Second Life, where anything is possible

Why build a virtual world? Philip Rosedale talks about the virtual society he founded, Second Life, and its underpinnings in human creativity. It's a place so different that anything could happen.

Philip Rosedale (avatar "Philip Linden") is founder of Second Life, an online 3D virtual world inhabited by millions. He's chair of Linden Labs, the company behind the digital society

Measuring emotion--Lovemarks, the future beyond brands

Lovemarks is a marketing technique that is intended to replace the idea of brands. Lovemarks were invented by Kevin Roberts, Chief Executive Officer Worldwide of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and are promoted by him and his company. Roberts claims, "Brands are running out of juice." He considers that love is what is needed to rescue brands. Roberts asks, "What builds Loyalty that goes Beyond Reason? What makes a truly great love stand out?" Roberts suggests the following are the key ingredients to create lovemarks:

Mystery
Great stories: past, present and future; taps into dreams, myths and icons; and inspiration
Sensuality
Sound, sight, smell, touch, and taste
Intimacy
Commitment, empathy, and passion

Roberts explains the relationship between lovemarks and other selling concepts through a simple schema based on respect and love. The full schema is as follows: mere products (commodities) command neither love nor respect. Fads attract love, but without respect this love is just a passing infatuation. Brands attract respect, even lasting respect, but without love. Lovemarks, explains Roberts, command both respect and love. This is achieved through the trinity of mystery, sensuality, and intimacy.

In September 2006, Saatchi & Saatchi won a US$430 million JC Penney contract because of the idea of lovemarks



Anne Geddes - a lovemark





Levi's - another lovemark





Apple - where the hard disk is (read heart instead hard)

Looks Determine Everything, Even on YouTube =/

"this is a short rant about how society is too focused on looks and being pretty. most my rants are meant to be funny and not to offend, so please dont take me seriously."
kevjumba

http://www.youtube.com/user/kevjumba

An Anthropological Introduction To YouTube

http://www.filmmaker.com/node/18421
June 23rd, 2008- an anthropologist from Kansas presented a talk to the Library of Congress about the sociological effects of YouTube. It's worth a look. You may also be interested in his other widely popular video about Web 2.0.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8747
Michael Wesch, creator of the strikingly insightful videos “A Vision of Students Today” and “The Machine is Us/ing Us”, gave a presentation at the Library of Congress back in May on the anthropology of YouTube. The presentation was the third in a series called “Digital Natives,” natives being basically my and probably your generation if you’re reading this. It’s about the net and the people who grew up with a computer humming by their bed stands. Wesch delves into this phenomenon that is us—how we think and how we perceive and connect with the world differently due to the internet and new media like YouTube.

“An anthropological introduction to YouTube” is where “traditional” academic research and the new media landscape intersect. It is the anthropological perspective and study of our generation’s fascination with YouTube,





Comment
Wed, 08/20/2008 - 12:26 — Jennifer Hightower (not verified)

Wow
The video was really long, but eye opening. Anyone who is a filmmaker should watch this, because this youtube phenomenon effects us all. So now, has the the notion of a filmmaker completely changed? Youtube is proof that high budget movies, and A-list actors do not necessarily a great film make. As film makers we are faced with the very real question of wether we will ignore this new phenomenon, or embrace it. To ignore it would be a great error, I think, because to ignore the power youtube on our society, is to ignore the needs of our audience. There is a huge gap between high budget films (and even Indie films) and films that are circulating on youtube. If someone could figure out a way to bridge that gap, I think that person would revolutionize media as we know it. It's an idea that deserves consideration sooner rather than later, because it seems to me that there is going to be an inevitable change in the way we make movies all together, and anyone who is stubborn about the change is going to be left behind. Not since the introduction of talking motion pictures has something so profound hit the publics interest, and it's very exciting!

http://www.filmmaker.com/node/18421

The Truth According To Wikipedia

The questions surrounding Wikipedia lead to a bigger discussion of Web 2.0, a phenomenon in which the user determines the content. Examples include YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia. These sites would appear to provide new freedom and opportunities for undiscovered talent and unheard voices, but just where does the boundary lie between expert and amateur? Who will survive according to the laws of this new "digital Darwinism"? Are equality and truth really reconcilable ideals? And most importantly, has the Internet brought us wisdom and truth, or is it high time for a cultural counterrevolution?

