The good virus

I'm normally not one for viral marketing campaigns. They just seem like a waste of time to me.

But (there's always a 'but'), the one for the J.J. Abrams movie, 'Cloverfield', is pretty cool. It's releasing today.

IGN Movies has an done a fine job encapsulating the viral campaign components.

What's a viral campaign? Well, without 'ask'ing the internet, I'm going to give you my erudite (or lamebrained) definition. With the advent of embedded and prolific technology coupled with the explosion of social networking, the viral campaign is one that is a cheap and interactive way to increase brand awareness. I also like to think that they're a cousin of mememails and sibling to viral videos.

For example, a game studio is launching a huge title...like Halo 2. They drop little packets of seemingly unrelated information (like some bizarrely named URL...like 'ilovebees.net'), and people go to that URL and find that its content is either deliberately obfuscate or shares some peripheral relationship with the title and provides additional background information.

Whatever the method, the delivery vector (a website, email notifications, or 'secure access' [those requiring a password obtained after completing some other task on another related website] sites) is designed to engage the consumer. An example of a successful iteration of a slightly older, but cult film of the early 2000s is the Flash site of Richard Kelly's 'Donnie Darko'.

Entertainment viral campaigns (those for movies and games) have been extremely successful in generating buzz. The hype for 'Snakes on a Plane' was primarily driven by its viral marketing and from the incorporation of suggestions from bloggers into the actual script. Of course, the movie was a disaster, but did showcase the awesome power of Samuel L 'Muthafuckin' Jackson, but I digress.

'Cloverfield' is shot in the Blair Witch style, which means that when we see it, the movie plays out like we're watching documentary content. Except this mockumetary is about a monster attack on NYC, and we see it through the eyes of some hip 20 somethings who could never afford to live in the places that they do in real life. In reality, they'd be sharing a couch in Brooklyn.

The movie's campaign is pretty cool because 1) it's not bizarrely obscure, and 2) because it fleshes out some back-story details. Kinda cool. It's like backstory that was left out of the movie, and I happen to like sci-fi/monster films.

You can actually infer quite a bit from the various viral components, although the film I find myself making in my head after checking out these viral vectors could be in polar opposite of the desires of production and creative team.

Regardless, the fact that there's deep-sea drilling, a mysterious substance that appears to infect/mutate people, satellite imaging, and an origin unknown skyscraper-sized creature running amok is good movie times for me!

If you're curious to see more on the viral aspects of the fime, consider this: according to the plot, there's a fictional Japanese company that does deep-sea drilling. One station is located in the Atlantic, relatively close to NY. A 'press release' on the company's website provides a phone number (+81-3-5403-6318) to call if you have more questions about the 'incident'. Hmm...want to call Japan?

Blog strike

Been so busy with work and winter and playing Team Fortress 2 that I haven't been able to post for a while, so this one's a jumble of 4 topics: the writer's strike, the Top 10 Online Flash games courtesy Cnet's Crave, the sale of a WoW character, and MyLifeBits.

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I hope the writer's strike recently initiated goes on for a whole year.

I hope the surplus of filmed shows is completely drained, and the vast inventory of television production vaults are entirely withdrawn.

Why?

Becase I want 'reality' shows to rule the airwaves. I want high quality programming like The Biggest Loser, The Bachelor/ette, Studs n' Skanks, Kid Nation, Punched in the Face, and all permutations of Punk'd to dominate television. I want syndicated episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Ties, and The Cosby Show to become the commodity for which networks will bankrupt themselves while they compete for fewer and fewer viewers.

'Lost' will epynomously actualize itself, and there will be no savior for 'Heroes'. 'Gray's Anatomy' will develop a terminal illness, and 'Desperate Housewives' will get a divorce on grounds of adulterous behavior with the kids from 'That 70s Show' and they'll need to move to some city where they film 'CSI' variants.

An entire season of television will see significant delays of DVD production save for the newest 'Survivor'.

And maybe people will start reading more books and watching less crap. Oh sweet bliss.

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Crave UK, part of Cnet, puts together 'Top 10...' lists on a fairly regular basis, and one of their current ones is a must see for those who engage in a little time-killing anti-boredom activity at work. I myself have never engaged in this questionable behavior, however, I know there are many that do. Lazy sloths.

I'm posting this one because I played most of these over the course of the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I highly recommend Desktop Tower Defense.

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Ever need to sell your World of Warcraft character online? Need help in specifying all those esoteric details? You need to talk to this guy. Just an excerpt of his post:

the priest was the best geared priest on its pvp server hands down pre bc. I was the first priest to have full t1, full t2 and the first piece of t3. I took a long break and recently came back to play BC. I lvled to 70 and started farming epics, but the game just isnt the same anymore. I still have alot of those old epics as well as old weapons like Benediction/Anathema from back in the day.

Currently wearing 11 enchanted epics from various lvl 70 raid instances and have more in the bank for DPS. My current build is holy/Disc and I can achieve 1700 plus healing easily and almost 2k buffed. I have about 1k arena points saved up to buy new gear.

