Joining The Conversation

I heard about The Conversation this summer and immediately bought a ticket:

[P]ioneers at the forefront of change in cinema, video, games, media and technology are coming together to share ideas, insights, and innovations. Our focus is on new tools, new distribution channels, and new rules.... The format of the gathering will be experimental: rather than a traditional conference, short talks and demos, "fireside chats," and roundtables will spark a dynamic series of overlapping conversations.

Their guest list is enough to make any independent filmmaker salivate—Peter Broderick, for instance. His recent article in Indiewire about the New World of Distribution for indie filmmakers is germane to how (I think) digital entertainment will be distributed. Hunter Weeks is another gem on the list—he's one of the co-creators of 10 MPH, a documentary about two guys crossing the United States on a segway. Week's movie home page is an exquisite example of how to use the internet to market your own movies. Other notable invitees hail from Netflix, Createspace, Filmbaby, JibJab, Lucasfilm, ILM, The Webby Awards, and YouTube. See the complete list of speakers at the bottom.

One really appealing part of The Conversation—you can throw out your own ideas. I thought about it for awhile and this forum seems ideal to mention some of my own predictions on the future of digital entertainment. Frankly, in one form or another, I've been observing, discussing, and molling over the movie industry for three years and have a pretty well-informed opinion about it. So I decided to make a presentation of my own about license-based entertainment which will be a riff on a recent article I wrote about iTunes' Death Knell. My ardent hope is that my presentation isn't eclipsed by someone else's brilliant 90 minute lecture. I do hate redundancy.

The Conversation takes place all day this Friday and Saturday. Tickets are still on sale, but a little steep now at $150. But if you have nothing to do, come be my own peanut gallery!

COMPLETE LIST OF SPEAKERS

• Alex Afterman, Founder, Heretic Films
  
• Alex Lindsay, Founder, Pixel Corps
  
• Arin Crumley, Director, As the Dust Settles and Four Eyed Monsters
  
• Barbara Robertson, Journalist, CGSociety, Computer Graphics World, Digital Production
  
• Chris Thilk, Director of Marketing, Spout LLC
  
• Cliff Plumer, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Domain
  
• Dan Gregoire, Founder, Halon Entertainment
  
• Dana LoPiccolo-Giles, Co-founder, CreateSpace (formerly CustomFlix)
  
• Danae Ringelmann, Co-Founder, IndieGoGo
  
• Dean Valentine, CEO, Comedy.com and Founder, Symbolic Action; former CEO of UPN and President of Walt Disney Television
  
• Diana Barrett, Founder, The Fledgling Fund
  
• Evan Spiridellis, Head Art Guy, JibJab Media
  
• George Strompolos, Content Partnerships Manager, YouTube
  
• Graham Leggat, Executive Director, San Francisco Film Society (Moderator)
  
• Gregg Spiridellis, CEO Guy, JibJab Media
  
• Hunter Weeks, Director, 10 Yards and 10 MPH
  
• James LeBrecht, Berkeley Sound Artists
  
• Jason Harris, President, Mekanism
  
• Jeremiah Birnbaum, CEO, SF School of Digital Filmmaking
  
• Jesse Keane, Chief Technology Officer, CinemaNow
  
• Jim Sommers, Senior Vice President, ITVS
  
• John Batter, Co-President of Production, DreamWorks Animation SKG; former Group Studio General Manager, Electronic Arts
  
• John Gaeta, Visual Effects Designer, Speed Racer and the Matrix trilogy
  
• John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic
  
• Jonathan Marlow, Executive Director, San Francisco Cinematheque; formerly at Vudu and GreenCine
  
• Josh Wiggins, Senior Director of Global Strategic Sales, Ascent Media
  
• KC Blake, Anywhere/Anytime Content Lab, Entertainment Technology Center@USC
  
• Ken Eklund, Writer & Creative Director, "World Without Oil"
  
• Ken Goldberg, Director, Berkeley Center for New Media
  
• Lance Weiler, Filmmaker & Editor, The Workbook Project
  
• Michael Ferris Gibson, Director, 24 Hours on Craigslist & Producer, Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story
  
• Michealene Cristini Risley, Independent filmmaker, Tapestries of Hope
  
• Mike Curtis, HD for Indies
  
• Mike Shiley, Director, Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories & Dark Water Rising
  
• Nick Braccia, Creative Director, Deep Focus
  
• Peggy Weil, Artist & Game Developer, "Gone Gitmo" and "The Redistricting Game"
  
• Pete Ludé, SVP, Sony Electronics
  
• Peter Broderick, President, Paradigm Consulting
  
• Phil Tippett, Founder, Tippett Studio
  
• Reed Hastings, CEO & Founder, Netflix
  
• Rich Bradway, Associate Dir. of E-Commerce & New Media, Boston Symphony Orchestra
  
• Richard Kerris, Chief Technology Officer, Lucasfilm Ltd.
  
