brain.

I'll be presenting a symposium on my experiments in using the social networks for story telling on Friday morning as part of the conference. It should be very interesting to talk about fiction in this context. I'm so excited to be part of this amazing event, because I'm already thinking about networks in an entirely new way... and so far I've only read the descriptions of the talks. I can't wait to hear them!

For more information about the Subtle Technologies schedule, speakers and events, visit the website. You can also follow the conference on Twitter (@SubtleTech) and Facebook. For the ultimate in cool,the Symposium will be streaming live onto OCAD Island in Secondlife.

VideoBlogging With Andrew Baron

2009-06-08T14:18:00Z

This weekend, Toronto's Humber College is offering a workshop in videoblogging with Rocketboom's Andrew Baron. It looks like a fabulous opportunity to get up close and personal with one of the web's original celebrities and a guy who really knows how to do it.

Here are the deets:

VideoBlogging: The Next Frontier

This special new media Workshop will explore VideoBlogging and offer an inside look by a recognized leader - the creator of Rocketboom Andrew Baron. The three minute daily VideoBlog, based in New York City, is currently one of the most popular VideoBlogs on the internet with more daily subscribers for original syndicated multimedia content than nearly any other site, including podcasts.

The Workshop will explore the differences between creating traditional TV programs and working within the online world, from production to distribution to attracting an audience to sustaining and growing a business. Participants will learn about the new opportunities for content producers, directors and writers, and explore the possibilities for developing and creating online content now and in the future.

Instructor Andrew Baron

Dates June 13th & 14th, 2009

Hours 14

Cost $198.00 per day

Total Tuition $396.00 + GST

To Register Phone Lorraine O'Brien 416.675.6622 ext 4033 or email.

Here's a look at a recent episode of Rocketboom.

Where Are All the Canadian Nominees?

2009-05-12T14:31:00Z

nextMEDIA announced the Interactive nominees for the Rockie awards (also known as the Banff World Television Awards) yesterday. There are two categories: Immersive Entertainment and Original Online Program.

Sadly there's only one Canadian amongst the nominees, an ARG from Xenophile Media. The Brits, on the other hand, are well represented with 5 of the 10 nominations, all from either Channel 4 or BBC. Oh wait, Xenophile's nominee, Whack the Mole is for a BBC kids series called MI High! Are you listening Canadian broadcasters?!?

Here are the nominees:

Immersive Entertainment

BITWORLD - Rescue Toya! Entrant: NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.) Country: Japan
Bow Street Runner Entrant: Channel 4 Country: UK
Britain From Above Entrant: BBC Country: UK
Die Deutschen (The Germans) Entrant: ZDF Country: Germany
The Secret Device Entrant: Double Twenty in association with Universal Pictures and Larry Gordon Productions Country: USA
Whack the Mole - The MI High Alternate Reality Game Entrant: Xenophile Media Country: Canada

Original Online Programs

Embarassing Bodies Entrant: Maverick Television Ltd. For: Channel 4 Country: UK
Gaza-Sderot : life in spite of everything Entrant: Bo Travail in association with Alma Films, Trabelsi Productions, Ramattan Studio, Upian.com Country: France
Mi Vida Loca - Real Spanish, Real Drama Entrant: BBC in association with Secuoyas For: BBC Online Country: UK
The Insiders Entrant: Channel 4 Country: UK

Amy Davies Dishes about nextMEDIA

2009-05-04T15:47:00Z

I was very excited when nextMEDIA recently announced a new program called TV 360. Here's what it says about the program on the nextMEDIA website:

About TV 360

The Program is designed to train Canadian writers, directors, developers, interactive designers, show developers and TV, film and new media producers, to develop multiplatform projects and pitch them successfully both to Canadian and international buyers. Prior new media experience is not necessary; however applicants must be professionals from the new media, film and television industries. There are 9 slots per team. Come one, come all! As noted, above, anyone with significant entertainment experience may apply, whether in traditional TV production or in digital production.

Not enough information at all! I had to know more. So I emailed the fabulous Amy Davies, producer of the upcoming nextMEDIA conference in Banff and she agreed to answer a few questions about the conference in general and TV360 in particular. Here are her answers:

Q.

