Seattle-based Pet Holdings, Inc., CEO Ben Huh (purveyor of beloved LOLcats and many other hilarious image macros) contracted with me to produce his Cheezburger Network’s 3rd Anniversary Video, an effort to celebrate the 3-year anniversary of icanhascheezburger.com and the 1 billionth collective view of the entire network’s user-generated video content.

As a new media producer and recent graduate of the UW MCDM program, I had been looking for Web video work and a means of applying the skills I had been developing as a graduate student.  About a month ago, Kathy Gill, one of the MCDM’s most popular professors (and exceptionally well established in the Seattle social media sphere, I might add) connected me with Huh via Twitter.  Huh has been in the process of hiring for various positions within his expanding Network and had been advertising such through his tweets.  However, at the time, the need for a video to celebrate Cheezburger’s birthday and billion video views had not completely arisen.  Only recently had the Cheezburger Network noted that they were approaching 1 billion video views, as the majority of their blogs’ entries have focused mainly on funny still images and memes.  Huh came up with the idea to produce the anniversary video (as well as to expand their video presence) in part based on conversations with me, and, I am certain, simply by looking at his sites’ video numbers.  As a fan of LOLcats, FAILs, and all things meme culture, I seemed like a really good fit for the project, and late one evening just before Christmas, we commenced work. Read more…

For the inexperienced producer, film or video production can easily become a laborious and frustration-filled undertaking. You’ve got a great story to tell or an excellent message to share, but you have no idea where to begin.  Several questions are running through your head: Is my script good? Do I have the right performers? Am I using the right audio and video equipment? Am I shooting enough material?

You’re soon facing mounting expenses and much more work than you could have prepared for. And your hair is fast becoming gray! But, that’s the nature of production. Whether you’re working alone or in a group, producing something substantial can often stretch you beyond your limitations. Regardless, you’ve still got an amazing story or message to share. So, what’s the best way to communicate it effectively with limited resources, time and money? A powerful video slideshow may be the way to go.

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Image from "This" Magazine

If this past summer’s controversial presidential election in Iran was any indication, Twitter has fast become a major platform for political discussion and grassroots organization on the global stage.  Social media, particularly the micro-blogging service Twitter, flexed its muscles during the opposition protests of the Iranian election results, and, at least for a month or two, it seemed that a global on-line conversation about democracy in Iran might actually help change the political climate of that country.  While it appears that the government of Iran eventually succeeded in squelching the unrest and cracking down on protests, it has become pretty clear that the nation of Iran will never be the same – and Twitter is partially to thank for that.  Considering the case of Facebook use in Iran, once you’ve got a taste of that sort of social freedom, it’s difficult to turn back. Read more…

Say What?

They say YouTube isn’t making any money.  Its bread and butter is user-generated content, although it has managed to draw partnerships with some major Hollywood content providers, such as Fox and Warner Bros.  Nevertheless, the money is supposed to be sparse.  Then you have Hulu, which got started with content from some of the major players, like NBC Universal and Fox, right off the bat.  Hulu is, according to the word on the street, doing very well.  And so what we’re looking at is two models, UGC and content from mass media.  In other words, a site catering to social media vs. a site catering to mass media (or, instead of simply saying “mass media”, we mean the lumbering, late arrival of mass media content providers to the social media space).

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Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute appeared on The Daily Show Monday, February 9th, to discuss his recent cover article in Time Magazine about ways to save the dying newspaper industry.  During his interview with Jon Stewart, he talks about how he’d like to see on-line versions of newspapers charge for articles in a manner similar to the way iTunes charges for songs.  While I don’t condone piracy or copytheft of any kind, I do have two words for Mr. Isaacson: COPY, PASTE

Why do I feel like he’s dug up a dead horse?  Barriers to entry for illegal filesharing are minimal at best these days; but circumventing news subscription services is an absolute piece of cake!  I can’t think of a single time I have come across an article hiding behind a subscription service, usually mentioned in a forum at a news aggregator like Digg or Fark, where someone didn’t simply copy and paste the content to the forum or other venue for everyone else to see.

Stewart astutely posits the idea of news aggregators, Read more…

Though we exist in a time of great media upheaval, where the Internet has made available so much story for so little effort, millions are still drawn to long-form traditional narratives. We still go to the cinema, the bookstore, the concert, the play, the big game, the event. Though so much power can be packed into a media snack – a tweet, a blog post, a text message, a sentence, a word, or even an acronym (LMAO anyone?) – we still sit down for super-sized media meals. Something must be inspiring us to pull up that chair and sup from the old media table. Inspiration seems to be the answer. What is the importance of inspiration to storytelling? In our digital world – full of bombardment from massive narrative abstraction and fragmentation, where so much story content is being communicated in so many bits and bytes and packets like bullets from a fiber-optic Gatling gun – we still find time to stick the old media morphine drip in. This happens when we do something so archaic as watch an hour-long drama on network television, spend nine innings at the baseball stadium, or, gasp, read an entire Harry Potter book cover-to-cover. Read more…

Facebook. Twitter. Mybarackobama.com. Text messaging. The president-elect used all of these digital tools to devastating effect in the 2008 election. How did he do it? What strategic lessons can we learn from Barack Obama’s high-tech campaign? How might he deploy this online army of millions to govern? And does President Obama’s historic rise to the White House also propel social networking into the mainstream?

The answers to these important questions have a profound impact on the very near future of our democracy, as well as how we organize, communicate and even do business in the digital age. On the eve of the Obama inauguration, the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital Media program held a dynamic, engaging “UW Insight” conversation that sought to put this digital revolution in perspective.

Part 1 includes the Introduction to this event and a presentation by Prof. Lance Bennett, UW Political Science and Communication, on the digital tools employed during the election.

Parts 2 & 3 after the jump…

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Yes, this is a little late in coming, but I wanted to blog about it for my friends and colleagues in the MCDM community anyways. It seemed especially fitting to send this out to the gang because not only does the subject cover a multitude of issues we’ve discussed and continue to study relative to the Digital Media program, but it’s got Stephen Colbert, too. And as far as I’m concerned, anything with Stephen Colbert is required viewing.

So, a couple of weeks ago Lawrence Lessig from Stanford appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss how copyright law is complicating things for everybody in the digital era, especially for kids, who are, unfortunately, being turned into criminals by institutions like the RIAA. Here’s the interview:

Lessig on The Colbert Report

Of course, near the end Colbert pretty much invites the world to take his material, even this interview, and “remix” it however they want. Three cheers for encouraging the Colbert Nation to steal Viacom’s intellectual property! And, of course, it was only a matter of time before the Interwebs would be all over this challenge.

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