• Scilla Andreen, CEO, IndieFlix
  
• Scott Kirsner, Editor, CinemaTech
  
• Ted Hope, Co-Founder, This is That
  
• Tiffany Shlain, Filmmaker & Founder, The Webby Awards
  
• Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist for Digital Media, Akamai
  
• Wendy Levy, Director of Creative Programming, Bay Area Video Coalition
  
• Woody Benson, Managing Partner, Prism VentureWorks

Why I hated, but now love, the iPhone

I'm one of those people you might label a Mac Fanatic. I love my Mac OS and have been faithful to Apple for years, even when they were futzing with Mac clones.

Admittedly, I've used PCs in recent years and they've gotten much better, but... they're still not flashy like Macs are. Macs have an "X" factor which Mac people have difficulty explaining to PC people... Macs are just fun to use. They shimmer.

I know. Sounds hokey.


About the best way I can describe it is a quip I read in an Apple programming manual published in the late 80s, and I'm paraphrasing: "A Mac program must function well, but its design must function well, too. The user must enjoy looking at the program as much as they enjoy using the program." This simple design philosophy is the jewel of love sewn into every computing product made at Apple. The software, the hard case, the cables, the accessories... hell, even the packaging. Macs look cool.

Thus, when Apple ramped up their advertising for the iPhone, I was shocked to hear my lack of excitement. At $400, I thought, it was too pricey for a phone—I was happy with my simple $50 Razor.

And then...

A hard-core PC friend of mine started raving to me about the iPhone. (Around the same time, another hard-core PC programmer had opted to buy a Mac as his next comptuer... because it was better for progamming!) What, I thought, was the big deal about an iPhone? And why wasn't I raving to him about an iPhone?

Apple has been gradually exposing PC users to the Mac OS through the iPod and the iPhone, which I mentioned last January in my post, The Company in The White Suit. Just take a closer look at this chart (click to enlarge):



Flash forward to this last Superbowl Sunday. My friend passes me his iPhone. "Here, Dude. Check it out."

After 5 minutes, I was in love.

With constant internet access, you can get dynamic traffic news reports overlaid on a map—and the map is zoomable by using your fingers. You can surf the web and see actual pages. You can watch You Tube videos with two keystrokes. But best of all—you can view all your contacts' information on Apple's slick OS. This is a big selling point for me because if there's one thing that drives me batty about cell phones, it's their disposability. With my current phone, I always know that within a year or two, I'm going to probably upgrade to a newer phone... which will probably not be made by the same brand... which means I'll have to learn a new OS, and that's another learning curve I'm not likely to enjoy because the whole time I'll be dreading about having to learn the next phone's OS. Grrrrrrrr.

* I'm already familiar with Apple's OS.
* I can upload my contacts once and never have to worry about dealing with a SIM card ever again!
* I know the phone will sync seamlessly with my home system.

But come on, $400? For a phone?

It still sounds like a lot, but only if you're buying a phone. And this is not just any phone—it's a small telecommunications computer designed to sync to your main computer. I can live with spending $400 if it buys me the peace of mind that I'll never have to upgrade to another phone for at least 3 to 5 years.

As my friend Jena told me a few weeks ago, "My Blackberry broke and AT&T said they'd mail me a replacement within five to seven business days. I don't have five to seven business days! So I walked to the Apple store, and 5 minutes later I walked back out with an iPhone. 17 minutes after I got home, all my phone numbers and addresses were synched up and I was back up and running."

So I'm buying an iPhone this year, probably next month sometime. The next generation has broadband internet speed, but it's still in development and probably won't come out until September or early next year. And that's too. damned. long.

Ross <3 iPhones.

Slusho Pics—You can't drink just six!

For those who missed my last post, CLOVERFIELD: Marketing the American Godzilla, go read it now. If you're in a hurry, skip to the bottom of the post to read the bit about Slusho.

I said pics were coming and I wasn't lying: this week I received my Slusho hat and T-shirt. Because I know no bounds of geekdom, I held my wife at gunpoint to take pictures of me opening the Slusho box. Oh, the joy!

