It all happened in a lake on Fraser Island. Bright sunlight and crystal clear waters set the scene for popping the question.
Rach thought I was joking at first, but once convinced, a flurry of emotions caused a small tidal wave upon the shores of Lake Birrabeen.
Can’t tell you how happy we are. Will share a pic or two once I’ve sorted them.
Woke this morning to discover I’m being followed by ‘Lost in Bondi’, thought it might be a backpacker, but no its the beautiful looking ‘indie’ the cat - who is sadly lost. Tweet, blog, put up posters - spread the word. Let’s find ‘indie’.
20/12/2008, UPDATE: Indie has been found… !!!!
This is probably my final new media article for INSIDE FILM (#116) magazine. Final, because Rachael Turk (the then editor) has moved on to focus her passions firmly on film creation (and me).
The story, which we wrote together, was born from our combined love of Mad Men and initial investigation I’d made into the Twitter channel that compliments the show (I first wrote about it here). It was great to take something from this blog and grow it to an article for the mag, we even managed to get a few words from January Jones on the topic of her character, Betty Draper, coming to life on Twitter via fans.
The Lives of Others
Well-written characters leave viewers wanting more. And whilst the clever social media strategies behind AMC and Lionsgate hit Mad Men are giving them just that, even they can’t keep up with the user-generated fervour, as Ben Cooper and Rachael Turk discover.
Hit US series Mad Men has created a stir within the sanctioned space of television – both within the show itself and its extended TV life in the likes of the skit ‘Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women’ (viewable in US only) that aired on Saturday Night Live in late October. But online is another world again. All the main characters of the series – Don Draper, Joan, Paul, Pete, Peggy and Sal – exist in the world of social media, short-message service Twitter. On this platform, characters interact and converse in character, with one another and with direct messages from other users. This both extends the story and builds the audience.
The use of Twitter is not in itself new: in online promotion of its series Drive, Fox last year created a Twitterer out of actor Nathan Fillion (Desperate Housewives) – except that it was, in fact, director Greg Yaitanes making the posts, using a Drive publicity photo of Fillion as an avatar. The Wall Street Journal has reported that NBC, CBS, ABC Family and MTV are among several networks playing with the marketing possibilities of Twitter.
Mad Men took a more proactive approach. When a user “tweets” about the series, he might be surprised to find Betty Draper suddenly following him on the platform [though he’s not the only one: she’s following over 6,000 8,540 people with almost as many following her, and has written almost 1,500 updates]. Though being proactive on Twitter isn’t hard – by using Twitter Search to query keywords about a particular topic or subject, the conversations and authors can be easily identified. Mad Men targeted individuals in advertising and marketing and instances of the show being mentioned to build intrigue and engagement.
One blogger, mediaphyter, criticises the fact that Man Men Twitter profiles link directly to the show website of cable network AMC TV instead of continuing the alter reality by going to a Sterling Cooper agency website. However, in our case, the Betty Draper who is currently following does have a LinkedIn profile – confused?
The reason for this becomes apparent when, a day after the first contact is made by the online Betty Draper, another Betty Draper starts following. The first was, in fact, an imposter, a clone. Some users – in their enthusiasm for the show have created their own (and in this case, quicker and more comprehensive) profiles, so much so that they’re doing a better job than the AMC marketing initiative. At last count there were over 75 dedicated profiles acting out and talking about Mad Men. Thus unfolds a parallel, white picket-fence universe. Not to mention a lot of free advertising. It is, at the same time, a relinquishing of control. AMC didn’t take to kindly to Mad Men clones and took the legal high ground, requesting that Twitter remove the profiles. As might be imagined, the web went into a not unwarranted frenzy. Yet within a matter of days it seems that AMC relaxed its stance and the profiles were reactivated.
It’s understandable that AMC wanted to protect the shows assets but by stepping into a social media channel such as Twitter they were naïve to expect the community to abide by their rules. AMC’s online character extensions were smart, even if they didn’t realise it, in the sense that they were so well thought through that, in order to be convincing, clones needed to behave equally as well. The creators of Mad Men bravely stepped into a community of frenzied conversation, stumbled a bit, but ultimately helped enhance the integrity of their characters in a parallel yet complimentary new channel.
Whether you “get” Twitter or not, what matters is that people are talking – about you, your work or something that relates to it. And by taking the time to listen you may find you have something to contribute. As for the “real” Betty Draper, lead actor January Jones says,
“I don’t find out what Betty does until I receive the script a day or two before each shoot, so if someone’s out there planning her day without me maybe they can share their wisdom!”
Of course the whole concept is anachronistic – the series being set in the ‘60s – but the very current desire of fans to interact with these superbly written characters and exist in their world allows the series creators this licence. And if Betty Draper had Twitter back then, we can imagine she and her friends might well have been using it instead of walking to the back fence.
And Pete Campbell would almost certainly have a LinkedIn profile.
Inspired use of the YouTube platform to bring classical musicians together and create a world first (well I think it is). The promise; to be part of a collaborative virtual performance and (if you’re really good) have the chance to play at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in 2009.
