Here’s the video of my talk at The Next Web in Amsterdam on Friday. I haven’t watched it because I don’t like watching me and neither should you. But I would be interested in your comments about what I’m feeling my way toward in this talk.

It’s about what I think is a change in how we think about the future.

3 Comments »

Here are two old films of city streets. (Thank you, Andrew Weinberger! And, yes, he is my brother.)

San Francisco, 1906:

London, 1927, in color, thanks to Claude Friese-Greene :

(Wikipedia explains that Friese-Greene exposed each alternate frame through two different color lenses.)

2 Comments »

Hat tip to Reddit.

Comments Off on Game of Friends

Is it just me, or are we in a period when new distribution models are burgeoning? For example:

1. Kickstarter, of course, but not just for startups trying to kickstart their business. For example, Amanda Palmer joined the Louis CK club a couple of days ago by raising more than a million bucks there for her new album. (She got my $5 :) As AFP has explained, she is able to get this type of support from her fans because she treats her fans honestly, frankly, with respect, and most of all, with trust.

2. At VODO, you can get your indie movie distributed via bittorrent. If it starts taking off, VODO may feature it. VODO also works with sponsors to support you. From my point of view as a user, I torrented “E11,” a movie about rock climbing, for free, or I could have paid $5 to stream it for 10 days with the ability to share the deal with two other people. VODO may be thinking that bittorrenting is scary enough to many people that they’ll prefer to get it the easy way by paying $5. VODO tells you where your money is going (70% goes to the artist), and treats us with respect and trust.

3. I love Humble Bundle as a way of distributing indie games. Periodically the site offers a bundled set of five games for as much as you want to pay. When you check out, you’re given sliders so you can divvy up the amount as you want among the game developers, including sending some or all to two designated charities. If you pay more than the average (currently $7.82), you get a sixth game. Each Bundle is available for two weeks. They’ve sold 331,000 bundles in the past three days, which Mr. Calculator says comes to $2,588,420. All the games are all un-copy-protected and run on PCs and Macs. Buying a Humble Bundle is a great experience. You’re treated with respect. You are trusted. You have an opportunity to do some good by buying these games. And that’s very cool, since usually sites trying to sell you stuff act as if buying that stuff is the most important thing in the world.

4. I’m hardly the first to notice that Steam has what may be the best distribution system around for mass market entertainment. They’re getting users to pay for $60 games that they otherwise might have pirated by making it so easy to buy them, and by seeming to be on the customer’s side. You buy your PC game at their site, download it from them, and start it up from there. They frequently run crazy sales on popular games for a couple of days, and the game makers report that there is enough price elasticity that they make out well. If I were Valve (the owners of Steam), I’d be branching out into the delivery of mainstream movies.

There’s of course much much more going on. But that’s my point: We seem to be figuring out how to manage digital distribution in new and successful ways. The common threads seem to be: Treat your customers with respect. Trust them. Make it easy for them to do what they want to do with the content. Have a sense of perspective about what you’re doing. Let the artists and the fans communicate. Be on your customers’ side.

Put them all together and what do you have? Treat us like people who care about the works we’re buying, the artists who made them, about one another, and about the world beyond the sale.

5 Comments »

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

1 Comment »

Comments Off on Stephen Colbert on running for president, exploratory committees with actual members, and free speechiness

David Talbot reports that Wikipedia is getting ready to make embedded video and important part of its content.

[Tags: wikipedia video ]

Comments Off on Wikipedia goes video

I found the DipDive video to be emotionally overwhelming. Granted, I’m an Obama supporter. But reminding supporters why their candidate matters more than most candidates ever have is not such a little thing.

This is the organization that made that video.

Go Obama! [Tags: dipdive obama video advertising propaganda marketing politics ]

9 Comments »

Says a Center for Media Research Brief:

According to a recently published market report from AccuStream iMedia Research, user Generated Video (UGV) scored 22.4 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006.

[Tags: media video participatory_media ]

Comments Off on That’s a ton of video