You'll note that some of the stuffing inside the box is Japanese newspaper... there's some speculation that the newspaper is yet one more clue about Cloverfield's storyline, but nobody knows for sure...

Cloverfield opens nationwide in theatres tomorrow. I'll be going to the 9:20 PM showing which is the closest match to New York City's 12:03 AM EST, which is when the story is meant to occur. [Actually, it just hit me that I'm late by a day—12:03AM on 1/18/08 happened about 4 hours ago, but whatever!] Thankfully, they'll be showing Cloverfield on the pristine Digital Light Projector, the best medium possible to show Hi-Def video.

Anyway, if you're still on the fence about seeing it, consider that it's produced by Alias and Lost co-creator, J. J. Abrams. His marketing pitch was something like, "Give me one $1500 camera, a bunch of no name actors, and $25 million—I'll put all my money into the CGI and make a killer monster movie."

Oh, hell yeah.

I may even order a slushy just to get myself in the mood.

What if Microsoft sold an iPhone?

I came across this brilliant video and had to share. The strange thing is, I could actually see it happening... which is why it's so funny.

Enjoy.

CLOVERFIELD: Marketing the American Godzilla

Last week, I spent 2 hours of my life learning about Slusho drinks and Tagruato's deep sea drilling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, first go watch the trailers for Cloverfield (first the teaser, then the full trailer).

Now, in one sense, Cloverfield isn't unique at all—it looks like a retelling of a tired genre, the Japanese monster movie. In another sense, however, it's innovative because it tells that story from the point of view of a small group of people. Unlike Godzilla, a monster which also attacks New York (why New York? Why not Charleston, West Virginia [thanks for the correction, Joe!] or Flagstaff, Arizona?), the viewer will probably have more invested in what happens to the main characters. It's like Blair Witch meets 9/11 and Godzilla. It's not surprising J. J. Abrams is behind this project—Cloverfield is a close cousin of Lost: put people you care about in an insane situation and see how they react.

Lost's popularity lays in the "peeling of the onion"—the more layers you peel back, the more layers you find. Each answer only gives you more questions. Of course, foreplay only lasts so long and some viewers have become frustrated with Lost's serpentine plotlines, while others are drawn to the story's emotional core: its characters. As in real life, Lost's story comes to you in scattered pieces of information. Like Ian Fassburg used to say, "A woman who's almost naked is far sexier than a woman who's totally naked." Viewers like to be given a challenge, a puzzle to figure out.

This is why Cloverfield looks to be such a great film. By framing the story from the point of view of strangers, without the benefit of any omniscient "meanwhile..." cutaways, the viewer is immediately handicapped and must struggle along with the characters to make sense of the impossible. A monster attack? What monster? How big is it? Where did it come from? What damage is it doing? What does it look like? Can it even be beaten? What will happen to us? What will happen to the city? What will happen to the world? These questions are visceral, emotional, atavistic. The trailer exploits that by piggybacking on the fears of another cataclysmic attack like 9/11... it's not by coincidence the characters witness a huge explosion from a Manhattan rooftop.

Some other simple tricks to hook the viewer into the story—the release date synchs up to the story's time, so photos taken in the film (and posted on the official web site, pictured at left) are datestamped to when the film is set for release... so the viewer will be able to easily imagine they're watching a live telecast. The first trailers didn't even list a movie title, just 1-18-08, the release date of the film. Even after the title was released, Abrams said the only official web site for the movie is www.1-18-08.com, but as of today there's nothing much on that site except for a few photographs. Flipping the photographs on 1-18-08.com (it's a Flash site) gives you more information about the characters, which leads—with some detective work—to their Myspace profiles:

myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/jamielascano
myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/hudsonplatt
myspace.com/jj_hawkins
myspace.com/lily_ford
myspace.com/marlenadiamond
myspace.com/beth_mcintyre

Look at each profile carefully—each person has each other person's profile in their top 8 friends list. Clever!

Rumors were also circulated that the film's title was to be called Slusho. Slusho? What the hell is that? A Google search for "Slusho" yields Slusho.jp as the top result, which appears to have nothing to do with Cloverfield... at first glance.

But look closer: the site has a commercial contest where the public can submit their own commercial for Slusho. The address for contest submission is Bold Futura, LLC, 1223 Wilshire Boulevard, No. 1422, Santa Monica, CA 90403. Huh? What's a Japanese company doing with a Santa Monica address?