At the heart of the idea is a musical audition via recorded video submitted to YouTube. Classical musicians play to a specially composed piece of music by Tan Dun, (known for the soundtracks for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero). Here’s an interview about the piece.
To participate in the ‘virtual performance’ musicians simply choose the instrument they want to play, this reveals sheet music (pdf) and a video of Tan Dun conducting. Musicians then record their performance and submit - currently unsure of the magic that happens at the YouTube end.. but would hazard a guess at a ‘massive’ mashup bringing all of the instruments together for Tan Dan’s orchestral vision. To be up for a chance to play in NYC a separate piece of music (list to choose from) and video is required for audition.
It’s a sound strategy that builds content around common interest, talent and idea. What better way to bring credibility than get a notable composer to inspire this talented audience. I look forward to seeing the results… and how its actually executed.
Rachael Turk (my better half) interviews the director of the new Bond film, Marc Forster. It’s the first time that Inside Film have created a video interview and published straight to web.
Daniel Craig & entourage hit Sydney for the premiere of Quantum of Solace. Frenzied photo madness. Looking forward to the next installment. Blogging from the red carpet (well, just to the side!).
Here’s a few pics, not the best quality (iPhone), but you get the idea..
Rachael is interviewing Marc Forster on Tuesday!!
This is a blog version of my magazine article for Inside Film, Issue #115. It’s a review and point of view on some of the latest developments in search and the importance of making rich content stand out online.
Searchable Video
Online video, whether it resides on Meta Cafe, Vimeo, Revver, MySpace, Current TV, or the goliath of YouTube, needs to be able to be discovered.
To put it into perspective, from a search query on YouTube in April, 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels were returned. It’s estimated that last year, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet in 2000, and now around 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
Primarily our social connections help us to navigate and find content that we like. That could be via the friendly “check this out” emailed link, or a mixture of looking up favourites, or following and exploring related clips within the video channel itself.
But as the content grows exponentially in line with broadband uptake, lowering costs of equipment, knowledge of video editing and so on, a prized film could easily be lost in the noise of everyone else’s efforts. Despite the need to be illustrative in describing visual content – with informative titles, word tags and descriptions to help search engines – that very same search engine needs to come of age too.
In September, Google made headway in this area with the re-launch of Picasa, its online photo-sharing product – now with facial recognition technology thanks to its acquisition of Neven Vision, a company that specialises in matching facial detail with images on a centralised database. Picasa’s facial recognition technology works in much the same way. Users teach the database who’s who within a photograph and, over time, it will begin to suggest who is in an uploaded photo.
This isn’t moving image, but you can see how this technology could start to identify actors within a piece of footage, the scene they’re acting out and the film in which they’re starring. Apply this technology to voice-recognition software and you start to get the picture.
It’s early days and, even with photography, the technology works best when a person is facing the camera (it’ll have trouble identifying them if they’re not).
We still need to teach computers to understand faces and features, images and scenes. This is no small task – but can be made far simpler if it’s distributed among millions of web users.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk is one such service that divvies up human intelligence tasks among thousands of people. It creates a crowd-sourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of humans to perform tasks that computers can’t – such as identifying emotions within photographs, a happy dog versus an angry one, or writing a description about an image. Users of the site can select from a number of different tasks and actually earn micro-payments from completing them.
A newly launched search tool named co5TARS is the latest in an emerging generation of content browsers that seek to address the increasing complexity of the web by visualising it. Unlike other solutions, co5TARS has been purpose-built to tell a particular story. Using the open data freely available from Freebase.com, it tells the stories behind the people in movies.
In a way co5TARS is a social network of film, depicting the roles and relationships of movie professionals as they change over time, offering unique views of this ever-changing network of actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors and producers, and using movie posters and iconography as a visual shorthand to navigate and explore.
Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, is a web browser plugin that provides interactive full-screen slideshows of online visual content. The plugin, once installed, provides a rich ocular interface to explore content visually. Searching is done as you would with any content browser, by keywords, but the results are entirely visual and are displayed in a simulated three-dimensional interface for exploration.
It’s apparent that we’re ready for intelligent ways to find what we’re looking for. This evolution is being dubbed the semantic web – it’s the way in which information and services on the web are defined in a semi-automatic way, making it possible for the web to comprehend and satisfy the requests of people looking for content. The semantic web is the vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited for inventing the World Wide Web, as a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange. It’s also our want to have a smarter relationship with the web, so that when we search for Paris, the results are smart enough to know that probably we mean Paris France not Paris Hilton because it understands our previous behaviour as a traveller and not a celebrity gossip monger.
Users don’t care how the information sought is delivered. But for content creators it pays dividends to identify and be descriptive about the content being made and published online.
I’m a new convert to the brilliant show Mad Men. Not just the show but its extension online. I’m currently doing my best to decipher the Twitter experience that’s running in parallel.
My reason is that when I posted a Tweet on the fact that I was enjoying series one, within 24hrs Betty Draper started following me - soon after Ken Cosgrove and my intrigue got the better of me.
I especially like the fact that the Mad Men characters remain in character on Twitter and truly interact with those that engage them. What’s an even smarter move is the fact that characters talk to one another and give another layer to the shows plot.
