...A couple of YouTube observations this afternoon. First of all, if you look at today's most viewed list, it's almost totally dominated by non-English content. That charge is clearly being led by excerpts of a Turkish TV drama called "Yaprak Dökümü," which occupies a whopping 7 of the top 20 most viewed spots. I can tell you little about this show, except that it has a cool website. Would any of Web Scout's legion of Turkish-speaking readers care to illuminate us?
...Also, the feature on YouTube that allowed you to sort search results by date added, number of views, and relevance -- has disappeared. Meaning you cannot, as of now, search the brand-newest videos coming in anymore. This may not be headline news, but since I just wrote about it, it's sticking in my craw. Why would YouTube weaken its search tools so much? Could be a glitch, I guess ... but it has been this way for at least 24 hours now.
...Mark Glaser at PBS' MediaShift has an article up about the converging arts of blogging and reporting -- and how any respectable media outlet should probably be doing both. I made a small contribution to the article -- but what's more: for the six or seven thousand of you who write me every day asking me to post a picture of myself (you know who you are) -- now you need look no further.
...FaceReviews found a Facebook word game they like called Funny Farm, where you have to guess your way through a web of related words. Like what 4-letter word connects to both "barn" and "farm"? Don't ask me, I guessed like 15 different things and still couldn't get it.
There's a new anti-Scientology website up called "ExScientologyKids.com," which looks to have been started by three young women who left the church, one of whom is Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of church head David Miscavige. Here's part of what they say in their intro:
Most of the people that write for this site have had extremely negative experiences in Scientology. Some of us have lost our families due to Scientology's Disconnection Policy, some of us have experienced physical abuse, and some of us were denied a proper education.
The admin page lists Miscavige Hill, Kendra Wiseman ("Kendra's parents and most of her family disconnected from her in 2005 when she refused to stop speaking to anti-Scientologists online") and Astra Woodcraft, whose bio says she "left Scientology for good when the church tried to pressure her to have an abortion."
"For what it's worth," says the welcome page,"we offer non-judgemental support for those who are still in Scientology, discussion and debate for those who've already left, and a plethora of easy-to-understand references for the curious."
YouTube is about to hit 75 million videos. At the beginning of
February, it had 70 million. YouTube told me recently that 10 hours of
new video are uploaded every minute. And that every day, the site gets
-- their words -- "hundreds of thousands" of new videos.
On a real red letter day I'll watch maybe 25 videos (and remember, it's
my job). But if you figure 200,000 a day get put up on YouTube --
that's about one-hundredth of 1%.
The videos most of us watch are the ones that have tipped into the
mainstream -- the bizarre, hilarious or sensational most-viewed clips
that have become today's preferred water-cooler fodder.
But those videos are really just a pinch of sand from a mile-long beach
-- the tiniest, least representative fraction of what gets uploaded
every day. What YouTube is truly made of is the stuff no one ever sees
-- stuff not meant for, or wanted by, the public.
"This Youtube account is just to do video blogs for my best friend . .
. who lives all the way across the country. If your not her, then don't
watch them. You wont understand them." After an hour or so of fishing
in YouTube's mighty stream of new uploads -- mostly throwing back the
video equivalent of old tires -- I found a video by a young woman from
the East. It was just 10 seconds, but it caught my attention. The girl
was snorting a line of white powder off her desk.
Who would put that on the Internet? I looked at the rest of her videos
-- nine others, all messages to one girl. I'd stumbled onto a "private"
correspondence between friends, one on the West Coast and the other on
the East.
In a series of 15 videos between Anna and Dana -- those are the
pseudonyms I'll use -- the best friends kept each other up to date
about boy problems, their mental states and the trip Dana was planning
to the West.
Dana was the rebellious one, with multiple piercings, heavy eyeliner
and dyed hair. She talked a lot about the drugs she was doing -- not
the prescription kind. Anna was the straight one -- tamer, more
deadpan, no makeup. But both had a kind of fierceness to them -- and a
sweetness. You could tell why they were friends.
After a lackluster performance in its NBC debut on Tuesday night, "quarterlife's'" impressively durable hype bubble has finally popped. The show scored 3.1 million viewers and finished last in its time slot, marking, according to Reuters, NBC's "worst time-slot performance in at least 17 years."
