Discovery's 'Alaska Experiment': Calling all adventurers

Throw a rock at a reality TV show, and it's likely to smash through the window of a mansion full of well-dressed models. Now: Run!

Yeah, if you're getting bored of the same old reality, then what about Discovery Channel's "The Alaska Experiment"? Through a Web casting call, the show is seeking a group of rugged individuals who are willing to wander off the beaten path:

"The challenge — if you dare to accept it — is to join a band of fellow explorers and journey through some of the harshest climates and roughest terrains in the world: the Alaskan wilderness."

Get your ice ax and parka ready, because only eight days remain in the second-season casting call for "The Alaska Experiment." Prospective participants ages 21 to 100 — sadly, my 101-year-old great-aunt just missed the cutoff — must digitally submit a written statement and photos from past adventures, and can also submit a video about why they should be picked.

Few contestants included videos on their profile submissions, but I did find one: Chad Israel, an actor who uploaded some very strange clips that don't exactly scream "I'm an Arctic climber." Site visitors can vote on the entrants they like, but Discovery doesn't say whether the most popular folks will be picked for the adventure.

Leading the pack are Joana Velez and Emily Levine, with 205 and 175 votes respectively. They are self-proclaimed actors whose bikini-photo-rich profiles seem to suggest they might not be cut out for the tundra. But Velez wants to undress those stereotypes: "people who don't know me would never guess how much of an adventurer I am... just for the looks! you see I have the steriotype of a girly-plastic-materialistic-girl which is why people call me Barbie! but trust me, Im nothing like that! ;)"

Congratulations, Barbie Jo. That statement just netted you another vote.

— Mark Milian

Photo credit: Dave / Your Scene, Los Angeles Times

DiggDogg! L.A. has 50 dogs named 'Digger'

Find a good story down there, fella?
(Photo credit: Waldo Jaquith / Flickr user )

Here, Digger! 

According to the L.A Times' nifty new Doggy Database, it turns out that 50 pooches in the area go by that very name. 

Raising the question: How long would it take 50 dogs named "Digger" at 50 computers to submit the exact same set of stories that Digg users have already submitted? 

Also receiving an honorable mention is the guy who went a step further and named his pup  "Digger dawg."

But, as often happens in discussions of Digg, "Buzz" is getting unfairly left out. There are actually 124 L.A. dogs named Buzz. I was shocked to find that no local owners named their dogs "Delicious," even though dogs abound with names like "Dr. Ruff" and "Betti Spaghetti."

Four local canines are named "Google," making it, according to the database, the 9,100th most common L.A. dog name. 

If you find any funny Web 2.0-related dogs, please send along and I'll add to the post.   

RNC finds out its Barack Obama site, 'Audacity Watch,' wasn't the first

Having read about the Republican National Committee's new "Barack Obama Audacity Watch" campaign, a web page where the RNC tracks less-than-glowing stories about Obama -- I went to Google to find out more. 

The top result for a search on "audacitywatch" yielded, what else, a site called "Audacity Watch."

Under the motto, "Exposing Barack Obama and the Radical Left," the site -- Audacitywatch.com --consists mostly of opinion-heavy, fact-light criticism of the Illinois Senator. One representative post is entitled, "Marxists Support Obama??!!" and another asks "Does Barack Obama Have Narcissistic Personality Disorder?" In the latter case, after offering an excerpt of the Mayo Clinic's definition of NPD, the post concludes thus:

Barack Obama says, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”  Are we sure that the “we” he means isn’t the Royal “We” (Pluralis Majestatis) – as in the Queen of England saying, “WE” – meaning “God and I” – ”are not amused?”

Perhaps someone should give Obama’s medical records — especially the mental health sections — a thorough re-examination.

Well, I knew the RNC was not Obama's No. 1 fan, but this didn't sound like the kind of insinuation they'd make, especially if all they had was the Queen of England argument. Where had I taken a wrong turn?

After a bit of step-retracing, I figured out my error. Instead of Googling "audacity watch" (with a space), I'd searched for "audacitywatch."  The former yielded the RNC page, and the latter this other site, by an anonymous but non-RNC-affiliated person from Washington state. 

Hmm. I couldn't help but wonder why the RNC would develop a feature that shared a name and basic theme with a website that already existed.  The URL Audacitywatch.com was created on April 30th, three months to the day before the RNC's "Audacity Watch" page went live. Given the name overlap, and the way a lot of people search for sites just by typing the name directly into the address bar -- didn't the RNC anticipate any reader confusion?

