Last year, I stumbled into mainstream Internet recognition in Seattle. Actually, I drove into it.

My wife and I got stuck in a terrible storm from Seattle to Tacoma, where we live, and in the boredom of our 10-hour “#snomg” commute I tweeted about everything that came to mind, with little filter. As a result, I flooded the stream on Twitter and gained some very minor celebrity (I mean, levels below even Kathy Griffin) during the event and a few days after.

This year, I had no plans to produce media around the impending storm, but then MCDM colleague Madeline Moy suggested in a Facebook thread that someone parody the “Sh*t Girls Say” meme with “Sh*t Seattle People Say When It Snows.” I found inspiration in it and got started. I filmed for a couple hours after work and dropped the first video that evening on YouTube, just to entertain my Facebook friends.

That first video took off. I thought it’d get 1,000 views at the most, but by the time I woke up the next morning I was well into five-figure views. I had plenty of shots left over, so I edited Part 2 and posted that, too. The two videos received many great comments in 48 hours, so I “replied” to them with Part 3 just earlier today, featuring many of the suggestions viewers provided.

So, how in the hell did this work out so well?

In digital media circles, we often talk about content and distribution models, but we rarely talk about newsworthiness — a more common discussion amongst PR flacks. Even great content — and I think I produced amateur content — needs a reason. To go viral, and I don’t think the “Sh*t Seattle People Say When It Snows” videos have hit that hockey stick growth quite yet, content needs more than a business reason or approval of an inner circle of friends. It has to appeal with reason and context for a broader audience to “get it.”

This year’s snow was my perfect storm, pun intended. I knew that a) people like to talk about the rare snow in Seattle, b) Seattlites have plenty of free time on snow days, and c) everyone likes a good laugh. Madeline’s request reminded me that there was a familiar and popular meme format to leverage.

It has been all Seattle snow jokes since.

2011 was a banner year at Flip the Media.  Over the last twelve months we have grown into an informative, timely and thought provoking daily journal. Student run, Flip’s success is based on the content that MCDM students enrolled in the Flip independent study provide to readers every week on a daily basis. Most of our content comes from the students and faculty in the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) program and Flip the Media reflects the best aspects of that program’s scholarship and entrepreneurialism.

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ViKi.com, Singapore based startup, is making international TV and movies more accessible to world-wide audiences via crowd-sourced sub-titling - in approximately 160 languages. Yes, even Klingon.

ViKi acquires the rights to programs, uploads them to viki.com and then leverages the power of its translator community. These willing translators provide real-time subtitling of world TV and movies–from Japanese Anime to Spanish Novelas to Korean dramas to Egyptian movies to the latest from Bollywood as well as TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK.

According to TechCrunch.com, ViKi is attracting around 8.5 million unique visitors with approximately 36 million visits per month, representing a four-fold increase over the past year.

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Louis CK makes really funny jokes and he wants you–even if you are broke, especially if you are broke—to be able to laugh at him. His newest venture, Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theatre is a full-length show available to download for $5. I just paid $19.99 for Chris Rock’s “Kill the Messenger” on iTunes, where full-length stand-up routines range in price from $4.99 to over $20. But here’s the thing—at this point we know that artists and comedians are making a pittance selling product through venues like iTunes and getting even less though streaming websites like Spotify and Last.fm. So Louis CK, ever the innovator, decided to take matters into his own hands and start selling his work independently.

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Who quits their day job to pursue a career telling stories? Well, it seemed like a good idea to Ben Pohl. Pohl gave up a full-time gig as a motion graphics and visual effects artist to pursue a career as a writer and director. He recently wrapped his first independent film, “Divination,” a movie Pohl describes as “madness meets magic.”

Pohl is a digital storyteller. He is fascinated by the mystery of communication and all of its moving parts. Until now, much of his time was spent locked in a basement editing on the post side of production for Victory Studios, a production house here in Seattle.

I recently sat down with the 30-year-old director at a Starbucks in Phinney Ridge. When I walked up to introduce myself, Pohl had already settled into a table, sipping an Americano as he thumbed the pages of Stephen King’s “Danse Macabre.”

Although Pohl enjoys the editing process, his real ambition is directing, high-end imagery and motion graphics. Read more…

A few months ago, I was collaborating new media models with both journalists and developers at a Knight-Mozilla News Challenge event in Seattle called hacks/hackers. About halfway through our brainstorm, a brave Seattle Times journalist spoke up and asked:

“But wait, what about the elephant in the room?”

(blank stares)

“You know…monetization.”

(frustrated stares).

Oh, yeah, that.

Indeed, monetization is the question everyone is asking about regarding the future of journalism, and no one really seems to have an answer for yet either. How on earth are we as journalists supposed to earn money for our content when online advertising revenue is dropping and people are so used to getting news content for free?

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If Netflix planned to grab media attention the way it has in recent weeks, it certainly has succeeded brilliantly, multiple times. While the real stories may not be known for a while yet, one thing is certain: Netflix has made itself a permanent case study in business communication classes.

Confusion and mishaps aside, Netflix did succeed in carrying out a couple of major tasks: it separated its DVD by mail service financially from its streaming service, and it raised the price of both its services significantly.

Recently, there have been rumors of a failed courtship between Netflix’s and Amazon. Wall Street speculates that Netflix split up in order to sell, and reversed that decision when the merger fell through. While nothing can be confirmed, the sudden announcement of Qwikster and the subsequent hasty change of heart certainly suggests there was perhaps more drama behind the scenes than what the audience saw. Read more…

In my last post, we got a glimpse into the way new digital media may affect our interpersonal relationships in the future, through Aritifical Intelligence and conversant robots. This post explores another potentially game-changing technology: digital currency.

We are all familiar with digital payments, from PayPal to iTunes accounts, direct deposits and online bill payment—but all of these are tied directly to actual fiat currency, or governmentally regulated, internationally compatible money. In Second Life, players use Linden dollars in daily activities, but these are also for purchase through US dollars. Digital currencies such as Bitcoin, however, operate independently from any national government. Bitcoin is “a currency by the people, for the people,” according to NPR’s Planet Money reporter Jacob Goldstein. It exists only digitally, essentially a computer program designed and implemented by a reclusive and mysterious man named Satoshi Nakamoto—which may even be a psyuedonymn for the actual creator.

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