'Star Wars Uncut includes countless examples of live-action "drama" (scare quotes mine), some of it staged on elaborately decorated sets, the rest performed in kitchens, rec rooms, living rooms, basements, and backyards. Some of the actors are surprisingly good; others are merely spirited. This sort of work isn’t stealing anything from creators. It’s enhancing its value by showing just how much it means to people. I really don’t see how it’s possible to watch this viral video crazy-quilt and write it off as a merely derivative or exploitative work. If anything, it shows how art made from other art can become an independent creation with its own personality and worth. Star Wars Uncut is a collectively made work of postmodern folk art, as arresting and significant as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can silkscreen or a Robert Rauschenberg collage painting built around photos filched from newspapers. The true subject of Star Wars Uncut is how pop culture touchstones live on inside people’s heads, becoming a shared language and an inspiration for personal creativity. Lucas’s work was a call; this is a response.'

'A computer program written by Mr. Pugh automatically plays the highest-rated rendition of each scene, and it compiles those scenes on the fly, so the movie can change in real time depending on the ratings of users.'

'"It's very possible that a sideways world running concurrent to our own exists, and that a facsimile of myself is happy, fulfilled, and already gearing up for the season seven premiere of Lost," said 36-year-old Kevin Molinaro, who, along with more than 20 million other hopeless fans, has recently booked multiple roundtrip tickets from Los Angeles to Australia in hopes of traveling through a vortex in the space-time continuum. "I just have to find a way to get there. We all do."'

'...experts like Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz, a New York psychologist wonders at what price these [movie tie-in] sales come. “What Lego loses is what makes it so special,” he says. “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch. When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.” -- “I would like to see more open-ended play like when we were kids,” says Gerrick Johnson, a toy analyst at BMO Capital Markets in New York. “The vast majority is theme-based, and when you go into Toys “R” Us, you’d really be challenged to find a simple box of bricks.” ...when a minifigure “dies” in a “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones” video game, he dissolves into a pile of bricks and then springs back to life, cartoon style. “We think kids really want to have this good-against-evil play; they want this fighting against each other,” says Charlotte Simonsen, a Lego spokeswoman. “But we want to do it with a wink.”'

Not so much a business model, more an attention model where people enjoy the shared chaos of production and collaborative 'tidy up' towards a finished product. Mess is lore, as some folk say. -- '#Chapter 4: Building it Together: Heap has more than 735,000 followers on Twitter, each of whom feels invested in the making of Ellipse and is eagerly awaiting its release. They’ve been there every step of the way, offered their opinions and insights when asked for advice about songs, helped create Heap’s bio and album art, and were the friends who were always willing to lend an ear… and a hand. #Chapter 6: Heap TweetUps' -- And then the afterparty. -- '#Chapter 7: Cafe Heap' -- And then the product in its solid state is too opaque and so people start looking for the next 'production' to get involved in. #Chapter Z: The awkward second album where any remaining fans demand repeats of attentional gimmicks of which the artist has run out and can only plead, "But it was always about 'the music'."

'Like all great religions, the franchises have mysterious histories, preserved in decaying books and obscure pamphlets. The thread that unites all of them is an overarching tale of social outcasts who find holy books that show them the light, and lead them to secret congregations where mystical debates and opinions are exchanged. Converted by these ancient books, the earliest fans began to build the franchises that would transform their visions of other worlds into the pillars of new belief systems. In the end, religious fervor is good for the pocketbook of the culture industry. The more we worship, the more we are willing to pay for action figures, for DVD box sets, for expensive reissues and signed first editions. These things are trinkets for our shrines, outward signs of our devotion. And like all religious objects they are dosed with a symbolic meaning that goes way beyond their unbroken plastic seals. They ward off what hurts us in the world. They promise better things to come.'

'Every year, in the first week of August, Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, and Japan Rail East hold a promotional event called the "Pokemon Stamp Rally". This has been going on for maybe ten years. The nature and scope of this promotional event is mind-blowing. And if we've consumed the right amount of Brain Lube, the things it implies are even more amazing and depressing.' -- Got to catch them all. Pokemon! -- A brief history of kleptomania (in video games): What stingy consumers started doing was buying games, clearing them, and then selling them back to used shops as soon as they could. So what game developers started doing was #1. Making games needlessly difficult #2. Padding games with artificial barriers such as level-grinding, side quests, etc. It's no tinfoil-hat theory that many of the conventions of the Japanese RPG were born out of publisher mandates such as "keep people from selling the game back in the first two weeks".'

