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.
The Groundlings, L.A.'s marquee improv troupe and incubator of luminaries including Phil Hartman, Pee-wee Herman, Elvira and Will Ferrell, is teaming with Sony Pictures Television to start their own slate of 50 webisodes.
Groundling Mitch Silpa got the viral ball rolling (ignore mixed metaphor) last year with "David Blaine Street Magic," an amusing series in which Silpa-Blaine harasses a pair of boy towners by constantly performing weird magic tricks on them (one instance of the unlinkable video scored 16M views on YouTube).
The Associated Press (via Yahoo) noted today that doctors don't like to e-mail their patients, citing a 2007 survey that found only 31% of doctors had engaged patients via Internet.
The knee-jerk criticism would be to call the physician crowd a bunch of Luddites who are afraid to embrace the new way of doing things. But let's not jerk our knee this time. Instead, let's put on a pretend stethoscope and rubber gloves to examine this touchy issue.
It may well be that telling all your patients that you're happy to answer e-mail would be a seriously untenable idea. The article mentions liability issues that would apply if, for instance, you weren't able to respond to someone with a serious medical problem. And anyone who deals with more than a few e-mails a day knows you can never answer all of them. Something also tells me there's a certain subgroup of people who would take advantage of the ability to e-mail their doctor, firing off missives every time they had a pain of any sort, or felt dizzy, tired or hungry.
Of course, there's got to be a middle ground where the most serious inquiries get answered quickly -- but for everything else, Google's pretty good.
On last week's episode of "South
Park," residents of our favorite made-up mountain hamlet woke up to a new kind
of horror: a townwide Internet outage. No e-mail, no WebMD.com to check rogue
symptoms and, most harrowing of all, no Internet porn. Panic-stricken and
Net-starved, Stan Marsh and his family lash their belongings to the roof of
their SUV and head west -- "out Californee way" -- in hopes of finding enough
bandwidth to survive.
Matt Stone on ways the Internet has changed storytelling
As the best episodes of "South Park" do, "Over
Logging" manages to be equal parts insightful, hysterical and disturbing. If the
Internet did go down, it actually would be a federal disaster -- probably
causing not only a depression and security crisis but also serious disruption to
the psyche of a nation that can barely imagine unwired life -- even though we
can remember it. Which leads to the other side of the scenario: How absurd it is
that the way we live has been fundamentally altered in, like, the life span of
"South Park."
When I asked co-creator Matt Stone about having a
show that bridged the gap from the pre-Internet era to now, he knew what to
say.
"We kind of did that on purpose."
Which is a good joke, but the thing is, there's some
truth to it. From the beginning, Stone and co-creator Trey Parker have been
medium-agnostic -- always saying they didn't give a fuss if the show played on a
TV, a computer or a plastic Happy Meal wristwatch as long as fans were watching
it. Back in 1997, that may have sounded anathema to Comedy Central and parent
Viacom Inc., but now it looks like master augury, as the line between TV and the
Internet becomes ever less distinct.
"South Park" has the Internet in its very DNA. Grainy
videotapes of the show's 1995 prototype, "The Spirit of Christmas," which
featured a vicious (and, back then, blasphemous) duel between Santa and Jesus,
circulated with legendary speed around Hollywood, eventually winning Stone and
Parker a deal with Comedy Central in 1997. "The Spirit" even made its way online
-- though no journalists at the time even mentioned it. This was back when
downloading a five-minute movie clip could take hours, even with a good
connection. "I don't know if it was the first, but it was one of the first viral
videos for sure," Stone said. "Yeah, the Internet's been really good to
us."
And they've been good right back. First it was
offering their de facto blessing to unlicensed "South Park" sites that offered
viewers instant access to the shows. And now, after Comedy Central has finally
emerged from the Internet Dark Ages, they're offering free, high-quality copies
of the show's entire library at southparkstudios.com
-- an online TV oeuvre rivaled in scope only by "The Daily
Show With Jon Stewart." (One demerit, though: The newest episodes, are not posted
for a few weeks after they air*, because of, the site says, "contractual
obligations.")
Among "South Park's" oft-cited strengths -- and no
doubt a reason for its popularity online -- is the show's perpetual relevance.