Priest has 5 different epic riding mounts and 1 flying mount. 375 tailoring and 355 enchanting currently. Every single pre BC enchant is known including all AQ 40/AQ20 MC and rep enchants etc. Currently have a lot of epic tailoring patterns to play with at lvl 70. Just need to farm primal nethers to make the good stuff. Plenty of enchanting mats etc as well. About 120g on this toon.

You need this character! Anyone with a character possessing holy/Disc is worth a thousand mouseclicks.

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Philip K Dick was right...again.

FoxNews is reporting that Microsoft is working on a venture to backup your life. It's a crazy thing to think that (based on Microsoft estimates) 'a 1-terabyte (1,000-gigabyte) hard drive will cost less than $300...and could easily hold all text documents, voice files and photographs of a person's complete life experience — but if it came to video, it would be only enough for four hours per day for an entire year.'

To tie this directly to a Dickian theme, an India-based company went to far as to use a clever phonetic spelling for the business, reQall. While reQall doesn't implant memories as in Dick's tale, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale', it suggests that there's a market for helping people to remember.

Because reQall converts what you say to text, remembering is as easy as searching the web. You can read and edit your posts, see what you’ll need to remember next week, search for a particular item and more. You can even see an overview of your activity on a calendar view.

Don't know if this is going to be the 'killer Web 2.0 app', or if it'll end up being one more online 'resource' that you'll need to remember that you could use if you just took the time out to set up an account with them.

I'm waiting for the movie version of Burn:Cycle.

More on memes with Internet People

So I recently revived the term, mememail. In the same vein, Dan Meth created a short video about "Internet People". It's a Flash montage of memeish material and phenomena that's coursed through the Internets over the years. Things like, Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" (check him out live on Jimmy Kimmel), "Dick in a Box", Stephen Colbert roasting Prez Bush, Jib-Jab parodies, You're the man now dog, G.I. Joe voice overs (you should check these out...one of my favs is the dancehall remix), Ashley Simpson's weird jig on SNL, etc. Check it out.

Mememail, the wave of the future...as long as you tell your friends

I received a couple emails from a friend. One of his emails consisted of a list about how to "Poop at Work", which was a list of smartly termed fart variants, and other related bodily functions, all descriptions couched in a pseudo-clinical fashion so as to bestow legitimacy. Frightfully charming stuff. I chortled. Crop-duster. Haha. The other was video taken from a "closed circuit security camera"which captures a husky dude placing his bare rump on the copier and giggles while the dittos come out. His joy is short-lived as the glass on the copy surface breaks sending his ass into the delicate nest of Xerox(tee em or is it just r?) machinery below. This brilliant piece was titled: Bad Day at the Office. There are other variants of this video out there.

I've seen these before at least 3 times each - usually through the email medium. These things just keep circulating and resurfacing...they're persistent little pieces of cultural material.

Which leads me to my current tirade. I'm going to start calling these emails with the funny/bizarre video or text "mememails". Why? Well 1) it sounds bloody brilliant [been reading a lot of British fiction lately...all those sodding idioms are become more and more familiar], and 2] because it's a near-perfect term for the behavior.

There are a bunch of definitions for a meme. Here are a couple I culled from the internets:

Meme, a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. From the Greek mimëma, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate.

Meme, as defined within memetic theory, comprises a unit of cultural information, cultural evolution or diffusion that propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution. Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).

So...if you start using the term mememail, we'll know that we gave birth to a cultural artifact. We'll know it comes from exquisite stock. We'll help raise it through the years, guiding it away from the Perverted Justice haunted chat-rooms, or the superfluously meandering halls of myspace.com, and leading it to nourishing resources like slashdot.org, or arstechnica.com, wired.com, theonion.com, news.com.com, or economist.com, and we'll teach it to sift through the chaff to find the tasty morsels of e-wheat.

I know I'm probably not the first person to coin this term (Richard Dawkins having coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene). I found some sources in the ether who included an old link from MIT, which apparently took a pioneering long-view of the phenomenon and had created a repository for these types of emails. The content looks to be from 2001 and is no longer cached anywhere, however, someone did reference the FAQ MIT put up. Check it out here, and do a 'find' on "meme-mail FAQ". I'll just have to live with the knowledge that I offered up a large piece of self-referential memetic material that was later diffused into the human cultural experience.

Good? Yes? Let's get started. Say it with me...mememail (rhymes with theme).

Newness and unibrow

I changed my profile pic because there have been a number of polite but concerned comments made.

It's just a guy repeatedly bashing his head into the keyboard after he's slammed his hands and arms into oblivion, then finally having both eyeballs flung from their sockets because so much cranial damage has been sustained. What's the big deal?

Now I have Supergreg representing me. Internets phenomenon from the late 90s early 00s. I'm bringing him back. OK. Not really. But I haven't heard anything about him in so long, and thought it'd be nice to reconnect. Don't forget to call your grandmother.