'OK, the cover is badged as a 'Lost' product, so the artifice is partly lost, but still. Generating an ISBN for the book; creating an author; having an actual book written (it's out in May); all relatively straightforward for an enterprise on this scale. All of this creates an entry in a new data-space: in this case, the Amazon database and user experience. This is the producers of the show (presumably) actually using the identifiers of other operations to provide coherent hooks for interaction around their product. Comments, discussions, tags - all could follow. How long before there's a Driveshaft CD available? (A while, I hope. Though it looks like there was a faux Myspace account for Driveshaft at one point.) One half expects the Sawyer character to turn up as an actual Flickr user, posting images from the beach, or more likely, selling bits of charred aircraft on eBay. This isn't so much product placement as identifier placement.' -- Metacontent

"Retro DHARMA ads found in various old mags from the 60s - 80s."

'The paper is now offering user-generated advertising as a service and competence to its advertisers. -- Bild's partnering with readers is part of a trend that this paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, is calling the "mutualisation of news". The separation between reporter and reader, he said, blurs as they work together. That is the future - and natural state - of media; collaboration not just in content creation, but now in advertising as well.'

"Is it ‘alt’ to go to the movies to see mainstream summer blockbusters? Feel like people who ‘go to the movies’ and ‘build their weekly schedules around television shows’ make me sad, because they represent how people don’t have any thing 2 do, so we just have 2 waste time watching things 2 keep us from thinking about how sad we all are on the inside. Sort of prefer ‘wasting time on the internet’ because we are all trying to get vulnerable and ’show the world who we are.’ It makes me feel sad when people outsource their personal brands to ‘fictional tales.’"

Carri Bugbee on starting her Peggy Olson twitter profile: "My driving force in those first couple of months was, this is going to be a kick-ass case study, it's going to be a great white paper..."

"Carri Bugbee, the PR woman behind some of the much talked about twitter marketing of 'Mad Men', is to build a Twitter-based ad agency for media and entertainment companies. Bugbee said that there are a number of lessons producers and marketers can learn from the 'Mad Men' fan fiction, including that producers should strive to reserve the Twitter accounts for all the characters in whatever show or film they are making. She also advised producers to overcome their need to control all aspects of their work and to use their fans to their advantage." -- Wasn't it just that ad people wanted to roleplay being ad people to prove what good ad people they were? Still, a good idea if they can attract true fans who can authentically flesh out the characters. Endless opportunities for brand/product/service/environment/person placement - and not just placement...

"Could Kelly’s [1,000 true fans] solution extend to the design, manufacture, marketing and distribution of products? ...not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art. This model would be a potential new spin on both human-centered design and product marketing. Collect the desires and needs of your customer base, but they’ve bought into the design process revealing something new about that. You can see some of this in communities such as Etsy... Is this possible in the arena of more complex products with behaviour, connectivity, and services woven into them? Is it possible where there’s not a direct relationship to the artisan or designer - that is, could it scale to work for larger companies and brands? ... creating products and potentialities for products that will garner a fanbase through their lifetime..."

"... the fact that Caddell can be both an industry insider and a fan simply demonstrates the degree to which those lines are blurring from all sides in our contemporary convergence culture; the fact that his fantasies have something to do with his real world identity should also not be a shock to anyone who understands the psycho-sociology of fandom." -- ;^)

"Stories that include their audiences in the creation process become more complex, go off on tangents and create new relationships between the broadcaster and the audience. Giving the audience space to create their own stories within the broadcast story is a great way to create mass media. Instead of creating one story with broad enough appeal for a mass audience to find it palatable, it’s now possible to create a piece of mass media without much of a storyline at all, but instead, the tools the audience needs to create millions of their own, that they in turn can change and narrowcast to their peers. The audience knows what they need from narrowcast entertainment better than the broadcaster does, and they know the target audience for that entertainment (their friends and families) better than the broadcaster ever will. When mass entertainment properties encourage and add value to the networks that grow around them, they make it easier for the network to reciprocate."

'He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film. "I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?'" he said. "I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film, became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie, and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.' -- via: @windo

"By working together, we aim to create a DVD to document [the] show that will be released free online, and possibly as a not-for-profit physical release. This one, is on us. Our time. Our effort. Our present to all NIN fans."

'The video "will be primarily of interest to advanced users, who may wish to attempt to edit it together into something," he wrote. "It could be really interesting to see what creative users can put together using this and other fan-recorded footage."'

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn. After reading the novel, many Muslims e-mailed Mr. Muhammad Knight, asking for directions to the next Muslim punk show. Told that no such bands existed, some of them created their own, with names like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five.'

'Shipping, derived from the word "relationship", is a general term for fans' emotional and/or intellectual involvement with the ongoing development of romance in a work of fiction. Shipping can involve virtually any kind of relationship — from the well-known and established, to the ambiguous or those undergoing development, and even to the highly improbable and the blatantly impossible. People involved in shipping (or shippers) assert that the relationship does exist, will exist, or simply that they would like it to exist.'