And so, after weeks of trumpeting his groundbreaking sale of the show to NBC, creator Marshall Herskovitz has changed his tune.
"It never should have been a network show. It's too specific," Herskovitz told a group at the Harvard Business School on Wednesday. "From the first three minutes," he said of the feeling he got from seeing the show on air, "I knew it wasn't right."
Perhaps, if it wasn't right for ABC, or the Internet, or NBC, it may be right for Bravo. NewTeeVee is reporting today that the cable network will be the show's last stop.
So yet a fourth (and hopefully final) chapter opens on this peculiar saga, which first set out to prove that failed television ideas can succeed on the Internet, and then, failing that, that failed Internet ideas can work on television. Since that didn't work either, we're now being offered yet another hypothesis: that a show no one liked in its first three incarnations can still make a few bucks on cable. Sounds totally possible.
...because according to this Slate analysis, reading newspapers online could actually be worse for the environment than reading the dead tree version. The math they use is a little fuzzy, but it's a good reality check for us computer hippies.
...Facebook pulled a profile called "Kill with Me", where users were showed an image of a man being tortured with the text: "This
guy is going to die. You want to see his stinking flesh burn and bleed
and blacken?...The more fans I get, the more
I'll show ..." Turned out the profile was set up by a company running the UK ad campaign for the torture porn thriller "Untraceable."
...from the 'how the heck did this reach YouTube's most viewed list' files...a video called, "Contest 1 - Winner gets 100 $ - talents search," where an odd, jerkily animated woman announces that winners of an Internet fame contest will get "one hundred dollar".
...let wikileak leak! As Henry Weinstein writes, lawyers from the EFF, ACLU, Public Citizen and various news organizations asked a judge to lift his injunction against the muckracking wiki, saying it was too broad: "the only way to describe it was as if a judge had shut down a newspaper because of controversy over one article."
The story of "Quarterlife," which premieres tonight on NBC, has been more about the ambitions of the show's creators, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, than about the show itself. This drama about being young in a confusing world is in many ways the tale of two TV-makers being confused in a young person's world.
"Quarterlife" -- which Mary McNamara reviews in today's paper, and which I wrote about in November -- began as a pilot for ABC way back in 2004, when YouTube was still a far-off twinkle in some nerd's eye. For one reason or another, "1/4life" didn't make it to prime-time, forcing Zwick and Herskovitz -- who wanted to keep their idea alive -- to figure out another approach.
What they came up with sounded pretty good on paper: an "Internet show," complete with a main character who's also a video blogger -- and all wrapped in a real-live social network. If that wasn't cutting-edge television, then kiss my grits.
But despite a good deal of hype, some newfangled trimmings, and a partnership with MySpace, "Quarterlife" never quite crossed the Web's success threshold: it didn't go viral. The episodes on MySpace tended to hover around 100,000 views over their lifetime, with maybe another 50,000 or so each from each episode's YouTube incarnation. (For reference, a semi-well known YouTube blogger named KevJumba scored 450,000 views this week when he posted a video about how he broke his shin and had to "get a cast that extends up to my unmentionables.")
The strangest turn happened when, very soon after the writers strike started, Herskovitz and Zwick sold the show to a content-strapped NBC. "Quarterlife" had quickly come full circle -- imagined as a TV show and then reimagined as an Internet show, it was now being re-reimagined as an Internet show that beat the odds to make it onto TV.
Will the show work on NBC, even though it didn't really work online? In a recent essay for Slate, Herskovitz waves away the question: "We've already won the main victory, no matter what happens." In this case, the main victory is not making a hit show, but getting a network TV deal that gives him "100 percent ownership and creative control."
No one knows the exact recipe for getting a video to go viral, but here's one that ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" has exploited twice in a row:
Several heavy dollops each of sex, celebrities, and the F-word (bleeped or unbleeped, according to taste). The more of each, the richer the result. Mix thoroughly!
Last month we had "I'm [making love with] Matt Damon," in which Sarah Silverman apologizes to boyfriend Kimmel that she's been repeatedly unfaithful to him while on the road. This month, we have Kimmel's spectacular, star-studded revenge -- a tour de force called "I'm [making love with] Ben Affleck" -- in which Kimmel informs Silverman of his own transgression.