Please describe your role organizing the nextMEDIA conference in Banff in June.

A.

In a nut shell, to program a not-to-be missed agenda for Banff 09. Practically it means lots of hard work goes into producing a program that will demonstrate ways to overcome some of the core challenges for the digital media market, and ways to grasp the opportunities. Then of course it’s bringing onboard speakers, innovators and leaders who are able to talk to that agenda. I always try to get as much input as possible from our Advisory board and the nextMEDIA community (producers, broadcasters, agencies and slowly the brands), which gives me a good idea of where to focus my mind. The over arching theme for Banff will be to address the complexities of the new media ecosystem and the multiple ways to connect with 21st century audiences. This means attendees will hear expert advice on everything from the latest ethnographic research to video syndication, interactive storytelling, mobile opportunities, games, social media and guerilla marketing tactics.

My second remit is to look at ways to push the boundaries of the conference experience so it becomes more than a show and tell. I’m a firm believer that you’re creating an experience for attendees and that you should practice what you preach. i.e. this means facilitating interaction, DJ sets, tech showcases, drinks, ideas!

Q.

What do you think will be the highlights of the event for web creators?

A.

First and foremost I think the opportunity to connect with potential business partners. Banff is geared towards big business and what with our post conference MatchMaker tool (Jill I know you’re a fan) and the onsite networking, I think we facilitate this pretty well. Plus it’s a retreat based event so there’s no escape! nextMEDIA have been working hard for the last few years to get agencies involved and we’re pleased to have Mediacom, Proximity BBDO, Ogilvy, Dentsu, Invoke, Indusblue and Cossette all joining us.

Q.

Can you give us some more details about how TV360 will work? How will the participants spend their time – will it involve the full 5 days of the conference or will there be time to attend sessions? Can you reveal anything about the multiplatform creative brief?

A.

TV 360 will be led by Lisa Osborne at the AFI and is designed to train Canadian writers, directors, developers, interactive designers, show developers and TV, film and new media producers, to do the development work around multiplatform projects. It doesn’t mean its all work and no play - we’ve designed the course so that attendees also have the time to attend the most pertinent conference sessions. In between they’ll be expected to work on developing a multiplatform proposition, with the help of mentors, and will eventually be called to pitch their ideas to a panel of experts. We haven’t cut into any of the networking times either. The course kicks off on Saturday and they have until Tuesday morning to work on the brief. Tuesday from 3pm – 5pm will be the dragons den, or pitch pit.

Q.

Can you reveal anything about the multiplatform creative brief?

A.

Absolutely not, that would be telling. It will be a nice “surprise” for participants.

I should also mention that accepted applicants will receive full festival registration which includes admission to both NM and BANFF TV fest and access to all official social events, air transportation and hotel accommodation.

Q.

How will the participants for TV360 be selected? I notice there are now three team leads listed on the nextMEDIA website. Will you add more teams or are you set at three? How soon after the May 15th deadline do you expect to announce the participant selection?

A.

They will be selected on a number of set criteria, Lisa O and mentors will be handling the judging process. Three teams of 9 will be chosen. Anthea Foyer, Mark Hand and Evan Jones will be heading them up. We’ll announce participants in the week after May 15th so they have time to prepare themselves for the anguish ahead. Just kidding of course! This is a fantastic opportunity for producers so we’re really grateful to Telefilm for supporting this initiative.

Q.

What are you most looking forward to about the nextMEDIA Banff event?

That’s a tough question, ummmm? Innovation, knowledge share, inspiring people, parties, ideas! I guess ultimately for me I’m really looking forward to mingling with some inspiring people.

There's still time to apply for TV 360, do it right here. The deadline is May 15th.

Web Creators Show and Tell

2009-04-29T16:19:00Z

If you’re in Toronto tonight – Wednesday April 29th – swing by Camera Lounge at 1028 Queen West at 7:30 pm for the Web Creator’s Show and Tell.

We’ll have a screening and panel discussion. My guests are

Scott Albert of GopherX, who will be screening some episodes of Team Leader,
Evan Georgiades, who had a cool new series Meta-Faith
Rob Mills, who will talk about In Teh Toobs and Ruffus the Dog.

I’ll be screening an episode of Hailey Hacks.

