McGee is clearly bribing people to follow him with the promise of the tiny sliver of self-satisfaction they'd gain from helping to benefit the charity, when in reality it's not the charity that's getting the real benefit here, but McGee. Having instant access to 500 people is surely worth more than $250 (his end of the bet), so if he "wins," he'll be getting a hell of a deal.
So let's cut to the chase: How much is a Twitter follower worth? The service is becoming a valuable way to instantly broadcast promotional material, draw people's attention to cultural or political activities, and just basically wield power and influence. So followers in a very real sense equal money. The value of a particular follower depends, of course, on how may followers they themselves have.
Us average Joes with 0-20 followers are probably more useful as consumers than as re-broadcasters. Consumers are great, but they're sort of a dime a dozen. Or more than that, maybe a dime each. I'd pay a dime a follower -- any takers?
The economics change when you talk about elite users, in the 1,000+ follower range. Maybe you'd pay $50 to Leo Laporte, knowing he could pass along your tweets to 25,000 people. On the other hand, Laporte is already following 375 people, so the odds that anything you tweet actually gets to him are quite low. Which decreases his own follow-value. Maybe Leo's only worth $10.
The problem with this kind of twitterola is that if everyone starts paying for followers, each individual follower will be devalued. A twitter gold rush would result, with everyone and their uncle racing to twitter to follow as many people as possible, a dime a pop. You'd get spiraling inflation and the whole system would collapse.
Seriously though, I will pay a dime per follower. Let's do this.
Picture ABC taking out an ad for itself during CBS' prime time. Or the Dodgers setting up a merchandise booth at AT&T Park. Or no, how about Coke adding themselves to Pepsi's Wikipedia entry. Yeah, that's it.
Hulu, the Fox/NBC Universal online TV destination and one of YouTube's direct competitors, has established a popular channel in the heart of its rival's territory. The Hulu channel contains dozens of million-plus hit clips from Fox shows like "Family Guy" and "The Moment of Truth," as well as NBC's "The Office." The YouTube clips are branded to the hilt with Hulu graphics and ad text.
This looks almost bizarrely incongruous just a couple of weeks after Hulu CEO Jason Kilar totally ripped on YouTube during a presentation at the NAB, where he showed a slide from a clip of "Felicity" someone posted and said, according to CNET's account, "the only way to get (Felicity) is from unauthorized sources."
Moreover, NBC pulled down its YouTube channel and all its contents in October, just before Hulu launched.
mtvU.com has posted the 'Pos or Not' game--based on HotorNot.com, but instead of rating people's attractiveness, this game asks you to guess from their appearance whether or not they're HIV positive. After a few times of guessing incorrectly--either way--the effect is achieved. Smart idea.
(Incidentally, this is a much more useful riff on HotorNot than this.)
Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)
By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.
Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.
Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.
The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?
Self-described "YouTube superstar" Tricia Walsh-Smith has followed up her original high-profile divorce rant with a decidedly less titillating "Video #2." This time there's no camera movement, no live phone calls to her husband's secretary, no mention of "con-doms" and, perhaps most disappointingly, no story development.
Appearing in her bedroom in some kind of flowy tunic in front of a camera (not a webcam, just something somebody put on a tripod), Walsh-Smith uses her encore not to describe the repercussions of the original video — like what her husband's response was, or what her five minutes of fame has been like, or whether she's gotten any movie offers — but to swing from tangent to tangent like a disoriented Tarzan. At one point she finger-waggingly castigates viewers for their abusive e-mails ("How dare you!"), as though she's the first to get flamed by the YouTube public.
Walsh-Smith and whoever is helping her make the videos are trying to set her up as an online personality. They play up her viral video "superstardom" ("3.2m hits and counting") and offer a teaser to the next episode, apparently to be released after the court proceedings in her husband's attempt to evict her: "D-Day fast approaches! Will Tricia end up in a tent?"
But they need to up their game. This time Walsh-Smith's angry rants don't sound like good story material; they sound like one of those tipsy phone messages you wish you could have back.
I offer these criticisms only because I think there's plenty to work with here. With a good story doctor (doesn't she know any playwrights? Oh, right — she is one!), a mobile crew and a few hundred bucks for coffee and doughnuts, this could be a runaway reality hit.
Without all that, though, it's looking more like a runaway train.
As much as the Spitzer prostitution scandal wants to fade into the past, some people just can't let go. National Lampoon Inc., a publicly held company that owns Web, TV, audio and movie properties, has launched a comedy site called WhoreDiamonds.com, a riff on the bejeweled ratings system used by Spitzer's Emperor's Club escort service (Wonkette joked about the diamonds way back in March).