Cue Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Harrison Ford, Macy Gray, Robin Williams, Don Cheadle and about a dozen other boldface names, many of whom appear in a "We are the World"-type shot of a studio recording ensemble. There's nothing like mass self-effacement for a good laugh -- it's sort of like the good-natured big brother of mass abasement, the psychosocial crack-fuel of the gossip world.
The Affleck video has torn a hole in YouTube by racking up nearly 500,000 views in its first half-day.
Hey, ABC -- you may be onto something here! Fellas oughta take that recipe to the viral bake-off.
Pakistan crashed YouTube when it clumsily tried to block access to the site's IP address Sunday night, by essentially just routing incoming YouTube traffic to somewhere else. Which is like closing down the 405 and having everybody get off at Skirball Center Drive. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) wanted YouTube blocked "on account of showing highly blasphemous Dutch film":
PTA believes that the said footage absolutely stands against the values of religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence arousing deep anguish and distress across the Muslim world. Had not this highly profane and sacrilegious footage been banned, it has the potential to cause more unrest and possible loss of life and property across the country.
-- Also on the free-speech front, Wikileaks.org, a website that aspires to be "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis," has refused to shut itself down after a federal judge ordered its Internet service provider to disable its Web address. The blog Wikileak.org suggested several ways readers could "get around" the injunction, and reminded interested parties that many of the leaked documents are still available on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.
It looks like the underground information byways are now being used for more than just music and movies -- when it comes to online piracy, it's all about incriminating documents now. Share some with your friends today!
And if the entertainment industry hasn't figured out how to plug the leaks, can we expect that other kinds of corporations will? And let's not even think about how governments will approach this ...
I received this e-mail after my story about trying to find 90DayJane went online last week. See the story here. In the letter below, the author of the controversial, short-lived 90DayJane blog reflects on the nature of fame, vows she won't reveal her identity and muses on whether she'll ever do anything as "big" as 90DayJane. A couple of sentences from the letter have been editorially redacted.
Hi David,
Please know that if I were not paranoid about my online security and anonymity I'm sure someone would have found me. It seems to have become a fun challenge to some warez people.
The thing about fame (I think) is that no one ever gets to choose what they are "famous" for. Unlike being respected in a chosen profession or achieving some great feat, fame is a simple situation wherein someone has managed to get to the top of the "cultural dog pile" (your words). People don't get to choose how the public perceives them and they can spend a lot of time and money trying to change that perception. By keeping my identity away from 90DayJane, I get to skip all of that.
This is the story of how I lost Jane before I ever found her.
"I am going to kill myself in 90 days," she wrote on her diary at 90dayjane.com on Feb. 5. "What else should I say?"
Jane
was young -- 24. She lived in L.A., had even put up a shot of her
favorite local Starbucks, the Hollywood sign in the background. Her bio
photo showed a pretty brunet, hair draped across her eyes, like a
closing curtain. The blog's macabre signature was an image of a young
woman's wrists, apparently tattooed with neat lines. Cut here.
"This blog is not a cry for help," she wrote. "I'm not depressed and
nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it
really have to?"
This
Camusian anti-logic instantly lighted a netwide fire. 90DayJane.com
became a flash point, drawing hundreds of thousands of views, dozens of
speculative blog posts and a string of comments so dripping with
suspicion, abuse and even anger that it was clear Jane had hit a nerve
before she ever picked up a razor blade.
-- Michigan State University released a study on Facebook usage among 286 undergrads. Turns out it might be good for you. Students with lower self esteem could make friends more easily if they used it than if they didn't. Or in their acadamese: "Facebook appears to play an important role in the process by which students form and maintain social capital." (FaceReviews)
Last week, the NYT's Freakonomics blog hosted a smart-people debate on the same question.
-- Big on Digg on Thursday was a pro-pot policy paper from the American College of Physicians. Well, pro-medical marijuana research, anyway:
Additional research is needed to further clarify the therapeutic value of cannabinoids and determine optimal routes of administration. Unfortunately, research expansion has been hindered by a complicated federal approval process, limited availability of research-grade marijuana, and the debate over legalization.
(How good does weed have to be to be research-grade?)
On a related note, the teaser for "Super High Me" is out, a documentary in which comedian Doug Benson (in pic at left) plans to "smoke pot every day for 30 days and try to remember to film it."