Depeche Mode - In The Studio

Here is exclusive "In The Studio" footage of Depeche Mode, with producer Ben Hillier, working on their 12th studio album, to be released in 2009!

Camera: Mr Andy Fletcher.

Be sure to visit www.depechemode.com for all the latest news, including "Tour Of The Universe" tour information!



youtube comment:
robholt77 (1 week ago)
"They are building the anticipation up nicely!!Awesome group and they've adapted to the internet superbly"

MobyGratis

http://www.moby.com/

What YouTube's 'Charlie bit my finger' tells us about Web 2.0

Have you seen "Charlie bit my finger – again!"? Well, about 53 million people have, and it hasn't been on a big screen anywhere.
This movie has had no marketing, no trailer, no production expenses, and certainly no highly paid actors. Instead it followed a simple formula: Toddlers + Laughter + YouTube = Huge Traffic.
But here's the really interesting part: Tens of thousands of people who saw this clip did more than just smile and surf on.
They "mashed" it up with other media ("Charlie Bit Sarah Palin"), created a song about it ("Charlie bit my finger – The Musical"), created their own versions ("Shoshi bit my finger … again!"), posted their own comments, shared it with friends, or otherwise interacted with the original clip.
This is the world of Web 2.0. It is the evolution of Web platforms that are supporting millions of simultaneously connected global conversations. And it promotes the idea that a community is more powerful than an individual.
The point of this new media landscape is to create something and share it with the world. When we post anything to the Web, we are begging for a conversation. We want to be ridiculed, called out, accepted, talked about, linked to, and, most important, not ignored.
It's easy to criticize the rise of participatory social media as a giant waste of time. And it's true that a fair amount of what's being created is adolescent. But that criticism misses the point: This trend is setting the stage for greater long-term engagement. It's an indicator that people are working to find new ways to collaborate and to be part of something larger than they are individually. The sheer immensity of the participation is the story.
Think about where the Internet was just a decade ago. Getting online was a chore. News sites were updated just once or twice a day. That was the static world of Web 1.0. Ironically, that platform emerged from the government's desire to promote collaboration among researchers and scientists, yet at the outset, it seemed best suited for e-commerce.
Today the Web landscape is dominated by blogs, wikis, and social networks. It is finally fulfilling its original promise of interaction, engagement, collaboration, and conversation. We are living through a media revolution that is set to explode this political season.
And who is driving this revolution? Teens. For them, this isn't "technology," it's just the way things are.
They have grown up in a media ecology that pushes them to manage time, identity, privacy, and persona in ways that we have never been asked. They time-shift television to watch it on their mobile devices. They create and share audio, video, and pictures at an amazing pace. They spend as much time honing their Facebook profiles as they do working on schoolwork. Here at Penn State, about one-third of our 90,000 students created at least one form of digital media last year.
They are smart and very talented individuals coping in a new social, political, and media landscape that is driving radically different kinds of behaviors. Many describe these teens as digital natives. So guess what that makes the rest of us? Digital immigrants.
In many ways, the rebirth of the Web as a collaborative platform is because of them. Their intense expectations for connections, regardless of our understanding of them, are driving new business models and shifting the way people connect, share, and collaborate across every node of the Web. They intuitively understand that participation requires promotion. When they post content, they market it aggressively via word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Again, this isn't just narcissism writ large. When teens and young adults do this, they report that their motivation is to have their friends reflect on what they have created, comment on it, and move the conversation forward.
In the next few weeks, pay attention as the big media personalities do the "real" reporting. And then watch how many iReports are cited, how many Twitter streams are mentioned, and how many YouTube videos turn into real campaign commercials. You'll be stunned.
In a Web 1.0 world, you would have needed real skills and access to a distribution network to do any of it. Those days are over. Charlie says so.
Agree? Disagree? Join the conversation at http://camplesegroup.com/blog.