We’ll also be talking web creation in general. There’s so much to learn. We hope everyone who comes will jump in and share what they know. Please document the event liberally with photos, video, tweets and posts.

Here's a

Good News on the Financing Front

2009-04-21T17:14:00Z

Kelly Lynne Ashton is Director of Policy at the Writers Guild of Canada and one of the country's most wired industry executives. An entertainment lawyer turned writer advocate, KLA is an expert on new media financing. She has the added super power of being able to understand all those crazy policy documents that the government puts out. Pretty amazing skill set. Which is why I turned to Kelly Lynne to clear up some of my confusion about the the new Canada Media Fund. and what it means to digital creators.

Q

Kelly Lynne, creators have been quite unsettled about the Canada Media Fund and what it means to the funding landscape. As I understand it, funding for television projects and new media projects have been dumped into a single fund. What does that mean for digital content creators? Will there be any money for stand-alone digital products?

A

There will be an allocation for standalone. The $14.5 million that was the Telefilm CNMF will be combined with the current CTF digital pilot project money ($10 million) and possibly even more money to build a healthy fund for standalone digital. The exact allocation is one of the issues to be worked out after the new board is put in place in June but the idea is that digital is the growth area so there needs to be an increasingly larger pool of money allocated to it. Eligibility and guidelines will be worked out by next December. On top of that money though, tv projects will now have to have ancillary digital components (websites, mobile etc.) in order to qualify for funding. Again, we don’t have the details yet but the Broadcaster Performance Envelopes will fund both tv and digital components of projects. That means potentially less money for tv but more for digital.

Q

Is there other good news for digital content creators in the CMF?

A

I think the big picture good news is that Heritage sees digital as the growth area. They understand that audiences want to access their television online and that they want original digital entertainment. Heritage is trying to set up a fund that is flexible enough to support the digital environment as it grows. In the short term the good news is that tv producers will need to partner with or hire digital content creators in order to access their television funding. This should open up a lot more job opportunities.

Q

This is the secret bonus question and you will win 10 000 points if you can answer it. Has a funding model emerged for the development and production of digital content? If so, what is it? If not, where are the gaps.

A

You’re kidding me right? The only clear business model right now is for those who control access to the content. By that I mean Internet Service Providers (i.e. Rogers, Shaw, Bell etc.) and platform/device producers (ie Apple, RIM). This is why groups are asking the CRTC to impose a levy on the ISPs – they’re earning revenues from controlling access to content so should contribute to its creation. As for the actual content creators or distributors nothing has been proven yet. Advertising is small but growing. Subscription works in limited cases such as kids or massive multiplayer games. Licensing content such as games to portals is generating some revenues. What seems to me to be the big gap is advertisers understanding the value of the kind of very specific demographics interactive content can generate and identify and then paying for it. They’ll get there eventually.

<align>From your lips, KLA... So there it is, CMF is good news for digital creators, but we still have a ways to go before we can actually put together a full budget.

Prime Time Emmy Interactive Category

2009-04-17T00:23:00Z

Vote for Speedie Date

2009-04-16T12:27:00Z

The Webby Award nominees are up and you can vote. But first you have to navigate what might be the world's most annoying web site. They won't even show you the nominations until you've registered and then confirmed your email address by entering the activation code. Pretty dumb and stoopid if you ask me.

But there is a reason to register, that's because Lorin Wertheimer's Speedie Date web series is nominated. Here's how Lorin explains it:

Friends,

It's a tough time in America. There are neighborhoods with 50% foreclosure rates. Millions have lost their jobs. Even those with jobs have seen their life savings cut in half. The threat of inflation looms large. And there hasn't been a new episode of Speedie Date in over three months.

Are these seemingly unrelated events connected? Possibly. It's impossible to prove (or disprove) a correlation, but this much is certain: the lack of Speedie Date episodes is not making things any better.

I wish I could tell you we were going to start showing new episodes tomorrow, that this economic nightmare would be over in a matter of weeks. But it's not that simple. It never is.

And yet, we should not despair. Here's why:

Speedie Date has been nominated for a Webby Award in the "Drama Series" category, and it is about to reach a much larger audience. Not only that, if it gets the most votes from the public, it will win the People's Voice award.

