Crowdsourcing Needs A Standardized Taxonomy

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Excerpt:

"The Daily Crowdsource is proposing an official taxonomy for crowdsourcing to adopt. This is an important step in developing the field of crowdsourcing. In order to develop best practices, common ways of handling common problems, and a unified way of presenting the group to the public, we need a standard set of categories. This document is an important step in that direction.
-David Alan Grier

Proposed Taxonomy
Microtasks
Macrotasks
Crowdfunding
Crowd Contests..."

Future of Film | Why Marshall McLuhan Would Dig Transmedia and DIY Distribution

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Excerpt:

October 03, 2011 10:00AM EDT By Nick DeMartino

"Marshall McLuhan's pronouncement that "the medium is the message" was revolutionary back in its day.

Nearly 50 years later, McLuhan's influence survives, with many of his ideas serving as memes for wave upon wave of new media. Not for nothing did WIRED Magazine anoint McLuhan as patron saint at the dawn of the Internet! Digital hipster Doug Coupland even published a McLuhan book subtitled "You Know Nothing of My Work” that riffed on the old gent’s ironic appearance in that Woody Allen flick.

McLuhan asserted that the container (the medium itself) mattered more than its actual content. Or something like that. Pissed a LOT of people off back then, especially people making the actual content.

McLuhan was at heart a sociologist of media, interested more in the way media technologies impact culture and and its populations, which includes, significantly, how each medium influences the others.

In today’s media-drenched ecosphere, we are accustomed to judging “new media” products almost solely in terms of how quickly they reach "scale," meaning a large audience — and definitely how much they disrupt their predecessors. Darwinian. And McLuhanesque, too, if you think about it. Even more so if you understand.

Like many a college student slogging through the inscrutable prose of McLuhan's seminal tome Understanding Media I thought: jeez, I'll never understand how to understand. In this, I was not alone.

Dallas Video Festival

Such thoughts bounced around my skull as I reflect upon my weekend at the Dallas Video Festival, where I conducted a workshop on Transmedia and joined a panel on The Changing Landscape of Independent Media.

Sure, there was plenty of talk about individual films and videos on the program, such as the fascinating Once I was a Champion, Gerard Roxburgh's film about mixed-martial arts fighter Evan Tanner, who died in the desert after a troubled life.

Or Tiffany Shlain's Connected, that interweaves her vision of how the Internet could save the planet with some major crises in her personal life.

Containerization of Media

For me, the juiciest conversations at the Dallas event (and most other gatherings of media makers and media lovers) focused on the container, just as McLuhan did. What is the state of distribution? How do I sell my film? How do I find an audience? How do I keep up with all this stuff?..."

Nuno Bernardo: How to fund your next Transmedia project | MIPBlog

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Excerpt:

"...Developing a full transmedia project across several platforms from the start would be prohibitively expensive. What you need to focus on is what is available to you to best demonstrate how your product works on one or maybe two platforms. Essentially, you need a ‘live’, functioning entry door into the story world you have developed.
When getting started with your transmedia production, I recommend that you focus on the media that you are most familiar with. For instance, if you’re a web-based company, you might want to initially focus on the internet, because this is what you know and this is what you do well on. So in this instance you might want to create a flashy website or an online experience.
If you are a television production company, you might want to produce your own short form episode or a pilot. Again if you are more familiar with the publishing world, maybe your starting point is a novel, or perhaps writing a series of articles for magazines. At this stage you are investing your time and calling in a few favours.
Remember, you shouldn’t try to do this all at once on several medias but you can (and should) plan a timeline and your expected expansion into other media.
Starting your transmedia production on your own gives you several advantages over the competition (the other producers that have nice transmedia projects that only exist on paper and slick PowerPoint presentations). One of the benefits of having ‘live’ examples of your story world is that potential financiers can see the world and interact with it. They can also see the size of the community that you are developing around your concept; the number of Facebook fans, how many people read the column in a magazine or the number of people interacting with this new concept.
We found what was important when selling Sofia’s Diary internationally was the fact that it had already been successfully deployed in one territory. Because of this, when we went to meetings to talk about Sofia’s Diary expanding into a new country we would always bring as many visual examples of the product as we could (be they videos clips, magazines or books). Obviously this was invaluable; when at meetings pitching the story we could demonstrate and show that the concept was a success and we had a track record to prove it.
Another really important part of launching your story at this point is to establish ownership and authorship of your work. If you pick your transmedia world and without any deployment you go to a potential financier and tell them about your great idea you are leaving yourself wide open to a number of dangerous pitfalls. If you have nothing but an idea, an investor or possibly a partner is likely to make some claim for a percentage of ownership of the entire format in return for investment.
Therefore it is vital, if you have any resources, to make the first deployment yourself and establish authorship on your own. Later when you go looking for funds, the story exists and you own it. By transforming your idea into a product (be it say a comic book, web series or blog) and building a community around it, it makes your pitching package something much more appealing to investors.
Financiers don’t like to take risks. They want to invest in successful products. Prove to them it’s a success and not just a slick PowerPoint. This is the best position from which to negotiate."