Last night I got an e-mail from a member of "Anonymous" -- it was an anonymous press release, with a dateline that read "LOCATION UNSPECIFIED":
Anonymous today announced a campaign to launch government inquiries into the Church of Scientology's status as a tax exempt organization. Beginning on February 26th and continuing on Tuesdays thereafter, Anonymous plans to coordinate phone calls and letter writing activities directed at their Federal legislators. Similar efforts are planned around the world.
The release identified an Anonymous spokesperson:
"Since 1993, the Church of Scientology has enjoyed favored religious status in violation of the First Amendment. Anonymous aims to draw attention to this violation of our Bill of Rights, and to initiate congressional hearings in to their validity," said David Mudkip, an American member of Anonymous.
There's a wiki page to go along with the announcement. The group is asking interested parties to write and call their congressional representatives.
Scientology's tax-exempt status is one of its most valuable assets. It is unlikely, therefore, that the church will endorse this particular campaign.
Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.
-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center. Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.
-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece.
"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."
Globalisation rules! Yes, I used the British spelling -- the one without the zed.
How about a version of Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" from an orchestra of traditional Japanese instruments? Can anyone translate the text at the beginning so we can find out who these guys are and see if they've done any Sabbath, Whitesnake or Yes?
Then there's the Indian version of "Sweet Child O' Mine," apparently from News Corp.'s Channel [V] India. I agree with one YouTube commenter that this is sitar shredding at its finest.
Send along any other awesome international (non-bedroom) rock covers. Maybe we can package them all and sell them on late-night TV...
- Noticing a lot more spam in your Gmail account lately? So am I. And so are the fellows at Mashable ... Could the barbarians finally be at the Ggate?
- Facebook did an about-face on its account-deletion policy. (NYT)
- Need more comedy? Well, check out comedy.com anyway. The new site is the creation of media muckety-muck Dean Valentine, onetime president of Disney Television and United Paramount Network. The site lets you rate videos by the LOL -- the one currently at the top is a clip from German TV of Lionel Richie singing "Hello" -- on helium (11 LOLs). There's also a ton of stand-up footage, and some original content. One original idea they've got: comedians compete to improvise voice-overs to popular viral videos. Maybe not LOL, but I'll give it one L for now.
Damon Wayans' new Web comedy channel, WayOutTV, is rolling out its initial slate of videos, with a little PR wattage from YouTube, which is giving front-page play to Wayans' extremely mildly amusing debut as a YouTube "guest editor."
But this thing is going to need more than a little publicity lipstick. As online comedy, WayOutTV, like most of the "professional" efforts before it, is way off.
Beginning with the channel's overuse of Wayans & Co.'s stand-up footage, the content -- mostly quick-and-dirty spoofs of movies and TV commercials -- is something worse than not funny: It's not webby.
Michael Shermer examines the oft-discussed question of whether Scientology is a real religion. If so, he suggests, some of the rallying cries of the anti-Scientology group Anonymous -- like ""Honk if You Hate Scientology" -- might be interpreted as hate speech. But Shermer is not quite ready to go there.
It's a sticky wicket, this matter of who gets to decide what's a religion and what isn't. The people? The courts? The IRS? History? All of the above? No wonder starting a religion is such a tough business.
In Germany, a woman got pregnant by -- it appears -- a man she sold sex to in an online auction. The problem is, she doesn't know who the man is. Why not? For one thing, she held six different sex auctions in April and May of 2007, and the father could be any of them. And even if she did know which 'John' it was, it's not like she got his real name, address and phone number.
But she's successfully sued the auction site to disclose the men's information. Now it's up to her to get them to submit to genetic tests.
Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook. According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.
But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile. Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his. Why? Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft. Case closed.
.
Excellent. So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:
1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile. 2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile. 3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway"). 4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile. 5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application. 6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.
Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit: "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation."
Which, OK, let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here. There IS a profile--you can find it yourself. And it's either phony or not. So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft?
UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to
many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally
justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."
Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...
This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt.
"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio. "Or even to get attention. It's simply a
public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and
nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it
really have to?"
No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait. That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.
So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:
-- Basic info: Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east. She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.") She clearly knows how to edit video. And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews.
-- Other characters: Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with. "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes. Clever, but suicidal?