DAZED RULES

From the http://www.theimagist.com/node/2308
All the young fashion photographers I know are bidding to be in Dazed and Confused, a turn of event I find to be fascinating. Over the past two years a powerful creative team has gelled at the magazine ring-led by the formidable Nichola Formichetti. I love a current project the magazine is currently spinning, to have its readers (well the ones who are under 18 and living in the UK) create their own Dazed cover using images shot by Hedi Slimane.

As dazeddigital.com explains:

So, how will it work? All of the fashion for this issue was shot over three days by designer Hedi Slimane, on a portfolio of British youth street-cast from various locations around London. We’re now giving you a downloadable Dazed cover template and three of Hedi’s images. If you want to use one (or all) of them, go for it – they’re yours to do with as you like. And if you want to use a completely different image of your own, that’s fine, too – it’s up to you. We just want you to make an exciting, attractive and revealing Dazed cover that says something about what it’s like to be young and British today. If you're from a different country, you're welcome to take part and just make a cover about what it's like to be young today in your country

You should be under 18 to take part. If you’re actually a 37-year-old graphic designer and live with your mum, well, we can’t stop you entering but it would be a bit weird, wouldn’t it? We’ll print our favourites in the January issue and show some of the best here on Dazed Digital as they come in, and we’ll also be blagging some nice prizes to give out randomly over the coming weeks as well. Please send all entries (JPEG format, ideally) to stephen.ll@dazedgroup.com by Thursday November 20th and be sure to include your name, age and where you live. Happy designing
http://www.dazeddigital.com/ArtsAndCulture/article/1384/1/Dazed_Cover_Versions

quarterlife

A show about a group of twentysomethings coming of age in the digital generation. And a social network about what it means to be creative, to pursue a passion, to make a difference in the world -- or just to find a place in it.

From Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creative team behind "My So-Called Life," quarterlife is the first Internet series that is as high quality as any film or television show - it's smart, funny, emotional...real.


quarterlife.com is a social network for actors, photographers, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and designers. quarterlife.com connects you with like-minded people, and offers resources for information about schools, grants, and internships. It's a place to explore the issues in your life, where changing the world is as real as the friends you meet.

Beatport 4.0

Beatport is a phenomenon of modern dance music. For better or worse, it has been a pioneer and leader in dance music culture's changing dynamic in embracing true digitalism.

"Independent music is the soul of the music industry. These artists and labels are the true believers in the sound and deserve all the credit. Beatport is just a platform to deliver their music to the masses."
Jonas Tempel, founder and CEO

"Beatport 4.0 will launch early 2009. Official release date coming soon."
more at http://www.ibiza-voice.com/story/news/1613


Beatport 4.0 : We want to hear your ideas.
http://www.beatportal.com/feed/item/beatport-40/

"We are at the beginning stages of planning for the next version of Beatport.com. As you can imagine, we have tons of great ideas. Things that we’ve been planning for quite some time, and things that are brand new ideas. But we’d really like to hear from you, the user community. What are your ideas?

The task of updating and developing Beatport from initial ideas to public launch is quite a long process. Honestly, they are some of the most intense times around the office. It’s hard to limit the amount of crazy ideas we are capable of creating — there are so many things that can be done on the internet these days. It’s hard to narrow it down to a list of things that will truly add value to each user’s shopping experience.

New technologies, new design techniques, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 — it all comes into play. To help, we’ve assembled a talented team of interface designers, DJs, producers and developers to help make sure the next version of Beatport is amazing. The process is just too big, there is no way we can think of every opportunity to improve the site, which is why we’re reaching out to get our community of loyal users involved from day one.