"The Internet and YouTube change the way you think about your characters
interacting with the world," Stone explained. "If our characters don't live in
that world, all of a sudden it's like, 'What are they, in the 90s? What is this
show? Is this "Happy Days"?' "
Earlier this season, Stone and Parker took on another
headlining topic with their episode about the writers strike, in which a
misguided Canada fights an ultimately losing battle against the rest of the
world, its main demand being "more money." The Internet made another cameo here,
as the most ridiculous YouTube stars (Star Wars Kid, the Chocolate Rain Guy, the
Sneezing Panda, etc.) were waiting in line at the Colorado Department of
Internet Money, which pays in large denominations of "theoretical dollars."
Stone on TV vs. Internet, the show's new site, and money
But at least a few parties believe online dollars are
worth something. Viacom, the plaintiff in a $1-billion copyright lawsuit against
Google's YouTube, routinely issues takedown requests whenever "South Park" (or
any of its other shows) appears on the site. A Viacom representative said the
company could not comment, given the legal dispute, which means the irony was
lost on this multinational media conglomerate.
In the above-mentioned strike episode, the boys make
an outlandishly obscene "YouToob" video, hoping to cash in on some of those
Internet ducats. Their video is a hit on "YouToob" -- and it got posted all over
the real YouTube too. With so many would-be auteurs constantly battling just to
get their work noticed online, there was something surreal and incongruous about
watching Viacom methodically remove dozens of copies of a hit viral video its
own show had generated as a joke.
When I asked about those takedowns, Stone admitted to
being "a little schizophrenic" about it. "Trey and I have never had a problem.
It's never hurt us," he said, but he added that "from Comedy Central and
Viacom's point of view, I understand how they want to try to make some
money."
Well, is there online money or isn't there? I asked
the guy who runs AllSP.com, a Malaysia-based "South Park" fan site on which
copyright-indifferent viewers can watch any episode they want. The site's owner,
a 25-year-old Web developer who would only offer his first name, Max, said over
instant message that his site did get "a lot of traffic and there is a lot of
potential for advertising revenue." And did he make a living off that revenue?
"It's enough to get by," he said.
Stone on how the real world influences the South Park world
*The new episodes are posted online for one week after the episodes air, but then removed until 30 days after the air date.
I've been on a hiatus from the Scientology vs. the Internet story, but enough threads have been spun in the past week that a refresher is in order.
First of all, there's the Jason Beghe Conspiracy (Village Voice), wherein the well-established character actor tells all about his none-too-enlightening experience as a Scientologist. The video -- it's f-bomb laden so I can't link directly -- was picked up and widely circulated after it was published by venerated Scientology critic Mark "Wise Beard Man" Bunker on his YouTube channel. After Bunker posted the first part of the Beghe interview on YouTube, his 10,000-subscriber account was yanked.
The reasons for Bunker's YouTube suspension are somewhat Byzantine (Dawn at GlossLip tries to make sense of it, as do the forumheads at Enturbulation). It has to do, apparently, with an earlier instance where Bunker had used unlicensed video from "The Colbert Report." But the timing -- so soon after he posted the Beghe video -- has people asking questions.
Norway has now signed itself up for a role in the Scientology saga too. The picture at left is the cover of Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. The Norwegian press is reporting that the daughter of a member of the nation's Parliament committed suicide not long after taking a Scientology personality test in Nice, France. (The cover at left reads: "TOOK HER OWN LIFE," and the quote at the bottom is from Parliament member Inga Marte Thorkildsen, who says, "All indications are that the Scientologist sect has played a direct role.") Here's an account in English, in which a Scientology official notes that millions of people have taken the test without a similar result, and "pointed to Ballo's earlier eating disorder and suggested that she had a history of psychiatric problems."
Note to commenters: kindly focus your discussion points on the article at hand, rather than posting generalized statements in support of, or in opposition to, Scientology.
Check out YouTube's daily most viewed and you'll find two videos from illumistream.com, a self-described producer of "expert video content" featuring "leading professionals who provide valuable and relevant expert information in an engaging format."
If your attention has been piqued, it's about to get double-piqued once you read the videos' titles.
Granted, this hasn't exactly been the most feel-good decade in human history, but when we found out that the Earth-shattering news is that sex can be good for you, you have to wonder if whoever made the video really has their finger on the pulse of world affairs.
Or is it on a different pulse? The comely host of the video, identified as "Coach Kendra" delivers the deets: "Recent findings show that men who orgasm three or more times a week are 50% less likely to die of coronary heart disease."
Coach doesn't cite the study she's referring to, or speculate on whether it's actually the sex that's keeping men healthy, or just that healthy dudes have more sex. What we do know, though, is that this video has jacked itself up to the top of YouTube with the good ole' trick of using a risqué thumbnail and a headline with more uses of the word sex in it than the title of any self-respecting porn movie.