Talk about making the most of your Valentine's Day. Francesca Salcido, a 26-year-old student at San Jose State, plans to do a 24-hour dating marathon on SpeedDate.com. The online video dating service sets users up on as many three-minute first dates as they can stomach, slamming another nail in the coffin of the good old-fashioned in-person blind date. But, like, is anyone going to miss it?
“I love Valentine’s Day and what better way to celebrate than to be dating all day,” Salcido said in a news release. “And who knows? Maybe I’ll find that special someone so next year I can celebrate in a more traditional way.”
The site's co-founder thinks Salcido can rack up as many as 300 dates in one 24-hour period (her current record is 100). But hold on, 300 dates x three minutes is only 15 hours -- what's she going to be doing for the other nine hours? Eating? Sleeping? Please, what kind of record attempt is this? According to Guinness online, there is not yet a world record for number of dates in a one-day period. So someone's definitely going to break it with all that extra time....
On the other hand, maybe she's budgeting some rest time in there to make sure her 300 dates are actually quality dates. Which is probably smart.
An interesting NYT article by Maria Aspan shows how hard it is to delete your Facebook account.
Does anyone disagree that with anything relating to online privacy, you should never have to click more than two buttons? (1) A button that does exactly what you want it to do (e.g. delete account) immediately after you click, and (2) a second button confirming you meant to do the first thing.
But with Facebook and other beehives of demographic honey, it's not that easy. No delete button in sight. No delete request form. Just a "deactivate" option. To get your account vaporized, you've got to actually write to Facebook. And who has time to write anymore?
It's as though they're doing you a favor by letting go of your information. Forget that you did them a favor by giving them free, monetizable information in the first place. Sally, you said we could have your birthday! You said so! Teacher, Sally said we could have her birthday and now she wants it back!
The NYT article quotes Steve Mansour, who had a heck of a time getting his Facebook account deleted. In a long, fruitless series of complaints to TRUSTe (the privacy watchdog that vouches for Facebook's information practices), Mansour makes a cogent case that when you're away, TRUSTe may not exactly be watching your dog.
Just to be the devil's advocate for a moment, though, let's remember who put all that information on the Internet in the first place ...
Post your deletion and/or privacy stories in the comments. And be assured that the L.A. Times will not sell your personal anecdotes to any third party ...
"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).
Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.
The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity). A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard. At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.
Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center. Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.
Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.
"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet. "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."
A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.
"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.
Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.
When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.
The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.
Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore."
"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."
Web Scout was intrigued by the idea that major corporations around the world might be part of a vast network of dissemination for Scientology-related literature and booklets. So I made a couple of calls to the communications departments of companies named in the latest leaked video. Here's what they're saying:
Dell Inc. spokesman: "This came to our attention yesterday. We did research it with our colleagues in our Europe, Middle East and Africa business segment and with our colleagues in South Africa. We found no evidence that this is accurate, and it's not our practice to disseminate religious materials of any kind. We've got no affiliation with the Church of Scientology."
7/11 spokeswoman: "My international department believes that it's unfounded and inaccurate. But we've got to follow up with our licensee and get to the bottom of it."
Philips Electronics spokesman: "We were as stunned as anybody this morning. It's not something we were aware of. As an equal opportunity employer, religion is not something we comment on."
Several of the spokespeople noted that in the video, Miscavige uses slippery language to avoid directly saying the corporations took part in any distribution efforts.
Take another look at the text of the speech--and you''ll notice the lack of actual verbs.
Then there's our corporate tie ins. The multinationals tend to have
Third World image problems, so this is what they're doing about
it--Coca Cola Pakistan with a braille edition for the blind, nationally
televised no less. Philips Electronics, likewise all over Pakistan,
and Dell Computers all over Africa.
Other entities named in the video are investigating the matter before commenting.
In a subtitled video that popped up in a few places on the Internet early this morning -- Glosslip.com found it, and it was later picked up by Gawker.com and other sites -- Scientology leader David Miscavige is shown speaking to an audience about both the religion's multipronged campaign for the "global obliteration of psychiatry" and its international effort to disseminate a booklet, authored by Church founder L. Ron Hubbard, that the organization uses for outreach. The video appears to have been made in 2006. Miscavige mentions the value of "corporate tie-ins" and implies that multinational companies such as Coca-Cola, 7-Eleven and Dell Computer have been involved in distribution of Church literature.