I contacted them to ask.  First of all, did they know about the other Audacity Watch when they were planning their own?

"We did not," wrote Amber Wilkerson, the RNC's Deputy Press Secretary, in an e-mail to me.  She also noted that there was "no link at all" between the two sites. "I actually haven't seen it."

You tell me: Does the RNC deserve a demerit for failing to find the other Audacity Watch before it went ahead and launched its own?  Or are we savvy Web surfers smart enough to tell the difference?

Lizz Winstead talks about the Jezebel flap

Lizz Winstead is the creator of "Shoot the Messenger," a live show that focuses on the media. (Photo credit: Mindy Tucker)

Earlier this month, Lizz Winstead invited two bloggers from the women's blog Jezebel to her weekly live show, Thinking and Drinking, in downtown Manhattan. A few days later she posted on her Huffington Post blog a scathing assessment of her guests, Maureen “Moe” Tkacik and Tracie “Slut Machine” Egan, complete with video bits in which Egan theorized about why she had never been raped: “I think it has to do with the fact that I am, like, smart," and Tkacik said she had been date-raped but "I always felt very, like, safe around this guy, even after he date-raped me.” She did not report him because she “had better things to do, like drinking more.”

For her part, Winstead, the co-creator of "The Daily Show," hectored her guests for not acknowledging that they are role models while also telling don't-try-this-at-home stories of her own.

Winstead's post linked back to the complete hour-long footage (sorry, can't link to it here--too many bad words). I recommend it to anyone who (like me) gets perverse pleasure watching generation gaps in action, or to anyone wondering about where feminism is going.

I emailed the editor of Jezebel, Anna Holmes (who is an acquaintance) to see if she and Moe Tcacik and Tracie Egan would talk about what happened now that some time has passed. Anna had written a post ruminating on what went wrong that night, calling the whole thing a "shame." But she declined to talk about it further, saying that they had all "moved on."

Winstead, though, agreed to an interview....

--Maria Russo

At first it seemed as if your Huffington Post piece was going to set off a huge discussion about sexual freedom, date rape, the feminist generation gap... Some blogs weighed in (and Tracie and Moe defended themselves in one college student's blog's comments) but now it seems to have faded from view. Did that surprise you, that the discussion you were trying to start sort of went nowhere?

I guess it faded from view –- well, for now, sure, yeah. But what I want to do in the next six months, I really want to participate in a panel of young feminists and older feminists. I don’t want to moderate it. I want to be on it -– to talk about how women do feminism, how older women and younger ones do it. When I had the Jezebel women on the show that was my intent, but there was clearly a disconnect between myself and these women. I probably sensed that there would be a little bit of that, just generationally. But I don’t understand the profundity of just how disconnected we were on issues of sexual freedom...

I read their blog, so I knew they were very open about their sexuality. I just didn’t expect a complete lack of talking about protection, and what it means to meet strange men and go out in the world to do that, live that way. I was hoping we’d get to: "Do you have any great new ways of putting on a condom?" But we never got there, because I think there were certain parts of the interview that stopped me right in my tracks.

What was it that threw you?

I think what happened was — they got drunk. And I’m hearing reactions from people who are saying, "But the show is called 'Thinking and Drinking'!" Well, I’ve had 50 people on my show who chose not to get drunk and who talked to me, and who actually watched the interviews I’ve done beforehand and understood what they were coming into.... Which is, if Stephen Colbert were to do "The Colbert Report," then he took off his outfit and interviewed the guests as himself. That’s what we do. The first part is comedy, a fake morning news show. The second part of my show is, I sit down with people in the media for pretty serious conversations. We’ve talked to Phil Dray, who has written marvelous books on racism, Rachel Maddow ...when you look at the list of people I interview it’s clearly not, "Well, let’s get drunk with Craig Unger." We sent the women the links, and everyone knew what we were going to be talking about.

I’m a pretty controversial character in my own right — people can question anything I say and challenge me. But with some of their responses, I was just like, "What the ...? I’m not sure what that means?"

Looking at the video, it seems at times that they were just trying for comedy.

The thing about doing edgy humor is you either get to succeed, or you get to fail. If the humor isn’t working so much so that I -– as someone who does that kind of material –- doesn’t even follow you... I mean, I made a joke about abortion that got a huge laugh. I don’t equate abortion as a moral issue. It’s something that only affects me. But if you’re going out to have sex without a condom with strange men –- that’s a moral issue.