Nuno Bernardo is the co-founder and CEO of transmedia production company beActive. He is also the author of a book, The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia. He speaks on MIPJunior’s “Teen Market at the Heart of Transmedia’s Explosion” panel October 1 (14.30). Find him on Twitter here, and Facebook here!

My FAVE Show: Vince Gilligan of 'Breaking Bad' Talks About Ending the Season, and the Series (Spoilers!)

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Excerpt (The most pressing deets!):

"....
Q.
As you mapped out Season 4, was this always the ending you were building toward: a conclusive showdown between Walt and Gus?

A.
Yes, it was, and it was something my writers and I worked on pretty much the whole season, knowing that at the end of the year, one of them would have to go. The town wasn’t big enough for the both of them, as it were. In the best sense of the movie “Highlander,” there could be only one.

Q.
And yet the show this season started to flesh out Gus’s back story, though it didn’t do so completely. Are there threads you might come back to later, or was that a deliberate choice to leave some things about him ambiguous?

A.
Right on both counts. We may come back to it in the future. As I told Giancarlo Esposito, and I told him a few months ahead of time what we were planning for the end of the season, I was very apologetic that we were going to lose his character. But I also hastened to point out that even though characters may die on “Breaking Bad,” they don’t necessarily rest in peace. In other words, we flash back in time quite often on this show, and we revisit old characters who have already met their demise. And because of that, who knows? We may well see Gustavo Fring again in the future.

But as to the second point, we talked a long time, my writers and I, about what exactly was Gus’s back story? How bad a dude did he have to have been, back in Chile, for the cartel to spare him, even though they were very insulted by his actions? And we went back and forth, we talked about Pinochet and his government, what did he do back there, precisely? And we borrowed a bit from “Pulp Fiction,” I suppose. Because in “Pulp Fiction,” Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are carrying around a briefcase, for the entire movie, that the contents of which are only hinted at. At one point, you see a glow emanating from inside the briefcase, but you never do find out for sure what it’s in it. And I always liked that, as a viewer. To me, the audience’s imagination as to who Gus was in his past life is potentially more interesting than any concrete answer we could give them.

Q.
Given that Walt and Jesse know even less about Gus, and don’t know why he was so important that the cartel could not kill him, could their assassination of him come back to haunt them?

A.
That’s a good question. We will be getting into that when the writers’ room reopens in November. But I can think of one gentleman who may have a problem with it, who’s a bit closer to home, who is Mike, played by Jonathan Banks. [laughs heartily] Mike may have a problem with what transpired, and I wouldn’t want Mike mad at me, I can tell you that...."

Goldmine! Folktexts: A library of folktales, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology, page 1

A

  • Abducted by Aliens. The aliens in these legends are not men from outer space but the underground folk: fairies, trolls, elves, and the like.
    1. The Recovered Bride (Ireland).
    2. Taken by the Good People (Ireland).
    3. Twenty Years with the Good People (Ireland).
    4. Ethna the Bride (Ireland).
    5. Jamie Freel and the Young Lady (Ireland).
    6. Ned the Jockey (Wales).
    7. The Old Man and the Fairies (Wales).
    8. A Visit to Fairyland (Wales).
    9. Four Years in Faery (Isle of Man).
    10. The Lost Wife of Ballaleece (Isle of Man).
    11. On Fairies (England).
    12. The Lost Child (England).
    13. The Fairies' Hill (Scotland).
    14. The Stolen Lady (Scotland).
    15. Touching the Elements (Shetland Islands).
    16. The Aged Bride (Denmark).
    17. A Smith Rescues a Captured Woman from a Troll (Denmark).
    18. The Sea Nymph (Sweden).

Two Cons of DIY Film Distribution - via Baseline Intelligence #infdist

Media_httpwwwbaseline_tvlbi

Posted by Jim on Thursday, October 06, 2011

Excerpt:

"So you wanna DIY your film release?

Reasons why this is a good idea permeate the Internet. Most of them center on the premise that a project’s best case scenario consists of low six-figure revenue from a distributor who uses accounting tricks to hide any further monies due and who maintains full format rights for the foreseeable future. So the thinking goes, a filmmaker should skip traditional distribution, or only use select portions of it (e.g., DVD or foreign rights), in favor of a DIY release that returns the same level of revenues and allows for retention of format rights.