Researching Bold Futura, LLC took me to boldfutura.org, which was live when I saw it, but is now defunct. From that site, I first heard about their affiliate company, Tagruato, a deep sea drilling company. A glance at Tagruato's web site, tagruato.jp, shows an interactive map of deep sea drilling; their most recent, and biggest, drilling rig is in the Atlantic Ocean, not far from New York City... Googling Tagruato led me to an intriguing blog at tagruato.blogspot.com, which appears to be run by a Greenpeace-like group blaming Tagruato for destroying our oceans. On that blog, they claim to have received notes from whistle-blowers inside the deep sea drilling company that "bad things are happening."

ALL these sites have been created to promote Cloverfield and, without realizing it, you can easily get pulled into this alternate reality and start to care about the characters listed on Myspace. This kind of marketing isn't new—it's called "immersive entertainment" and it's been used for films before. The goal is to create a world where easter eggs are sprinkled across multiple web sites for those curious enough to seek them out. When someone finds a new piece of the puzzle, they discuss its meaning and import with others and the end result is a phenomenal word of mouth about the movie. I mean, look at me... I'm practically a walking advertisement for a movie I haven't even seen yet.

I had so much fun learning about this marketing campaign that I just had to buy my own Slusho T-shirt and baseball hat... I'm told the box it arrives in includes newspaper stuffing offering even more clues about the movie!



If you want to know the complete lowdown about the ad campagin, here's a real site which lays out everything currently known about each of the sites listed above:
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20546

And don't forget to see Cloverfield on January 18th!

On Writers & Strikes: Richard Cox reply

Over on Myspace, fellow novelist Richard Cox posted this response to last night's blog about the WGA strike. I had a lengthy reply I'd prefer to not get lost in the Myspace ether, so I'm reposting here for posterity.

Richard's reply:

Even after reading your blog I'm not sure I understand the situation well enough to comment.

However, as a novelist, I don't incur any risk when selling my novel to a publisher. The publisher shells out the money to print the book and market it (although in my case, they didn't shell out much for marketing, haha.)

And yet I am still paid for each book sold, assuming I earn out my advance.

It boggles my mind that you could write a brilliant screenplay or teleplay and be paid a flat fee no matter how well it performed.

From my uneducated position, writing suffers when you treat it as a commodity. I realize producers believe they can take any high-concept piece of junk screenplay and, with the right actors and director, turn it into a moneymaker.

But why don't they learn from the lessons of really awesome movies that are well written that become juggernauts? Why do they accept mediocrity?

And then there is the whole argument of how a brilliant screenplay becomes a lump of generic mashed potatoes after studio people muck it up with test screening results. In trying to minimize risk, they ruin the chance to make a mint. And the original writer probably doesn't want to claim those mashed potatoes, anyway.

Posted by Richard on Thursday, November 01, 2007 at 8:00 AM

And my reply:

I did gloss over a few points to make the issues more palatable, but the gist is there. Perhaps the most important point I did not make is that there isn't One True Way to offer financial remuneration from producers to writers—there is only precedent, and precedent is always rooted in historical and cultural contexts. In Europe or Asia, they may treat this issue in an entirely different way. Nevertheless, all that is really moot: what matter is what has been done in the past and how the present deals on the table relate to past precedent.

In the past, writers have been offered what's called "scale", or a salaried pay, which is agreed upon three years advance in a document called the Schedule of Minimums (which you can find online here). Much like an advance for novelists, it has to be done this way because what happens if the final product, for whatever reason, does not get produced? At least the creator's time has been appropriately reimbursed. Writers do get residuals from DVD sales (see the car/idea analogy above), but writers feel like they got screwed 20 years ago on that deal. Internet residuals are on the table and they're not making the same mistake twice.

However, producers paying scale mean they're shouldering the cost and that means financial risk until the product makes money. For novels, there is relatively low cost incurred compared to films because a publisher can issue multiple prints to gauge market interest whereas only one film or set of TV episodes is "published" at once. Movie producers have a lot at risk, financially speaking, and when money comes into the picture, people tend to get gunshy. (The solution here is obvious: make all writers producers by forcing them to invest their own money up front. That would change their toon pretty bloody quickly!)