The bait-and-switch has, until now, been the province of tricksters and charlatans looking to goose their video view numbers. But now, apparently, health experts are playing the game, too. (What would Dr. Ruth say?)
Just below that is an even more amusing clip. Sex: Medical Benefits of Sex (Healthy Sex, Sexy Sex #5) features expert Brooke Bennis, a Certified Fitness Trainer, apparently explicating the anatomical benefits of sexual relations.
I say apparently because the video has no sound, a new kind of frustrating tease...gah! Torture! 260,000 and counting of us are dying to know why sex is a good thing. Does anyone have any idea?
According to Los Angeles Police Department Public Information director Mary Grady, the LAPD's website gets more than 31,000,000 hits every month.
That's mondo traffic. Slap on a few banner ads, some Google AdSense, some flyovers, floaters, interstitials, a couple of credit card offers and a photo of the ubiquitous University of Phoenix--and ka-ching! That should easily be enough to cover the massive budget overruns on the new headquarters.
Earlier today, TechCrunch reported on the forward-thinking ways of the Greater Manchester Police, the first police force in the UK to build a Facebook application to allow community members to help report and keep track of crimes and missing persons. GMP also has a YouTube page in which they show things like anti-terrorism PSAs, footage from the 1996 Manchester bombing and montages of still photos and video of a murder victim whose attacker has not yet been located.
The LAPD's Grady said her site has "over 10,000" pages (she didn't seem to realize that this is not necessarily a feature), but she admitted that the department has not yet harnessed YouTube, Facebook or any of the other youth-centered media sites.
"We definitely realize technology is something that's very beneficial and it reaches a wider audience," Grady said. But in terms of YouTube/Facebook/social media, "We've looked at some things, but no final decisions."
Grady cited an LAPD freeze on civilian hires, and a general resource crunch as reasons the department had not yet been able to build in these areas (lapd.org does, however, have surveillance footage, a blog, a nifty crime map and a (badly neglected) Flickr page).
Maybe when the headquarters gets finished the department will have more time to make YouTube videos and upload to Flickr.
"If I'm going to do it," Grady said of future improvements, "I'm going to do it well."
There's little that can be added to this Wired video of a water balloon being popped in super slow-motion. Except that it has introduced me to the genre of super slow-motion, which is my favorite YouTube genre of the week. The trick is to get things that involve very high-speed objects and slow them down until they're very slow. It's a window into the zooming, flashing, exploding universe that our brains are just too sluggish to grok.
If that's tickled your slo-fancy, here are a few more:
You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?
I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:
NBC is taking another swing at making Web TV work, this time with sci-fi thriller "Gemini Division," which will feature Rosario Dawson as an NYPD cop in the future:
When Sara's fiancé is killed, she discovers a microchip in her engagement ring that sets her on a journey into a biotech underworld filled with genetically fabricated life forms called Simulants. She locates the Gemini Division, who are trying to reclaim all the Simulant chips and eradicate these rogue terrorists.
"Gemini" will arrive at NBC.com in 50 four-minute episodes this summer, along with a partner series, "Wake Up Dead," a comedy about zombies. Gemini will be partly live action, partly animation. The only trailers I can find are a pair of sub-30-second teasers someone posted on MySpace.
Count me as a fan of mutant DNA underworld stories. The recent hit video game "BioShock" is one, except it takes place in the 1940s, so it's all mechanical mutant bad guys instead of electronic ones. But still.
"Gemini" promises a feature that's coming to be standard issue with online TV efforts: an ARG (Alternate Reality Game).
NBC describes the "Gemini" version as a "completely immersive and interactive online world filled with bonus content and new mysteries to unravel."
OK, fine. But am I the only person who thinks that the production companies get a little more excited about "bonus content" than we do? "Bonus" usually implies that the free goody has some sort of monetary value, when what they're talking about is stuff like a 40-second clip of Dawson blasting at a giant bionic sewer Rabbit. Which could be cool too, I guess.
At the risk of turning into an all Lonelygirl, all the time news source, I'll pass along the news that LG15 creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried formed a "social entertainment" company called EQAL, which has been given a hot capital infusion of more than $5 million by Boston's Web-TV-friendly Spark Capital.
Beckett and Goodfried have been ahead of the curve on Web TV innovation since their original hoax-de-force. They were also early on the interactive elements of webisodes, including letting viewers communicate with the characters, planting clues at Northern California bowling alleys and other physical locations, and bringing product placement to absurd new levels by doing things like writing a "Neutrogena scientist" into the plot.