In describing the workings of what he called "the 2006 campaign for the global elimination of psychiatry," Miscavige boasts of a coordinated international public relations attack meant to damage and discredit the psychiatric profession, its revenues and the drugs it employs.
"That campaign was expressly, maybe even diabolically, engineered to ignite both government action and media blizzard," says Miscavige from a lectern. "Our Mental Health Adjustment Kit essentially works like a 'smart' bomb in that it sniffs out 'psych' fuel lines and blows the funding mechanism."
"To put it bluntly," he continues, a moment before receiving rousing cheers from a large audience, "we booby-trap the whole psychiatric ecosystem." Miscavige also goes into detail about a program he refers to as Operation Planetary Calm, whose goal is the worldwide distribution of Hubbard's "The Way to Happiness," a text the Church of Scientology refers to as a nonreligious "common-sense guide to happier living," according to a website registered under the address of the church. Part of the strategy, he says, is "corporate tie-ins."
"Multinationals tend to have Third World image problems," he notes as snippets of video play. "So this is what they're doing about it -- Coca-Cola Pakistan with a braille edition for the blind ... Philips Electronics, likewise all over Pakistan, and Dell Computers all over Africa."
Miscavige also implies that 4,000 7-Eleven stores in Taiwan carry the book, and adds that "the numbers grow even larger when you follow the campaign trail into Taiwanese schools -- to date, it's 250,000 by order of Taiwan's Ministry of Education."
At one point, a computer animation depicts a giant grenade, labeled "Psych Buster," exploding near a building labeled "government" and another building, perhaps a bank, with a large dollar sign on its side. Miscavige repeatedly invokes end-times biblical tropes such as "plagues," "parting seas" and "apocalyspe," and cites the goal of breaking "the dark spell cast across Earth by psychiatry."
After a message was left with the church seeking comment on the apparently leaked videos, links to which were initially sent to The Times by investigative journalist Mark Ebner, a spokesman identifying himself as Kendrick Moxon returned a call to say he was aware of the video. He described it as "an edited copy of a pirated video."
"Some sort of an excerpt is what it appears to be," he said, and did not deny that the video represented a real event.
Late calls to Coca-Cola seeking comment were not immediately returned.
As of this writing, at least three copies of the video had been posted on YouTube, the most-watched of which had fewer than 10,000 views.
Alana Semuels reported today that Damon Wayans is joining the growing parade of celebrities who are making big bets on the Internet. Wayans' subject matter will include "an African American leprechaun pimp, a thieving airport security guard and an adulterous Burger King."
Wayans believes that his site, WayOutTV.com -- going live later this month -- will be able to invert precedent and attract a regular audience, something that sites like FunnyOrDie, MyDamnChannel.com, SuperDeluxe and Heavy.com haven't had much luck with. But then again, they didn't have a black leprechaun either. . . .
As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.
Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube) "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers, Anonymous is a collection of individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")
Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube) "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles." "Rule #18: Bring water. A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")
Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain) "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."
A rare jewel in the Web TV world is "The Guild," written and produced by Felicia Day, a graduate of the Joss Whedon School for Gorgeous Nerd Actresses.
This show is an absolute, no-holds-barred dorkfest -- a soap opera about a group of social isolates who, having met and played together in the World of Warcraft (WoW for short -- that's the hugely successful fantasy MMORPG world with 10 million players), decide to see what it's like to . . . gulp . . . meet in real life.
Day plays CodEx, the group's "Healer" -- a type of video game character who is too weak to fight monsters, and so is forced to weenily stand in the background and use her healing magic to help the stronger players. It's a video game nurse, basically. CodEx's in-game diffidence bleeds into her real life, where she's unable to rid herself of Zaboo (Sandeep Parikh), a hyper-geek from WoW world who shows up at her doorstep after she gives him too many in-game "winkies" -- (; (;.
Another great character is Clara, the hefty mommy with a baby and two toddlers who is so obsessed with the game that she sometimes forgets to feed her kids.
The show makes heavy use of WoW jargon -- gold farming, rezzing, wizard staffs, manna pools, loot -- the show is funnier if you've ever actually --- er . . . journalistically investigated the game. But non-players should be able to enjoy it too.