Novels are also a low collaboration medium, compared to movies. As Orson Welles said, "A poet needs a pen, an artist, a brush, and a filmmaker—an army." So the payout structure for films calls for a lot of employees to make the product, whereas with a novel, you need three people: the novelist, the publisher, and the printer; in some cases, the novelist is even the publisher, too. It would be pretty cheeky for a publisher to pay a novelist $100,000 for a novel and then make $10,000,000 without any kind of royalties since the novelist is the TOTAL creator of his medium. Comparatively, a screenwriter is just a blueprint maker, since actors, directors, and even producers can add their 2 cents along the serpentine path to the movie theatre. Should the actors, directors and producers then receive a residual based on their input? It's a slippery slope.

The answer to your question about why producers don't learn from the lessons of well-written films is simple: it's about money. Producers want to make hits, so their initial intent is to make the next American Beauty, but along the way, producers (or more accurately, producers' employees) have second-thoughts—what if the script I'm gunning for doesn't do well?—and thus the truly original writing self-selects out. In this respect, literary writers will always hold a trump card over screenwriters. If a novelist or journalist fails, they wipe egg off their face, but if a screenwriter fails, their producer's very career is at stake.

Thanks for posting! It's good to have another writer's perspective. I neglected to mention that the National Writers Union (nwu.org) recently supported the WGA strike; they are a "United nationwide local of the United Auto Workers representing (at this point) about 2000 freelance journalists, book authors, PR writers, etc."

That (banned) XBox Commercial

I posted this commercial on my blog over a year ago, but it just resurfaced and it's so good, I'm reposting it!

You can tell someone took great care to capture a cinematic mood. The faint rolling bottle and cooing baby in the background really paint a complete scene, too... the setup, though funny, has such a serious tone that it creates a false tension—making the comic payoff even funnier.

Advertising at its best!

Mmmm... Oreos. Don't you want one?

When actors spontaneously start talking about Oreos, or when films linger a little too long on a flying jet—long enough to make you wonder why they're showing it at all—that's product placement. Movies have used product placement for years as a financing tool, but now networks have graduated from product placement to product integration.

Product integration is when the product plays a more prominent role in the storyline, perhaps even a crucial one. Advertising has always had a love to hate relationship with entertainment, and Tivo has tipped the scales in the favor of the consumer. Thus, to hopscotch the consumers' trigger-happy DVR skip button, networks are now including prominent product placement in their series. And, in some cases, adding those products into the storyline.

With new developments come new complications. Consider the following ethical minefields:

• Advertisers pay networks to have writers insert a mini-ad within the story, and actors act out the scenes—so both writers and actors are now getting paid to do two jobs instead of just one: dramatic acting and commercial work. Theoretically, that should mean two separate paychecks, but the networks are divvying out only one. The Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild aren't real happy about that.


• What if a writer or actor disagrees in principle with product integration, or disagrees in practice about a specific instance where integrating the product makes the story suffer and breaks the story's emotional connection with the viewer? For a true entertainer, there can be no greater sin than this.


• What if a writer or actor simply refuses to do any product integration? Should networks be able to fire them with just cause? If not, do writers and actors have a right to refuse any product integration practices? Or would the networks effectively bully everyone into doing it for fear advertisers might yank their funding?


• How ethical is it to insinuate these informal ads into programs without informing the viewer about it? If you see an full page newspaper ad, but its layout is similar to a newspaper article, they slap a "PAID ADVERTISEMENT" label on it, so why shouldn't the networks do something similar? (And the answer is obvious: they would alienate their viewers.)


• Finally, what if I bought the DVD boxed set of the series (perhaps years after the show has aired)? Will the original advertisers of the "commercials" in the storyline—captured for time immemorial on DVD—continue to pay the networks any residuals? And if so, shouldn't the actors and writers get residuals, too?

Entertainment and how it's marketed is changing, but integrating products into storylines is a massively bad idea except if the story needs it, or improves because of it. How different would The Gods Must Be Crazy be if the pilot had thrown something other than a Coke bottle into the African dessert? If it serves the story, use it, but don't force it—viewers are smart and they can sense a con. Which is what this is—a con. Advertisers are conning the public into thinking our primetime heros spontaneously mention a product even though it's a deceptively embedded commercial. For advertisers, this is a new low. For networks, I don't know a better definition of "sell out" than that.

What about the flip side? If I'm a network exec and I have a choice to let my series go off the air, or compromise some of my ivory tower ideals... Star Trek: Voyager fans will recall that—two years on the air and suffering rock bottom ratings—Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine character single-handedly resuscitated that series for another five years. Is that selling out? Well, maybe. But Ryan's smokin bod got viewers watching the program and she wasn't selling any products (apart from her own "brand"). Nothing wrong with grabbing a customer's attention with something flashy so you can do your spiel.