Why, exactly, are the two so different?

I think anyone who is writing about sex and their sexual lives -– I referred to them as role models in the piece. I referred to them that way not because I believed they were but because as I read the comments, it was other women defining them that way. The bottom line is, if you are out there and you are talking about your life, you have a column, you are putting it out there –- you sort of don’t get to choose whether someone looks up to you. That’s the good and the bad thing. I don’t think anyone chooses to be a role model –- if your behavior is listened to and followed, people are going to emulate you.

Otherwise just write at home –- don’t put it out there. Doesn’t it mean you want people to see it? To have a dialogue about it and think about it? I know people do think about what I say and I take it to heart.... When you mess up, people call you out on that too. Which is why I put it on the Huffington post, including the things I said that I’m not proud of -– and I didn’t want to expunge comments.

Google doing quality control on Knol articles?

Does your Knol pass muster? (Adapted from an image by Flikr user tnarik)

The other day I asked readers to pass along articles they'd written for Google's new Knol encyclopedia.  Several were kind enough to share their contributions.  What's odd is that almost a week later, eight of the 12 articles written by those contributors still have not appeared in Knol's search results -- nor does my excellent article on the smoothie machine show up when searched for within Knol. (Strangely, it appears when you do a Google search for it, though.) 

Here's a spreadsheet where I've tabulated the articles that people sent me and when, noting which show up in the Knol results, and which don't. If you have written any that aren't appearing in the Knol search, send them along and I'll add them to the list.

When I asked Google why it was taking so long for the articles to appear, a spokesperson wrote back the following:  "There may be a delay until knols appear in the search results at knol.google.com. This delay varies from one knol to another and is based on numerous factors."

Pretty vague, but the takeaway is clear: Unlike Wikipedia, Knol's articles are being put through some kind of quality control process before they're indexed, whether it's to suss out spam, copyrighted information, porn or maybe just poorly written prose.  Since Google won't elaborate, we're left to guess. Thing is, if you look at the articles on my spreadsheet, none of them are spammy, porny or badly written. So why, for instance, does this entry on Cambodia not show up in Knol's results, even though it was written last Thursday?

Google's reluctance to be transparent, while never surprising, is at least puzzling in this instance. This product has been positioned as a public information resource, created by public users. It would seem that both readers and contributors should have a basic sense of how their content is being treated.

Revision3's web TV runs on star power

Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)

I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.

But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.

You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.

And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.

But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”

“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable. “Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”

But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.

'Dr. Horrible' lives again (on Hulu, MySpace, etc.)

Joss Whedon's hit web musical "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" has come out of its week-long hibernation.  The show, originally available only on Dr.Horrible.com and iTunes, will now appear on a number of web sites, including Hulu.com, MySpace, and eventually Yahoo!, AOL and others. (There's a version on AOL with Spanish subtitles but I don't think it's licensed.)

According to a press release from Hulu, this 'Horrible' run will last four months, after which  the fate of the good doctor is uncertain. We know  there will eventually be a DVD release of this first installment, and then, probably, a sequel. 

Some of us also think that, because the full three-episode cycle clocks in at about 42 minutes -- just the length necessary for an hour-long television slot minus commercials --  we might actually see the show hit the old fashioned airwaves. Maybe as a holiday special or something.

In a blog entry on the Hulu site, Whedon entreats viewers to watch the newly revived show:  "HULU hosted Dr. Horrible for free for a week, which we, the mushortio*-makers, are forever grateful for, and now you can stream it for free on their site. How awesome is that? I know, you're humbled. Stop groveling. Just remember: the more you watch it, the more you will understand about life and the universe and hydroponics."

Also, the more cash Whedon and company will make -- this run may be free but it ain't commercial free. If you choose to watch the full version, you'll get a preview of what it might look like on the boob tube: Hulu has plugged up Dr. H's gaps with a set of shiny new advertisements. 

And I for one say, it's about time.  All that hippie free-ness was making me nervous.

*This is Whedonspeak for 'online musical short'

Previously:

Initial traffic numbers for 'Dr. Horrible'
Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

The clip below will probably expire when the show's Hulu tenure is up.

 

Alleged L.A. tagger arrested after cops find him on YouTube

An image of "Revok" from a graffiti video on YouTube, and the Riverside County booking photo of Jason Williams.

"Revok" is a prolific graffiti artist who also has a heavy presence on YouTube (see video below). As it turns out, the two might not go so well together. As KNBC reported here, Indio police arrested Jason Williams in Los Angeles last week on vandalism charges after they traced fingerprints from various tags and street art back to the L.A-based Williams. Most of the tagging in question apparently took place during the Coachella music festival.