"The Guild" is one of several geek-oriented Web TV shows -- MyDamnChannel's You Suck at Photoshop being another -- that are capturing wide audiences and further hastening the demise of the geek stigma (a process always aided by the presence of good-looking women).
IT'S only fitting that the Root, the new online black news, opinion and ancestry magazine launched by the Washington Post Co. almost two weeks ago, is still figuring out its identity. The small publication, created in 2 1/2 months, operates out of a borrowed conference room at the Washington offices of sister e-mag Slate.com. It has only four employees, including its editor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose day job is being a famous professor at Harvard, which is not in Washington.
No, the Root is not exactly grassroots. It's the brainchild of Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, who served on the Pulitzer committee with Gates and got him interested more than a year ago. Financially, the Root represents "a very, very small" outlay for the Post Co., Graham said in an interview. Still, the new site is clearly part of a strategy to offset the company's declining newspaper revenue by expanding its family of independent but commercially symbiotic websites: Slate, washingtonpost.com, Newsweek.com and the green-focused sprig.com.
Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage.
The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.
I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter. Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics. It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel?
OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.
The Times' Jim Puzzanghera has a synopsis today about the Great Web War between Scientology and the vast, highly-networked hacker underground known only as // the loosely allied group of online ne'erdowells known as // the three 15-year-old script kiddies known as // some dude called Anonymous.
Today's piece is not alone in having had trouble moving the ball forward in adumbrating just who the heck Anonymous might be. For one thing, almost all of the anti-Scientology behavior in the last few weeks could've been perpetrated by one person with elementary video editing knowledge, intermediate hacking skills and a roll of postage stamps.
The childish YouTube diatribe against the church's practices, while diverting enough (thanks largely to its use of old-fashioned computer-generated voicing software), failed to achieve the profundity of, say, a Martin Luther's 95 theses. The DDOS attack against Scientology's homepage is nothing particularly sophisticated in the world of hacking, and mailing envelopes of corn starch to church outlets -- that's just lame.
Were all these tactics perpetrated by the same group/person? Or is it a bunch of independent actors? How many hard-core anti-Scientologists are there -- and why? The identity and constitution of Anonymous is the most important part of the story.
Stay tuned, BatFans -- as soon as Web Scout makes his current deadline, he'll put on the Scouting cap and see if he can't find out s'more.
Web Scout's First Law of Internet Culture: 99% of everything is crap.
This law holds true for Facebook's application cosmos, which is up to 15,000 apps and counting. It's true of flickr, of the podcast world, for blogs obviously, Web pages too, and for online video, it's the truest thing of all. YouTube has nearly 70,000,000 videos, so many of which are terrible that you wouldn't be mathematically remiss by rounding its crap fraction up to 100%.
But hey, I'm not a glass is 100% empty kind of guy, so it's always great to stumble onto stuff in that rarefied golden microdroplet of net culture that contains the best, coolest and most imaginative stuff out there.
Facebook's Graffiti application is wrapping up its "ReGeneration Contest," sponsored by Dell, where online artists were invited to use the app's painting tools to "explain what green means to you."
The images produced by the 150 finalists are a testament to the depth of artistic talent out there in Internet land. Moreover, it's a treat to use Graffiti's "Replay" feature, where viewers can watch a recording of each work being created, stroke for stroke. More than a few artists have seized on the new technology to tell a kind of animated story--by, say, drawing buildings rising into the sky, and then, as they hit the zenith, slowly sprout into trees:
Facebook Graffiti has become a genuine art form--a sort of nephew of the pseudo-genre of 'speed drawing' that's generated someamazing stuff on YouTube.
Graffiti is one of Facebook's major success stories, having racked up more than 8 million users, about 250,000 of whom use it on a given day. Graffiti avoids the worst Facebook pitfalls by actually being useful, not just a spam farm, Ponzi scheme or an app-for-app's-sake.
So brava to developers Mark Kantor and brothers Ted and Tim Suzman, for an app and contest well done. The winners will be announced soon.
Come to think of it, why don't I hold my own Graffiti contest? Whoever sends along the best "Interwebs"-themed (interpret as you will) Graffiti posts, will get it posted right here on Web Scout!