In fact, entire networks have tried to use product placement as their sole revenue stream: the failed Digital Entertainment Network was an online channel to exclusively fund their shows with product placement, with a clever twist: viewers were invited to shop on the website for any items appearing on the network's shows. Want that sweater the character's wearing? Why, here's a link to buy it! Thus, product placement was part of the appeal for watching entertainment on that site. Nothing wrong with that.

Here's Phil Rosenthal, the co-creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, testifying to a House Subcommittee about the perils of product integration:

It's Time For A Book

My mother is visiting this August 11th and because she doesn't have a computer, she's never read any of my blog posts. Recently, she asked me to put up all my screenplays into one book so she could read them whenever she wanted. But she's never read my blogs? Mom, you're killing me.

And that got me thinking. I probably have enough material from my blog for a book, so why shouldn't I use a Print On Demand self-publishing service like Lulu.com to print my own book? It's not like I don't know how to lay out a book—I have the design knowledge from years of laying out magazine ads. The challenge of publishing a book is that it's a marathon because you're wearing so many hats at a given time.

Nevertheless, I got really excited because I own all the copyright to my own writing... what's stopping me from going all the way and distributing my printed blogs through Amazon*? And the answer is—money. Among other things, Amazon requires an ISBN number and you can only buy ISBNs in lots of 10. At $25 per ISBN, that's $250. And then there are the proofing costs. All told, self-publishing could be as expensive as $350, which is a hefty chunk of change.

Naturally, I could slap all that on a credit card, but I thought it might be a nice gesture to invite my friends, family, readers, and subscribers—the people who still enjoy reading my banter after all this time—onto the wagon and help this train come into the station. Plus, the end result could be something really special for my Mom to see a "real" published book of nothing but blogs her son wrote. Come on, you can't say that's not cool!

Anyway, if you feel like you want to help out, all contributions are very welcome:

My aim is have all $350 by August 3rd. If I start getting contributions as planned, I may detail on my blog each step of getting my book published. That's got to be worth two yanks of a steam train whistle.

* I'm not very concerned with how many people buy the printed copy, because just having a book listed listed on Amazon is worth bragging rights for its own sake!

Trust me, I know what I'm talking about

NPR ran a piece a while back about how camera makers were hiring salespeople to walk around in pairs on the street, presumably a man and a woman, acting as if they were a married couple, and "innocently" ask passersby to take their picture. When the unsuspecting mark tried out the new camera, the couple would usually say something like, "Cool camera, huh? We just got it..." which would then segue into a private and improvised, but very carefully controlled, commercial. This is the new face of advertising, appropriately dubbed, "Guerilla Marketing".

It comes in many forms, too. I first heard about "Sock Puppeting" from Will Shipley on his blog where he talks about how his competitor anonymously plugs his own product. Then today I just read about this:

I interviewed for a guerilla marketing business in San Francisco that targeted web forums.

I was told that if I accepted the job, I was to have at LEAST 50 identities on as many forums as I could muster (they wanted 100 eventually), with a goal of 5 posts an hour. The posts had to be well thought out, and the idea was that I was to establish multiple identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was right a well written but subtly placed marketing post could be finessed in. And regular visitors would recognize the post as coming from a long time poster.

They had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. You do the math. No wait, I'll do it for you: that's 880 posts a day (if minimum was met). However he said the better ones could do around 8 or 10 an hour. And they had different "verticals" so there was the sports guy, and the games guy, the hentai, excuse me I mean anime guy, etc.

But the most critical point was this: develop and integrate the identity. No random "HEY EB GAMES IS AWESOME BUY THIS" stuff.

Kinda spooky.

Didn't take the job. It was a fucking mill.

Seems a little silly to pay $1 million to get a few people to buy your product, no? Why not spend $1 million to make your product rock? Word of how good your product is should get around all by itself.

But I can do you one more... The BBC just broke a story on a newly declassified document about the US military's plans for "information operations":

Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon.

So it appears even the governement is hopping on the bandwagon. It's a good thing I bought Apple's newest Macbook Pro, which is powered by a dual-core Intel engine. Up to four times the speed of the PowerBook G4 and eight times the graphics bandwidth. With built-in iSight for instant video conferencing on the move and Front Row with Apple Remote to dazzle everyone in the room. Wait no more. MacBook Pro starts at just $1999. They're awesome.