Control of distribution shifts to people who know the movie best, and fractionalization of format rights creates revenue potential in the same ballpark as a traditional distribution deal. However, this alluring picture obscures the two main cons of implementing a DIY movie release.

Con #1: A DIY release involves supreme amounts of time. In the case of a hit (extremely rare), more than enough money will be made to compensate for this time. However, without a hit, a filmmaker will spend many many months, if not years, trying to push audiences toward his or her film in its various formats, regardless of the number of PMDs (producers of marketing and distribution) hired.

In the case of a film garnering publicity on the festival circuit (but never to be a financial hit), this means getting that all-important next project off the ground will be postponed to a time when people are consumed by a new batch of festival favorites. And if a film is unable to generate festival buzz, moving on to the next project ASAP becomes imperative. In either case, the victory of holding on to format rights appears rather pyrrhic.

Con #2: Low barriers to entry for film production and self-distribution create a galaxy of competition. A DIY release does not magically confer better odds of being seen. In fact, during any given year, thousands of other filmmakers are simultaneously pushing to turn their control over distribution into profit.

Additionally, DIYers have to battle against larger and much more capitalized specialty distributors ranging from the studios to larger indie labels. These entities use DIY tactics incredibly effectively, as it is their job, year in and year out, to save money for their corporate parents/investors. It is not unusual to read an account of a specialty label’s marketing tactics and think you have been transported to the pages of a DIY releasing manual...."

Sky VOD content heads to Virgin | Broadband TV News

Media_httpwwwbroadban_fcjur

Excerpt:

"In a landmark agreement Virgin Media is to add content from Sky Anytime to its on demand service. The package includes several thousand hours of films, series, sport and news.

At a stroke the amount of VOD content on offer from the UK cablenet – already the largest collection of on demand content in Britain – will increase by a third to over 6,500 hours.
Customers will now have access to Sky content in line with their existing TV package. No additional costs are involved.

The Sky Movies Collection will put in place 500 movie titles that will sit alongside existing movie content sources that include FilmFlex, PictureBox and Virgin Media Player. The Sky Sports Collection will give access to highlights from Barclays Premier League, UEFA Champions League football, international cricket and European Tour Golf.

Movies have become the latest area of attention for the Competition Commission, which in August found Sky’s control over pay-TV movie rights in the UK is restricting competition between pay-TV providers, leading to higher prices and reduced choice and innovation for subscribers.

One of the Commission’s proposals to a consultation that closed September 16 was for Sky to face “must retail” measures requiring it to acquire on a wholesale basis and offer to its subscribers any movie channel containing first subscription pay-TV window (FSPTW) movie content...."

LOVE: Want to walk past a police barricade? Put on a suit. Suits for Wall Street -- 4 days left! IndieGoGo Campaign

From the campaign & only 4 days left:

"In the Battle of Ideas, Aesthetics Matter

Occupy Wall Street is a lot of things. But at the core it's a conversation -- a conversation about tactics, a conversation about democracy, a conversation about in what kind of world we want to live.

For a successful conversation, parameters are defined, topics delineated. The consensus-building at Zuccotti Park works on this, slowly, methodically, setting the stage for further action.

It's a lot of talk, and a lot of effort, but, for a lot of people, it just doesn't matter.

Why? Because to them we look like a bunch of dirty hippies.

Conversation: Over.

We Propose a Solution: Suits

We all look great in suits. To reporters, to workers, to skeptical tourists, we'll look like people to listen to, or, at the very least, to hear out. Lazy journalists won't be able to easily dismiss us and will have to actually listen to what we say. The conversation will grow out of the echo chamber and into the wider world -- where it belongs.

Suits are camouflage in the warrens of Wall Street. And there are other advantages.

Need a bathroom? Try wearing a suit. It's easy.

Want to walk past a police barricade? Put on a suit.

Let's Show Them We're Serious

In the 1960s you could fly your freak flag high. In 2011, it just looks sloppy. We are the 99 percent, but we need the support of the 60 percent who think we're just messing around.

On October 15, our crack team of well dressed artists, designers, and wardrobers will deliver racks and racks of business attire, free of charge to anyone at Liberty Square. We'll be joined by progressive tailors, radical barbers, and folks who want everyone to look great.

The way you say it matters as much as what you say. So say it in style. Say it in a suit.

What We Need and What You Get

You can help us realize this vision with your donations. Twenty dollars will put a protester in a crisp thrift store suit.

Or mail us a nice suit you're not using anymore. It’s free if you mail it from work. Here's our address:

Proper Business Attire Working Group
C/O The House of Yes
342 Maujer Street
Brooklyn, NY
11206

Extra suits and late deliveries will be donated to Threads for Success, an innovative New York City program that dresses young people in the justice system for court appearances and job interviews.

Let's get organized."