But is all fair in love and whores? The NatLamp site asks users to rate real prostitutes on a scale of 1 to 10. Some of the pictures, a rep for the site said, are sourced from real escort agencies. But the rest are mugshots of women who have been arrested for prostitution. Mugshots are publicly available, so the site has decided to stockpile them from police websites around the nation, and construct a virtual pillory of prostitution arrestees (not convicts, mind you). The police shots show women who are the kinds of street prostitutes who have probably turned to the sex trade out of desperation--the signs of drug addiction, poverty, and abuse are all over their faces.
Mugshots are a matter of public record to ensure the transparency of the justice system and to protect the rights of prisoners. It's one thing to grab a booking photo of Paris Hilton or Mel Gibson, but to try to make a snickering profit off of women who have fallen into society's lower reaches--that's the worst kind of bottom-feeding.
It's old news that National Lampoon Inc. has built a business on "whoring" out the great comedic name that Doug Kenney and co. built in the 1970s. At this point all they're doing is killing a dead dog.
Spike Lee is pairing with mobile device manufacturer Nokia on a project meant to get people making cellphone movies. Nokia phones are now good for shooting video, and Lee is asking for young people to submit entries for a movie in three acts. He'll select the best footage and edit himself into the next Spike Lee joint. More details at the NYT.
The specs are pretty loose: The central theme of the film is humanity, and the motif of the first act is birth. Plenty of room for interpretation on both counts, and the instructions on the site offer little guidance: "How you define it is up to you."
Nokia is no doubt banking on Lee's ability to attract a large group of interested submitters, lending some credibility to mobile moviemaking -- until now largely the province of experimenters and tweens. Sorting through terabytes of submitted footage should keep Lee busy all summer -- the film's final cut is due in October.
In response to the thousands of emails pouring in to Ms. Tricia Walsh-Smith with regards to her YouTube Divorce Video, Ms. Walsh-Smith wishes to say: "Thank you all very much for your encouraging words. I am trying to answer each one as they come in but with the great amount of them, this may take time. I have restored the video to the site and this time I've included a completely unedited version of the phone call. The new video can be found on YouTube."
Indeed, the original video has been taken down, but I haven't been able to find Walsh-Smith's re-post, nor the apparent director's cut. (There's a copy of the original here). If you can find the clips in question and post in the comments, you're a better Web Scout than I.
The video of NYT columnist Thomas Friedman being "pied" during his Earth Day speech surfaced on YouTube late yesterday. In it, you can see the two perpetrators (one of whom has now been ID'd, according to The Brown Daily Herald), vault up onto the stage and hurl pies at Friedman with all the accuracy of Rick "The Wild Thing" Vaughn before he got his glasses. Friedman got a few dollops of cream on his shirtsleeve, and slipped a little on what looked like some shortening, but was otherwise unharmed.
The video was posted under the account of the Greenwash Guerrillas, a radical (and, obviously, militant) environmentalist group that takes issue with Friedman's approach to climate change, saying his version of ''Green' [is] as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face."
Who among us could recover from such an embarrassment and somehow continue the speech, undeterred, perhaps even laughing it off? Well, not Friedman, anyway. He looked irritated and discombobulated as he walked off the stage in order, presumably, to go clean up.
Of course, the pie in the face is a tradition dating at least back to Vaudeville, the Keystone Kops and every serious comedy duo or trio in the first half of the 20th century. Later it gained currency as a political action. Here's Wikipedia's list of people who have been pied.
One of its earliest victims was anti-gay American singer Anita Bryant, who at least managed (as you can see in the below video) the amusingly homophobic line,"Well, at least it's a fruit pie," before beginning a prayer for the assailant's immortal soul.
David Sarno
is the Times' Internet culture and online entertainment writer. His Web Scout print column runs in the L.A. Times Calendar section on Wednesdays.
— Follow David on Twitter.
When I saw Matt McGee's offer to donate $500 to charity if he could beat his friend to 500 twitter followers, a question occurred to me. 
The economics change when you talk about elite users, in the 1,000+ follower range. Maybe you'd pay $50 to Leo Laporte , knowing he could pass along your tweets to 25,000 people. On the other hand, Laporte is already following 375 people, so the odds that anything you tweet actually gets to him are quite low. Which decreases his own follow-value. Maybe Leo's only worth $10. 
Self-described "YouTube superstar" 
As much as the Spitzer prostitution scandal wants to fade into the past, some people just can't let go. National Lampoon Inc., a publicly held company that owns Web, TV, audio and movie properties, has launched a comedy site called WhoreDiamonds.com, a riff on the bejeweled ratings system used by Spitzer's Emperor's Club escort service (Wonkette joked about the diamonds 
Spike Lee is pairing with mobile device manufacturer Nokia on a project meant to get people making cellphone movies. 
Indeed, the original video has been taken down, but I haven't been able to find Walsh-Smith's re-post, nor the apparent director's cut. (There's a copy of the original 