Both KateModern, the pair's London-based Lonelygirl-esque thrillerama, and Lonelygirl15 itself have been nominated for 2007 Webby Awards, so it will certainly be interesting to see what EQAL does with enough money to make a few legitimately medium-budget series.
Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent. But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.
According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help.
"ARRESTED," he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.
Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)
Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as ZDNET reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?
Defamer posted a length entry yesterday titled "Exclusive: Debunking The Marilyn Monroe 'Sex Tape' Hoax" in which the blog's editors essentially hand over the microphone to a group of three Monroe experts -- in this case, a Monroe author and two memorabilia vendors led by Mark Bellinghaus. The experts then lay out their case for why the purported sex tape can't be real.
As a disclaimer, I'll say that I too doubt the existence of the tape -- more so than my insufficiently skeptical post of the other morning reflected. But debunking a claim means proving it's false -- not just speculating about it or attacking the source's credibility -- which is all this very long Defamer post manages to do.
Instead of getting to a smoking gun in the first paragraph, the post spends a few hundred words clearing its throat and reprising older Monroe nudie photo or film scandals, as if this latest naturally fits into that tradition.
Then the hatchet job begins, and the posters begin their ad hominem attack on Keya Morgan (see CBS interview here), the collector who claims to have brokered the sale of the sex video. Bellinghaus, a man who uses words like "criminal," "retard" and "gerbil" to describe his foes in intemperate screeds on his website, gives this fact-less account of his interview with rival Morgan:
In general Mr. Morgan was a name dropper, especially when it came to those notorious for supporting the conspiracy theories involved with the story of Marilyn Monroe. However, he wove into our conversation his claim that he dated Mariah Carey and Renée Zellweger.
The Morgan-bashing goes on for several paragraphs before the Defamer posters get to their tripartite dismantling of Morgan's claim. Problem is, the three parts are not pieces of evidence or assertions of fact exposing the falsity of the story. They're just questions.
Here's my take on each of the three:
1) Defamer asks, if the alleged film is supposed to have been filmed before Monroe was famous, why would the Feds care?
My answer:Documents listed on the FBI's website explicitly mention a film in which Monroe was "committing a perverted act upon an unknown male," and that the film was being "furnished to the FBI Lab." (Doc.2, pg. 70)
2) Defamer says, Keya Morgan mentions a mole on the face of the woman in his film. Just because the person in the alleged film has a mole, that proves it's Monroe?
My answer: Absolutely not. But, uh, it doesn't prove it's not either.
3) Defamer asks, if Morgan's film is supposedly a bootleg copy of a classified FBI footage, why would the FBI have allowed the sale to have happened?
My answer: Who knows? Maybe in the post-9/11 world, the FBI has better things to do than conduct stings to prevent the sale of copies of 60-year-old Hollywood sex tapes.
And that's the end of their proof, and Defamer's exclusive. Which is less a proof or an exclusive than Defamer offering some Monroe-mabilia peddlers a chance to smear a competitor.
NOTE: I've closed comments on this post because it's become something of a flame contest. Thanks.
By now we've all heard of the so-called "YouTube divorce" video, where playwright Tricia Walsh-Smith rants about how little she gets in the event of a divorce from her wealthy husband Philip J. Smith, a Broadway theater mogul. Occasionally tearing up, she reveals that she is about to be "evicted" from her apartment because of a clause in her ill-advised pre-nup. Then Walsh-Smith offers the YouTube viewing public a whole bunch of so-called dirt, such as that Smith owned Viagra, dirty magazines, and prophylactics, even though she says they "never had sex" because of his heart condition. There's a vague reference to Smith having allegedly "hacked" his wife's computer -- but what the Sam heck does that mean?
This video doesn't herald a new era in divorce, where spouses humiliate each other online instead of hashing out their differences in the living room or in court. As is eminently clear from the planning and execution of the video -- which is clearly edited by someone who knew what they were doing -- this is a performance piece by a theater professional. Even down to the "prepare for a sequel" message at the end: "Will Poor, Vulnerable Tricia be Evicted? Or Will Mean Bad Husband do the Right Thing? Stay Tuned!"
It's a great idea for an online soap opera episode -- the enmity between a rich New York husband and his beautiful, estranged, younger wife. Money. Sex. Gossip. And all in 6 minutes. Maybe this is the hit Web TV show we've been looking for!
Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.
Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.
Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site
dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in
the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had
spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He
also acknowledged that an order to bury the documents could amount to
an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords
the public "the right to receive information and ideas."
Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of
an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing
the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.
But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their
identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being
barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral
equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the
dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's
just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.
Gawker head honcho Nick Denton explained to Silicon Alley Insider that the decision to sell the sites was based on the economy, lack of advertising, and his desire to get lean before the blogosphere implodes. "There's a cold wind coming," Denton told Silicon Alley. "We need to focus on our core titles."
Gridskipper was sold to Curbed and Idolator was ushered to Buzznet, but Wonkette will remain in the family (such as it is). Denton says it was "spun off" to its managing editor, Ken Layne (pictured here and after the jump). Layne and Denton go back to the days of Sploid, an off-the-wall Gawker blog that focused on UFOs and weird news — subject matter that Layne handled beautifully in the late '90s with Tabloid.net (now defunct).
Apparently Layne and Blogads chief Henry Copeland have bought Wonkette from Denton. Because Layne and I are friends, I was able to catch the new mogul on Google Chat early this afternoon for this impromptu interview.
Web Scout: First of all, congrats!
Ken: Thank you. It is a weird ending to the story — or weird new chapter, I guess.
Web Scout: By now everyone has read Nick's e-mail to the Gawker folk, but my first question is: Who will actually own Wonkette, you or Blogads owner Henry Copeland?
Ken: Well, a new company is forming as I type this, and I am running the editorial side of it. Henry's BlogAds is going to be doing for us what they do for Perez Hilton: exclusively handle the site's sales and marketing, and handle the hosting and tech.
In a strange and lurid tale more befitting one of those Hollywood moviesthat fictionalize1950s Hollywood than something that actually happened, the New York Post is reporting that a 15-minute sex-reel starring Marilyn Monroe not only exists, but was just sold to a New York collector for $1.5M. It gets weirder: the NYC businessman who now owns the footage bought it from the son of a dead FBI informant. And sorry, you're not going to get to see it on YouTube ... yet.
"The gentleman who bought it said out of respect for Marilyn he's not going to make a joke of it and put it on the Internet and try to exploit her," Keya Morgan, the memorabilia man who brokered the sale, told Reuters.
"He said, 'I'm not going to make a Paris Hilton out of her. I'm not going to sell it, out of respect.' "
You'd have to ask, then, that if the buyer's intentions are so altruistic, why let the story out of the bag? Surely the knowledge of its existence will do nothing but stoke the public's desire for historic sex footage that no number of highly paid paparazzi could capture?
Especially with all the sordid details around it. The Post's story says that J. Edgar Hoover spent weeks trying to show that the man in the "still FBI-classified" footage was either JFK or RFK. Add in some G-men, Joe DiMaggio, and a film reel that's been locked in a vault for 50 years and--seriously--do we really think this thing's going to stay secret for much longer?
Celebrity sex tapes want to be free. And this isn't just any sex tape: there is actual historic value to this footage because it involves America's most famous and controversial on-screen beauty. Now that we know it's out there, we might as well see it, right? Otherwise we're just collectively going along with the buyer's plan to keep her image artificially unsullied. Which would be one thing for someone still living, but this is a world-famous Hollywood icon who died almost 50 years ago.
The only remaining question is, how long before the tape gets leaked or sold? If anyone wants to start a bet with me on Long Bets, let me know. I'm thinking the over/under is 3 years....
UPDATE: And in light of the first comment below, I'll
probably take the over. As I was getting at earlier, it's just too
strange that the buyer wants to keep the tape secret, but has still
allowed the broker to swirl up a media frenzy about the story. The Post
didn't get a quote from the buyer or, apparently, confirm his identity
or existence. Who is this strange businessman that "wants to keep this
unseemly part of Monroe's past buried?" Sounds like quite a
character...
Publisher Nick Denton announced this morning that he had unloaded three of Gawker Media's 15 blogs before the "cold wind" from a chilling economy blows into town (SAI). Travel and music blogs Gridskipper and Idolator are being passed along, along with Wonkette, the now almost-venerable 4-year-old political gossip blog that made its original editor, Ana Marie Cox, an online star--and helped establish the Gawker brand.
"The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% [of] our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue," wrote Denton in an e-mail to his staff.
Denton also said that he thought the new owners might be better-equipped to sell ads in those niches--which seems to imply that selling ads in those niches is not all that easy (since he can't do it).
Is this the first big sign that the sub-prime mortgage freeze is hitting the blogosphere? Sheesh, and just in time for summer.
