I GRADUATED COLLEGE!

I GRADUATED COLLEGE! After attending schools in 4 states, I am the owner of a bachelor’s degree. #awesome

I Before E Conspiracy

Well Worn Web Series Topics

I know of no less than 13 web series about dating in LA and no less than 6 about anti-bullying. Even if they're great, they get lost in sea of sameness. I imagine there may be some other all-too-familiar topics beyond these 2. Why do what everyone else is doing already.

Frankenmixer

The world's first satchel mixer. Self-contained power, adjustable pot-to-plug spacing and made of 100% recycled materials. Proudly assembled by August/Richards industries in the USA.

Talking Head Videos Bore Audiences Online

Boring an audience is almost the only thing that is never a good idea to do in a video. Probably not a good idea in any form of entertainment or media. But nonetheless, people continue to make talking head videos, because they are often easy and cheap.

Alas, this may never change, and perhaps shouldn't change since keeping costs down and productions fast is just about as important as not boring the audience. But it is worth knowing the realities even if you're committed to making a talking head video:

The eyetracking data clearly show that a talking head is boring, even for 24 seconds. On the Web, 24 seconds is a long time - too long for users to keep their attention on something monotonous

(from Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online).

Election Year Bigotry

So many online seem to genuinely not understand how any decent person could not be on their side of politics, no matter which side they themselves are on. This is bigotry, make no mistake, bigotry. It is as destructive as all other forms of bigotry. It is the biggest obstacle we as a nation face.

We are all Americans, and smart, good people disagree with you. You may be smart and good intentioned, they may be smart and good intentioned, and you may disagree fundamentally just the same. That is exactly how it should be so please open your mind to the reality of living with people who don't share your exact beliefs.

Or admit your bigotry by starting all comments on politics like "I can't believe the race is this close" or "how can he believe what he just said" with the phrase "I'm an ignorant bigot who would rather bicker than do anything good for anyone on earth ever, but..." and then continue your meaningless diatribe.

Then I could at least respect your candor, honesty and self-awareness while I cringe at your closed-minded destructive us-them thinking while I'm feeling utterly alone in thinking that our federated republic, the Great American Experiment, may not be perfect, but it is so far the best way for humans to organize together for advancement of our individual and collective goals.

And what ever the case, while I may find such bigotry wasteful, senseless, short sighted and not even in anyone's self interest, I fervently defend your right to say it, and cherish that my countrymen and women have such varied beliefs and ideas. E pluribus unum, out of many one.

Change When Needed

Jay Levinson used to say that you should keep your ad campaign even after your best customers, your wife and your partner get bored with it. Change it when the accountant says it's time

- Seth Godin

My Film is in a Festival

I am very proud to share that my 127 Seconds, which I star in, wrote and produced, is in a festival tonight.

Push a Whole Season Live at Once

As I have suggested to many a web TV producer when discussing video release timing, no reason to fight to get people back for subsequent episodes if you already have an entire seaosn shot. Show them all at once:

As Netflix debuts its first original series, "Lilyhammer," on Feb. 6, the video subscription service has settled on a scheduling strategy suited for the digital world: making every episode available at once.

Signaling that it's embracing users' preference to watch multiple episodes of their favorite programs as a "marathon," Netflix won't be spacing out the eight shows of its first season of the comedic crime series over several weeks.

If you love the first episode, there is no need to wait until next week, or to set a DVR, to catch the next one, Netflix's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, said in a statement Tuesday

(from Los Angeles Times).

Netflix is Bigger than BitTorrent

Netflix has overtaken BitTorrent when traffic is averaged over 24 hours...the data show that people are increasingly more interested in streaming legitimate paid content than pirating it if the price is right and the delivery is convenient

(from PCWorld). May mean legitimate video streaming is using more bandwidth than not-always-legitimate-streaming. When iTunes was launched years ago it may similarly have begun to catch up to illegal music downloading's use of resources.

The Mountain by Terje Sorgjerd

Beautiful photography. Landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd (previously) scaled Pico del Teide, Spain's highest elevation, to capture footage of the Milky Way atop "one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars."

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan

1930 newsreel footage showing how Helen Keller, unable to see or hear, learned to talk.

Lady Gaga at Google

The musician's@google with Lady Gaga (via TechCrunch).

Free Content Drives Sales

Treating your consumers like criminals may not be the best way to convince them to buy your sh*t

(from Free Monty Python Videos on Youtube Lead to 23,000% DVD Sale Increase). While freemium may not always be the answer, suing customers is clearly almost never a good idea.

Clarity of Purpose

Don't show me a project, a website, an ad buy or an essay without first telling me what it's supposed to do when it works properly

(from What's the Use Case by Seth Godin).

MBAs Running Showbiz

MBAs running showbiz is like having a doctor hang ceiling tiles: they might get it right, but why would you ask them to try in the first place? To have MBAs, general business people, in charge of entertainment companies makes little sense in the final analysis. Sure they might know about allocating money and saying what stockholders, the board and colleagues want to hear, but they aren't showman (and show-women; show people).

Too many decision makers didn't come here to entertain anyone. The influence, power, money and glamor appeal to many, but few continue on in their motives and aim to change minds and hearts, move people, innovate or change anything but their own position and accolades. Most executives, and those aspiring to be executives, are skilled at one thing truly, and at the exclusion of other interests it's all they do: Most executives just move piles of money around.