We are looking for input to help our team map out the future and come up with the next features that will become Beatport 4.0. These features can be track-related, search engine improvements, navigation ideas, new widgets, new desktop applications, etc. Internally, we’ve come up with great ideas on how to make MyBeatport better and help users find the music they love faster. There are even some good ideas on how to make the pre-listening player better. From top to bottom, there are dozens of potential improvements that can be made to the shopping experience.

But that is enough about our ideas. If you have a minute, please give us a few of your ideas and requests. We are all looking forward to hearing your thoughts and contributions towards the future of Beatport"

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has, virtually overnight, generated huge buzz, enthusiasm, and fear. It's the application of the open-source idea to any field outside of software, taking a function performed by people in an organization, such as reporting done by journalists, research and product development by scientists, or design of a T-shirt, for example, and, in effect, "outsourcing" it through an open-air broadcast on the Internet. Crowdsourcing has already had a huge impact on big companies like Procter & Gamble, as well as start-ups like Threadless.com, which rapidly became the third largest T-shirt maker in the United States. The fuel sparking the crowdsourcing flame is the potent combination of more highly educated people working in fields other than those in which they were trained (think of the art historian peddling financial advice at Merrill Lynch) with the greatest mechanism for distributing knowledge and information the world has ever seen: the Internet.

John Rives, the first poet 2.0 endorser for Orange

I am strangers in the cafe where I stood up for my first webcast
And strangers in the forums who first stood up for me
I am fan mail from a North-Sea Oil rig worker and chatroom chatter from Gibraltar
I am video love poems the stroke of midnight to my girlfriend as she wakes up half a globe away
I am blog updates with some new found friends in the sunshine of the city plaza
I am the boy with the book on the bank of a river whose picture I took and then e-mailed to my mother because he looked like my brother
I am the downloads I do uptown and the uploads I do downtown
I am Rives, the first 2.0 poet and thanks to everyone, I’m inspired wherever I go
Orange

"I am Rives" - TV ad for Orange's mass-market campaign "Internet everywhere". The campaign bears the signature of Publicis Conseil Paris and Romania is the first country in the Orange group in which it is running. The TV ad was filmed in Lisbon, Portugal.
http://www.orange.ro/inspired/making-of-ro.html



John Rives, the Poet 2.0 learning Romanian




http://www.ted.com Rives recaps the most memorable moments of TED2006 in the free-spirited rhyming verse of a fantastical mockingbird lullaby.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts.

Olympics '08: Marketing Michael Phelps

Michael Phelps' Olympic performance was measured in gold. When he returns home to Baltimore, his value as a pitchman could be measured in tens of millions of dollars.

Grown Up Digital, by Don Tapscott, - promo

Digital Natives and enterprise 2.0

Does The Talent Agency Model Hold The Key To Brand Advertising's Future?

by Joe Marchese, Tuesday, Jun 26, 2007 1:01 PM ET
Joe Marchese is President of socialvibe.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=62949.

Recently MediaPost covered NBC's leadership in efforts to integrate brands at the creative point in content production. This is something I think NBC was starting to hit its stride on even earlier (more about product placement and NBC here.) All of this leads to some very interesting points. If the goal for brands is to be integrated with or sponsor content even before production, it sounds like what brands need is an agent.

Certainly agencies have been leaders in building brands for some time (see Coke and CAA). But this new emphasis on brand integration and content sponsorship renews the need for matchmaking of brands and talent much earlier in the creative process. Brands want to be funny, or dramatic, or cool, and writers want to write funny, or dramatic, or cool -- along with actors and producers who also want to be funny, dramatic, or cool. The talent agency's potential ability to see opportunities to form these symbiotic relationships between brands (and a brand's money) and talent (and talent's need for a brand's money) is unparalleled. It's the ability to make these matches early enough in the creative process to allow for the vetting of potential brand integration strategies (i.e., anything but pop-ups) that gives the talent agency a major advantage.