Perhaps you are asking yourself, "How can I help America?" If so, there's an easy way: anyone with an internet connection can vote, from now until April 30th, for their favorite of the Drama Series contenders. And it's easy to do. You just go to http://pv.webbyawards.com/, register (which takes all of 20 seconds, and you don't get any junk mail or anything), click the "Online Video and Film" button, find the Drama Series category, and vote for Speedie Date.

If we win either award, it will mean press coverage, and possibly help us find a sponsor, which means we'll be able to release our remaining five episodes and (hopefully) make more episodes. More people seeing Speedie Date means more joy in the world. Happy people go out and do things, like buy stuff, and hire people, and create businesses. More Speedie Date means factories might reopen, banks could regain liquidity, the stock market could turn around, and the global warming trend might just be reversed (unhappy people have a bigger carbon footprint). There is no limit to the good things that might happen. But if you don't vote, we'll never know what could have been.

Help make America great again. Vote for Speedie Date.

I can only hope that there will be some spin off effect on Canada as well, because I'm still waiting for the Webby Awards to send me an email confirmationation with my activation code.

The Brain, Compassion and Social Networking

2009-04-15T17:40:00Z

I've been thinking about the web, the brain and compassion this week. I've been listening to the audiobook version of How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer's fascinating book on the neuroscience of decision making.

One of the sections that struck me was on empathy. Lehrer points out that facial expressions play a huge role in the brain's capacity to empathize with the feelings of others. Tell people the stats on poverty and child hunger and they'll make small contributions to fundraising efforts. Show them pictures of the faces of hungry children and they'll donate twice as much.

Here on the web, in our blogs, Twitters and other social networking activities, there is a distinct lack of facial expression. Sure there are profile pictures but they don't do a very good job of telling others what we are feeling at the moment. If you've spent any significant time on the web, you know that discussions can quickly go to flame. People say and do things you wouldn't do in face to face encounters. There's cruelty, name calling and much much worse. I've written about this before, but now I think I understand it a bit better.

Our brains need to see the emotion on the faces of others in order for us to understand their feelings. It's much easier to act without compassion when your brain isn't reminding you that the there is a breathing, thinking feeling human being on the receiving end of your comments.

Over on the Fast Company site, Jamais Cascio has a post that adds more pieces to the puzzle of social networking, the brain and empathy.

Jamais reports on Antonio Damasio's new report called "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion" from the Brain and Creativity Institute .

...the human brain evolved to very quickly recognize and empathize with physical pain and fear in others, but is much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain, or to acknowledge and celebrate virtue or skill. What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration. This is especially problematic with regards to compassion, as we may find ourselves building insufficient bonds of empathy, critical to communities undergoing stress (and we're seeing a lot of stressed-out communities right now!).

Enter the social networks, particularly Twitter:

...the real issue are the forms of media where rapid-fire messaging overwhelms the brain's capacity to see consequences. Any kind of rapid interaction, where we absorb a message and then move on to a new one in a very brief amount of time, can result in this social numbness.

To some extent, the rise in the use of video on the web is going to help deal with the need for facial expressions. Already, kids are abandoning IM for video-chat. How long can it be before all web-based interactions will be via video? But that still leaves the question of length of interaction. I'd love to know what Damasio et al think of 12seconds, a video version of Twitter. Does the fact that you can see the person's face make up for the fact that the encounter is only 12 seconds long?

Either way, I don't think we're doomed to a social networking future of cruelty, social numbness and flaming. There's more recent neuro-scientific research, much of it reviewed in Norman Doidge's <u>The Brain That Changes Itself</u> that points out the plasticity of the human brain. We will adapt to online communication -- even if it's rapid, transient and faceless. We're still neanderthals when it comes to communicating on the web, but our brains will catch up. Empathy will prevail.

Links

2009-04-03T19:10:00Z

I spent the morning with some guys who are producing what will be an awesome web series when it's done. We spent a lot of time talking about how they'll roll it out, distribute and promote it. I love the ideas and can't wait to put them into action.

Here are some of the links I shared with them. If you don't know these sites already, a whole weekend full of fun lies ahead!

Video sharing (great places to upload to and launch from):