Please don't mistake my meaning. Using resources well is vital for most things in life, be it rolling a tube of tooth paste from the bottom, or keeping a multi-billion dollar diversified media and entertainment company from going broke. Capital allocation, putting money toward what it makes sense to put it towards, is good business, and part of 'show business.' But making money is only part of show business. There is so much more that can be done in addition.

Show people, like Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille and P.T. Barnum, can make fortunes to be sure, but that's not all they do. In addition to making money, show people's efforts transform or create entire industries/genres/cultures and expand the thoughts/feelings/actions of countless millions of people for multiple generations.

Shakespeare was a very successful business person profiting from his own acting, writing and theatre ownership/management. He owned a stake in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later named the King's Men), the leading theatre company in London (and therefore England) which built the Globe and owned other very successful theatres. He likely originated (i.e., was the first to play) some of the most re-performed acting roles ever written (by him) and in plays by others. He built a fortune in the late 1500s and early 1600s when if you were born without a lot money, making a lot money was very difficult. But Shakespeare's financial success is a footnote to his accomplishments.

• affected all of Western Culture
• transformed and created huge portions of the English language itself
• touched and touches millions of minds, hearts and dreams
• created 37 plays and over 150 poems, often considered the most important literary works ever made
• keeps and has kept thousands of publishers/typesetters/editors/actors/directors/etc. gainfully employed for the last few centuries

And his accomplishments show no signs of slowing down anytime in the foreseeable future. No media company has even tied him, on any one of them. They should try.

To hope to keep a business running and growing is to lack ambition. Being concerned with dominating an industry, or increasing customer 'touch points' (the times and ways a company interacts with customers) and ignoring the need for good quality entertainment, entertainment that the audience so desperately craves, is to call a failed professional life a financial success and then give yourself a congratulatory pat on the back.

Yes, all things must sustain themselves or they are not healthy. A child's lemonade stand ought to make it's money back or (and this may not be a bad thing) it's subsidized playtime. If the child dilutes the lemonade to make the stand financially profitable, have they succeeded? They succeeded at making money while disappointing every customer and learning that cheating can get you loot. Empty, unfeeling, void of true value, loot. Instead, if the child makes the lemonade so tasty people pay a premium for it, then the loot can come in piles and buyers are happier/less thirsty too. Everyone can gain, no one need lose, and the world can become a better place.

Annual financial reports, no matter how large the numbers on them are, will never be able to have the worth of good financial results from the massive creation of value at a Shakespearean level. You say you're no Shakespeare? Good, we already had one of those, but never has there been another you. Make great work. You say that's hard? Yes, it's hard, harder than we can almost imagine; it is very hard to create great work. That's why it is called work and being hard makes it no less worth doing.

By all means make money, and don't ignore the day-to-day need to pay-the-bills. And create value while you make the money.

Collapse of Complex Business

Interesting insights, and while I don't neccessarily agree with all of them, the idea that anyone can do things as they were done in the 20th century, or will be able to again soon, is foolish.

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media's supply-and-demand curve went parabolic [went up a lot, quickly], with a predictably inverse effect on price [went down]. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, It is not free, and is not going to be, Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact-we will have to pay them-but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

"Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that."

(from Clay Shirky).

Is The Game Really Changing?

The game only appears to be changing. Network Executives aren't screwing things up any more than they always have screwed things up...it's just that we hear about it more now because of technology. When Cinema discovered that Television was taking over people's relaxation hours, the entire industry scrambled like morons to find its way. In the end, making movies evolved on it's own and all they needed to do was keep working.

It's the same with the internet. Together, we have to make shows and projects the same way we always have. We have to unify business, technological, and theatrically creative minds and point them all in the direction we want our projects to go

(from Darren Ewing).

Hollywood's Present is Online

Many talk of online video as a wave of the future; they are flat wrong. It is now, right now. I know a government employee that 4 months ago discarded their TV and now watches only online. I know a lawyer that uses Tivo as an on-demand that in combination with online TV and DVDs doesn't watch broadcast, cable or satelite live, ever. I have never owned a television, yet I watched three shows tonight and also appear on TV from time to time. Anyone who thinks online entertainment is a future, and denies it is a growing present tense event, is either not paying attention, about to lose their job or both. All things are more online and mobile than ever before and they are right now (I write this post on my phone; please forgive any spelling mistakes ;-).

"Hollywood's future is in Bannen's hands" by Lisa Marks may be over selling a single show as some sort of vangard. I love that this show is being made and am excited to see it, but Sony is not first with web content that costs more than $1 million (Seth MacFarlane, Burger King and YouTube did that over a year ago) and the CEO of Sony Pictures (parent of Crackle) said he "...doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet... Period." This show may be Sony's late, half-supported-by-the-studio attempt to be in the now.

A month online is equal to a year offline, and to not learn from history a from a year ago (like 12 years online) is to retrace steps taken by many before, and risk being obselete before you've begun. In 3 months, the generation referred to as digital natives will be the largest and most important demographic for entertainment. This demographic is already watching, listening and experiencing their entertainment where and when they want to and media companies are only just now pretending this will happen? That is like acting as if the wheel or fire might catch on when it's already the year 1500. People's careers and livelyhoods as employees and stockholders are suffering because of antiquated thinking (yes, 3 month old is antiquated). Get present or be irrelevant; there is no half way.

Printed Newspapers Are Yesterday's News

The Daily Show pointed out online news is faster than print. This is part of what makes people prefer online news, and by extension, makes advertisers shift their focus and spend from print to online.