[...]

Overall, I believe that with the right infusion of business process technologies and model adaptation, talent agencies are ideally positioned to capitalize on the shift to new media monetization methods. Who better to target cool than the people who represent those creating cool? What are your thoughts?

USER GENERATED CONTENT ADVERTISING REVENUES 2006-211

Talent Agencies Evolve to Show Clients the Digital Money

by Mark Glaser, January 31, 2007

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/01/talent-agencies-evolve-to-show-clients-the-digital-money031.html

Everything about the Ask a Ninja videoblog phenomenon smacks of a new form of entertainment. Two guys in Los Angeles produce a series of simple, low cost video clips where a ninja character answers profound and ridiculous questions. The comedic series gets popular as a video podcast through iTunes, with viewership of 300,000 to 500,000 per episode, and the show's web presence branches out to include an online store for merchandise.

But when the Ask a Ninja creators, Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, wanted to get serious about making money as entertainers, they went the old school route and hired the behemoth United Talent Agency (UTA). Recently that representation bore fruit as the pair signed on with Federated Media to have the ad network sell advertising on Ask a Ninja in a revenue-sharing deal worth $300,000 per year (if the site maintains its popularity).

"It's not an accident we've set up under a Hollywood model and not a Silicon Valley model," Nichols told me via email. "UTA is much better at negotiating than I am. And they only make money when we make money, so they are extremely motivated to get us the best deal possible. Creators are never going to have enough clout on their own to negotiate better deals with the YouTubes of the world. We tried making deals without agents and they failed miserably because we didn't know what to ask for or how to ask for it. Agents save you a lot of time and effort."

[...]

UPDATE: The newish anchor on Rocketboom, Joanne Colan, emailed me just after my deadline with her own experience with agents. The videoblogger is a veteran of TV, and said she has always been the one to get the projects, and then hired an agent to finalize the deals. Here's her view of how agencies have been swarming the Net:

I have witnessed the buzz in Hollywood in the past six months among agencies who seem to have quickly thrown together new-media units within their alternative programming divisions. Within the agency structure, again in only very recent months, it seems, movie and TV studios, networks and casting directors are seeking the next new face or the next sure-seller project among online content. Agents are scooping up as many online projects as they can in order to take charge and sign deals between their existing clients and their brand new shiny Internet ones. For the "kid" who was making low budget content in his/her bedroom and getting it online, receiving calls from Hollywood and being offered fancy agent contracts can indeed be very exciting.

It can be a great relationship and a very necessary one to boot when the right agent is passionate and head-over-heels excited about what you do, has really done their homework, understands your talents and dreams as well as your shortcomings (as if they had been your psychiatrist for the past few years), and is hungry like a grizzly bear who just woke up from winter hibernation.

William Morris preps Agency 3.0

William Morris preps Agency 3.0
Agency, Amp'd Mobile team for new media co.
By MARC GRASER, MARC GRASER, DIANE GARRETT

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117986198.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1

The William Morris Agency and Amp'd Mobile founder Peter Adderton have teamed to launch a new-media venture that marries brands and content with emerging distribution platforms.

Called Agency 3.0, it's the latest digital foray by the tenpercentery, which unveiled a venture capital fund for fledgling digital media outfits in March. This venture, however, is less a tech incubator than a next-gen marketing agency that will also develop and produce content.

Agency 3.0 is Adderton's latest digital venture after Amp'd went bankrupt last June. He had positioned Amp'd as a mobile phone venture whose target was younger consumers interested in watching content on their cell phones.

The goal of the new company, Adderton said, is to identify emerging technologies three to five years ahead of time, then place brands onto them as they start to break through.

"We want to get brands onto Facebook before it becomes the No. 1 site," Adderton said. "When they really start to explode, we'll be ready with tried and tested techniques."

TALENT AGENCY - NEW MEDIA COMPANY

1. FORD MODELS