One thing to remember is that when screenwriters develop characters for TV or film there is always a solid backstory. They’ll know the school the character went to, trauma they’ve had in their lives, successes etc. But it usually doesn’t get explored in the final show or film. What’s great about using Twitter in this context is that we get to explore that backstory (in part) and go deeper into the relationships and happenings around the show getting to know the characters more.
What’s fascinating is the fact that the real characters have also inspired clones and fan profiles on Twitter. The Betty Draper that followed me was a clone not the real one (who started following me 48hrs later). People have literally got into character - mimicking what a 60’s house wife or ad executive would be like.
Whilst exploring I found this comprehensive spreadsheet which counts the number of followers for Mad Men characters, character clones and fan profiles on Twitter (many thanks to @RobinG2 for taking the time).
Adding up the accumulated ‘followers’ you get to a figure of 57,619. Now I know their not unique, and no doubt fans of the show will follow multiple characters - but that’s one hell of a ’social footprint’. People that love the show enough to follow a character, create a character clone or set up a fan profile is significant.
Below is a grab from @RobinG2 spreadsheet showing the evolution of followers over the course of the show. Click to enlarge.
Feels like forever that we’ve been getting to know Obama, on flickr, twitter, facebook, youtube, blogs, tv, and the iPhone etc etc. Isn’t he running America already?
Last September I was in Washington Square, NYC and was lucky enough to catch Obama speaking. It was an empowering address that had the crowd ‘fired up and ready to go’ by the end. I walked away saying wouldn’t it be great if America was wise enough to let a man like this take the helm, but doubted they would.
Well here we are, over a year later and a matter of hours from knowing the outcome. I’m looking forward to eating my words and embracing a new US president (truthfully voted in by US citizens) that will make the change that’s needed - happen.
I cast my vote a year ago and it stands to this day. Let’s hope we’re raising a glass to Obama (in Australia) tonight.
Image found on Wooster Collective
The new Kid Confucius single “Darling, I Need Ya” has been iTunes single of the week this week. Friends and fans of the band are all doing their best to hit the 20,000 downloads mark to make it a record here in Australia. And reach a wider audience.
So to help the cause (and the lads) simply download the track from iTunes (its free) and if you love it, go buy the album!
Get to know the band on MySpace
Unique visitors: 6,193,776
Page Views: 29,090,134
Hits: 58,340,512
Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes
Number of mixes: 2,252
Number of votes: 461,090
Number of track listens: 1,745,304
Fantastic example of user-made content and the impact it has.
Shared via the w.a.s.t.e mail-list on the announcement of the Reckoner remix project. Be interesting to see if it has a similar impact.
I’ve been keeping my eye out for the Yahoo! oneConnect app for the iPhone (its not available in AU yet). The app uses your social connections as an address book and universal messenger - which sounds cool, and is exactly what I want.
This morning I awoke to a message that ‘oneConnect’ in now following me on Twitter.
Weird coincidence?
Possibly. Although it looks like the people people being followed are Australian, and no doubt iPhone users - I know you can identify location, but can you isolate people who post through an iPhone?
I hate Twitter spam. But if this is a strategy to let me know the app is being launched here I’m quite open to it. However, they need to say something rather than the inane first comment below;
If anyone knows any more about this… I’d love to hear.
I’ve recently reconnected with an old friend, Tom Kay (top pic, far right), via an article in Monocle magazine (as you do!). For your interest the article was about the company his behind Finisterre Technical Apparel based in the UK.
Anyway, back in 1994 Tom and I travelled to Chile with Operation Raleigh (now called Raleigh International). It has to be said that to this day it still stands as the most incredible experience of my life. It made me. Tom kindly reminded me of that by scanning in some pics from the trip - which I can’t thank him enough for.
Pictured; Chris Dyer (on the left in both pics), me with varying hair issues, and Tom.
As I write this I’m sleep deprived (due to my over active brain) in Sydney with a massive grin on my face, remembering Chile.
More pics on my photostream.
So I joined SlideShare yesterday to share a pres that I put together for an APG training session.
I’ve used the service for research but had yet to share anything. Within an hour I’d received an email from the SlideShare team saying that my pres was to be featured on their homepage. I was thrilled. Is this normal (I thought) so I popped the question to the Twitterverse… Katie Chatfield was kind enough to respond. She’d had the same experience.
That said the benefits of being on the homepage have been great. Within a day I’ve had 90 views and one comment. Eight new people have started to follow me on Twitter (no its not spam). Rod Rakic even ‘retweeted’ the presentation to David Armano and introduced me to the term ‘grokking this’ (wiki definition here).
What has been the most exciting of all is sharing my thoughts and interpretations with a wider audience. Not that I’m a stranger to this, but it resonates when you’re in a new channel, with a new set of eyeballs and opinions.
Back in the real world, one of the participants of the training session had this to say (via email);
I attended the B&T Digital Bootcamp the day before, and this workshop blew it out of the water – particularly in two main areas: knowledge of industry and trends, and practical ways to harness this for planners/advertisers.
Again a big thank you to Melanie Sweet and Gabi Scott from Google, and Jenifer Wilson from Lean Forward. For making the session complete.