Revok is not a small-timer. He appears in a number of online videos about graffiti, including at least one where he spraypaints a wall himself -- and others where he is interviewed and profiled as a well-known Southland graffiti artist. In this video interview, Revok says, "More than half my life now has been spent doing graffiti. I've gone to jail I don't know how many times, had people trying to kill me. There's really no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for that."

The graffiti in many of the YouTube videos is ornate and expertly rendered. Revok is clearly a talented artist. But ...

"No matter what you call it," an Indio police spokesman told KNBC, "it's defacing public and private property.''

For repeat offenders, felony vandalism (for damage greater than $400) is punishable by a jail term of up to one year, a fine of up to $5,000, or both. Not what you would call a pot of gold.

Worth Watching: "I Met the Walrus"

In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan sneaked into John Lennon's hotel room with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and the idiosyncratic music titan was gracious enough to agree to a short interview.

This film, "I Met the Walrus," is the audio of that interview set stunningly to animation by Josh Raskin. The film was nominated for an Academy Award last year and is now being featured at YouTube's Screening Room section, where it has garnered 650,000 views. Top marks...

Chatting with Gary Vaynerchuk: "I want my brand to be my DNA"

GaryVee says: "It's just a matter of time." (Photo by David Sarno)

Gary Vaynerchuk, star of the popular online tasting show Wine Library TV, and a self-styled internet businessman, blogger and web celebrity, sat down with me in Westwood last week to talk about how you get big on the Internet, and where it's all going to lead.

Why does personal branding seem to be so well-suited to the Internet, whereas it may not have been in the era of big media?

It's become a democracy. Me, Gary Vaynerchuck--80,000 viewers a day--I would've had to come to L.A., work at a bar and be a wine guy, get lucky, bump into somebody, and go audition. But now the cost of entry to build your personal brand is zero. That's what's changed. I don't think the fundamentals of what gets you to watch this or me to watch that has changed.

I always tell people: it's the Conan O' Brien rule. I've been on Conan. Had I been on Johnny Carson 20 years ago, I'd probably be a bigger brand. Had I been on Ed Sullivan 30 years earlier than that, I'd be a phenomenon. Because back then there were less places for the eyeballs to go. 

But getting 500,000 or a million views on an Internet show--that's going to be there. And those are going to be the players.

You use a lot of social technologies to advertise your content and yourself. Can you win a mainstream audience with that stuff?

99% of the people on the earth have no idea what Twitter is. You start getting even more nerdy than that, getting into places like Seesmic--places to build your brand--I know I'm sitting on a huge knowledge base that most people don't understand.  I'm going to ride that. That's why everybody's interested in what I'm doing. 

But most mainstreamers don't understand this technology...

I don't care. Because it's not about today.  I'm in a different place.  I've built a successful multimillion dollar business.  I don't have to make $40,000 a year right now, or $200,000.  To me, it's this:  [he taps his watch and smiles].  I just keep hitting my watch.  That's all I do.  I spend hours a day just tapping my watch--it's my move.  It's just a matter of time. Period, end of story, game over.

You've said you want to own the New York Jets eventually -- but what does that have to do with wine?

Wine's a vehicle.  But it's a massive passion--I love it, and it'll never go away.  I want to create a world where you're not branded one way.  I want to be a social media expert, and a marketing guru, and a big time wine guy, and a jets fan, and a family guy, and a sensitive guy, and a wrestling maniac.  That's who I am.  I want to create a new package that hasn't been seen before.  America has always wanted to pigeonhole people.  Your network and your managers and your producers have wanted you to stay focused 'on brand.'  I want my brand to be my DNA.

You taught yourself to be a wine taster starting before you were old enough to drink--by eating dirt and cigars and other strange stuff.  But really, all that enthusiasm and you never tried the real thing?

I didn't. You'd meet my mom and you'd understand.  Never. 

I'd love to say I did. It's sexier. It'd be a great marketing thing, right?  Like the 16-year-old drinking wine? I didn't.  I wasn't a curious kid.  I've never done a single drug.  I've only been drunk three times in my life. And I'm in the wine profession. 

I like being in control. It's probably the whole content and business thing--it all ties into the same genetics.  Plus I come from a heritage of a lot of people being drunk all the time.  Russians and stuff, so I'm turned off by that kind of thing.