Medialoper

Chasing the long tail of new media

Archives for June 2007

The Daily Loper – June 29, 2007

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Free At Last Edition

Todays links of interest:

The Scream, or They Do It So We Don’t Have To

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Driving home late Wednesday night through Hollywood, my car got stopped by police and bodyguards outside of Amoeba Music, the greatest store on planet Earth. There was, to put it mildly, a melee and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Did someone have an early release iPhone? Maybe it was Paris Hilton, post-Larry King Live? All I could gather was screaming, flashes, cell phones, exhortations of love, and hundreds of people on both sides of the Cahuenga Blvd. My car, in the left hand lane, was forced to stop to let a limo out from behind Amoeba. Whatever. I was in no hurry. All I could see through the windows was a hand wave to the crowd; well wishes and love being exchanged from crowd to celebrity, and back. A force feedback loop of emotions from admiration to adoration. It was like something out of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

I started thinking about the scream, and where it comes from. There is something so primal about it that we can all relate and vicariously thrill to the scream as it comes from a place we don’t normally inhabit or take part in within the structure of our normal day-to-day activities. (Possible exceptions: dealing with bad drivers and unruly kids.) From our infancy, to adolescence, to adulthood the scream represents different things. It starts off as communication, followed by rebellion, and finally back to communication, albeit in art form.

[Read more…] about The Scream, or They Do It So We Don’t Have To

Make and Craft: A Case Study For Entertainment Companies

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Make Issue 08 coverHere is what happens when you give a blogger free wine. After confessing that I had wheedled and whined until I was the proud recipient of the last display copy of a new publication at a recent trade show (believe me, the wheedling wasn’t pretty; it was effective), I ventured another confession. “I really want to knit the kimono.”

“Me, too,” said the employee of the publisher. She’d expressed no horror at my underhanded tactics, assuring me that had she been there, she would have given me the magazine, too. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “But did you see the size of the needles? They’re tiny! It would take forever.”

“Yeah.” What else could I say? Knitting a kimono would be a challenge, but, well, it would also be a challenge that would take the better part of a year. My current project is already moving into forever territory. I shrugged. “I’m knitting laptop covers for Christmas.”*

And off the conversation went. It turns out that nothing excites a vendor at a trade show like the prospect of knitting laptop covers and using cool, shiny, big buttons to close the snugly cover. The husband wandered over to another table, his attention focused on the Holy Grail of magazines. “It’s the pinball issue!”
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The Daily Loper – June 27, 2007

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Also, Dawn’s A Giant Edition

Todays links of interest:

The Daily Loper – June 26, 2007

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Transplendent Edition

Todays links of interest:

Harry Potter and The Search For “Harry Potter Spoilers”

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It’s no secret that people who write these types of online journal thingies pay attention to our traffic. And occasionally an old post that we figured was long dead and buried rises out of the morass and gets a lot of traffic. In the last month, a post I wrote back on February 3 called “Harry Potter and The Gynormous Spoiler” has become our third most-visited page.

Because the piece itself is pretty much a trifle — it’s essentially me whinging about how I’m sure to be spoiled on Harry’s fate prior to actually finishing the book, poor me! — I’m surprised that it got any traffic at all. But I think that it just reflects the public’s appetite for and anticipation of the ending of these books, an appetite that has suddenly ramped up, and is just about to explode.

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The Daily Loper – June 25, 2007

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Forget The Shooty Dog Thing! Edition

Todays links of interest:

DRM for Books: Will Publishers Learn Anything from the Music Industry’s Mistakes?

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Every once in a while you hear publishers mutter something about not wanting to make the same mistakes the music industry made. While it’s an admirable goal, the problem is that it’s not clear that we all have the same view of what those mistakes actually were. As the music industry approaches the post-DRM era, it’s pretty clear that Digital Rights Management is one big mistake that book publishers would do themselves a favor by avoiding.

The very nature of DRM runs contrary to the freedoms that all book readers know and love. The freedom to read a book anywhere, the freedom to read a book without special requirements or equipment, the freedom to loan a book to a friend, or borrow a book from a friend or library. By inserting a layer of DRM between readers and books the experience of reading is fundamentally transformed in all of the wrong ways. Not only that, DRM protected books lose all of their essential viral qualities. Unrestricted books sell themselves — DRM protected books never get the chance to.

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The Weekly ‘Loper – June 24, 2007

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While you were trying to process the fact that you’d actually gotten a new job after all this time, here’s what we were looking at:

  • Preparing For The Summer Blockbuster – While people are obsessing over whether the fifth Harry Potter movie is going to outgross the third Pirates movie, here’s the biggest battle brewing in Hollywood this summer.

  • David Chase, Don’t Tell Us If Tony Soprano Is Dead     – As long as we are starting useless online petitions to creators of HBO shows, I think I’m going to to start one to ask David Milch what the hell is going on at the beginning of John From Cincinnati.
  • Do You Want Spiral Frog? Get Thee To Canada! – Of course, if you don’t currently have a valid passport to get into Canada and actually try Spiral Frog, by the time you actually get one, it might actually have launched here!
  • How to Start a Political Revolution Without Breaking the Law – A long, very well-researched look at the legal issues surrounding the use of social media to disseminate political messages.
  • TOC: Book Publishers Meet the Future – In a weird way, as the oldest of all of the technologies responding to the digital future, it makes sense that the publishing industry would be one of the slowest. On the other hand, as Kirk points out in his report from O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference, an elegant solution to the problem of updating the plain old book can resonate on a emotional level that say, a set-top box for integrating your TV and your computer probably couldn’t.