To catch up the uninitiated, there is a revolt afoot on Flickr, one of the Internet's most popular — and zealously guarded — photo-sharing sites.
You see, earlier this week, Flickr gave its users the ability to upload 90-second videos to their accounts. Since most newer digital cameras can also act as video recorders, the folks at Flickr thought their user base would appreciate the ability to store all of their camera's contents in one place. Or, in Flickr's more poetic coinage, the 90-second snippets can be seen as "long photos."
In one of the most perplexing uproars I've seen online, a large swath of Flickrites has united in protest: against the video feature. They are saying, in essence, that introducing this lower form of art (video) will tarnish the site's reputation as a bastion of "fine photography."
The mission statement of the 25,000-member group "We Say No to Videos on Flickr" offers the following timeless (and slightly unpolished) proclamation against video oppression:
I love Flickr, and I think it should stay the same way it has always been. It should just be for Photos!
We don't need another YouTube! I have nothing against YouTube, I just don't want to see all the $*#% that on there to wind up on here!
Fair enough. Open a site up to any new kind of content and you're bound to get a flood of mediocre stuff. You have to give it to Flickr: Along with a few photos of debatable interest value, it has indeed managed to attract a community of skilled and enthusiastic photographers. It would be a shame if that community was destroyed by wanton video uploading.
My question is: OK, you've got all these good photographers sharing their still images. In the clamor and chaos the video feature is obviously going to bring, are these people suddenly going to lose their artistic eye? Or is it that good photographers make bad videographers? All right, now I'm just being sarcastic, so I should stop.
You know what I think, though (before I stop)? I think the Internet has given rise to a petition-happy culture, where we love to make a stink about various and sundry causes, because it reminds us we're alive. But when it comes to actually going to that mat — getting up in those trees or lying down in front of that tractor — well, someone else can do that.
A couple of months ago I heard that an old burger joint was closing in my college town — a real fixture of the community. So I started a Facebook petition and got a few thousand signatures to save it. Great! But then I realized that a petition doesn't save a bankrupt hamburger place. Money, effort and organization does. And I don't know about you people, but I don't have much of any of those in the first place, let alone some to spare.
Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).
Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.
Something Awful [via Gawker] has a page of fictional "awful Facebook invitations" that do a good job of distilling the current state of Facebook applications: They are awful. My favorite is this one:
But I'd rather install Remember Lite Brites than most real applications. There are now 21,000 apps, almost half of which are in the "Just For Fun" category. Here are a few of those — and remember, these are real applications that someone decided to design and construct for your enjoyment:
And after the jump is just a tiny fraction of the incredible number of "What kind of [BLANK] are you?" applications. Maybe this is a generation-gap situation here, but I simply don't see the appeal in identifying yourself with lots of different kinds of things. If there's anyone out there who does, please let me know.
Jessica Rose is back again, not as lonelygirl15 or Julia in "Blood Cell," but as 15(!!)-year-old Tina, the sister of Lee, the varsity wrestling captain at Victory High School around whom "Perfect Sport" revolves.
The movie, from Building Block pictures, is debuting April 13 at the 41st Annual WorldFest in Houston.
Its creators describe it as being "packed with emotion, grit, and above all, honesty. It's the classic coming-of-age story presented in a way that you've never seen."
In the following scene, Tina tries to persuade Lee to let her join the team. She being a girl, and this being a sports movie, he is understandably skeptical.
MySpace has partnered with ShineReveille International -- a worldwide media distributor -- to sell its original series globally -- not online, mind you -- but as DVDs, old-fashioned TV shows, and merchandise.
MySpace's roster so far of Web series is rather unremarkable, raising questions about which particular foreign demographic (Italian? Indian? Turkish?) might want to purchase DVDs of "Roommates" or "Special Delivery" action figures (that's their "Candid Camera" show). On the other hand, though, it doesn't hurt to have global distribution channels in place -- I wish I had some of those.
(below: MySpaceTV's "Special Delivery" where Anders pretends to have two broken arms)
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 
The Associated Press (via Yahoo) noted today that 
Norway has now signed itself up for a role in the Scientology saga too. The picture at left is the cover of Norwegian newspaper 
According to Los Angeles Police Department Public Information director Mary Grady, the 
You know what I think, though (before I stop)? I think the Internet has given rise to a petition-happy culture, where we love to make a stink about various and sundry causes, because it reminds us we're alive. But when it comes to actually going to that mat — getting up in those trees or lying down in front of that tractor — well, someone else can do that. 