'"The dojinshi (nonprofessional self-published manga) are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," ... the anmoku no ryokai (unspoken, implicit agreement) arrangement provides publishers with extremely cheap market research. To learn what's hot and what's not, a media company could spend lots of money commissioning polls and conducting focus groups. Or for a few bucks it could buy a Super Comic City catalog and spend two days watching 96,000 of its best customers browse, gossip, and buy in real time... These settings often provide early warnings of the shifting fan zeitgeist... the established publishers and the dojinshi creators [relationship works like] something resembling the prisoners' dilemma: If they cooperate — that is, if they honor the terms of anmoku no ryokai — they both gain. But if one overreaches — if publishers crack down aggressively or if dojinshi creators go too far — they both suffer.'

check out her favourites... :P

(Lost the original linking post to this file) -- "Hello there, my name is Bud Caddell. Iʼm a Strategist at the New York based digital think-tank, Undercurrent. On Twitter, Iʼm also known as Bud Melman, a mailroom clerk at Sterling Cooper Advertising in 1962. What follows is an inside look into the recent Mad Men on Twitter phenomenon, and what it means for the future of media and entertainment." -- Awesome write-up of narractivist fanfictionary.

Uh huh.

MmmHmm.

Yup.

"My son saw the Green Goddess Cucumber salad and said it looked like Soylent Green!"

"This is a painting inspired from the classic Charlton Heston Sci Fi movie Soylent Green. It's People!"

"If you've ever seen the film 'Soylent Green', have an inkling of foresight and possess even a minimum of awareness, you'll 'get it'."

"The 100% recycled cotton is soft yet strong and built to last (and perhaps solicit a round of the giggles...)"

"We are all Soylent Green."

"Welcome to Last Exit To Nowhere, home to a collection of unique shirt designs which are inspired and pay homage to some of the most memorable places, corporations and companies in modern fiction – from the sunny shores of Amity Island (Jaws) to the frozen climes of Outpost #31 (The Thing)."

"Superstruct is like a big, fun brainstorming session." -- Video.

"Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I've begun to call "the T-shirt economy"—paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Their algorithm is simple: First, don't limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans' desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you." -- As Mary Harrington said: "Never underestimate peoples' desire to dress up."

Stuff's just beginning to trickle in reflecting on our Halloween reenactment of The War of the Worlds on Twitter. Here are some links to what we've found so far. Each participant averaged 2.6 tweets total. The most active participants posted 60 to 100 tweets. There were around 600 people following the invasion progress. That's about 1500 tweets for all participants over the course of the event. I think it's safe to assume that about 10,000 people were touched by these apocalyptic tidings."

"#1: a noteworthy astronomer speculates on the possibility of an alien invasion. This would be a good time to talk about the Drake equation in your blog, especially if astronomy is your hobby. Send an email to wotw@cixar.com with your blog so we can proliferate it on the @wotw2 Twitter account. -- #2: The alien invasion occurs. Follow @wotw2 to keep in sync with the progress of the invasion. This Twitter feed will automatically update, in general terms, the unfolding of the alien invasion like clockwork throughout the world. Coordinate with Tweeters in your area to tell local stories. -- #3: After the threat dies down, people begin to blog and speculate about what happened, and every topic near and dear to them. -- #4: The curtain rises. Blog, link, and tweet about the experience."

"In the recent War of the Worlds example, some estimated 600 participants got together and generated around 1500 tweets about what they envisioned to be happening around them as various events within the original narrative unfolded, so that as the tripods touched down, people were encouraged to generate local narratives and fill in gaps in the story... a "real time" unfolding of a story-act, creates not only a story world, but one which is ambiguous in its boundaries, where characters can enter and leave at will, in any direction... the original story is merely the facilitating mechanism in the storytelling effort... the stories that explode out of the framing device have gaps, overlaps, contradiction, temporal inconsistencies, and all forms of delay, change, surprise. We are not only talking about a multilinear hypertext narrative, but rather an entire narrative ecology that potentially explodes the structure of how we, as a collective, tell stories."

"#Sharon Ross: When viewers think about "franchising" it connotes commerce and manipulation that's not in a fun way. When audiences talk about "franchising" and "branding" it turns them off. "Worldbuilding" is about community, bonding, the creative aspects, being able to experience the story - it's beyond participation. You become a part of it as a story teller or as a character. "Franchising" feels more limited, even though it's a big part of how it ends up organically working from a business perspective. You don't want to say "narrative extension" to an audience member because it sounds stuffy and not about the pure visceral pleasure - that anything could happen. Narrative doesn't quite encapsulate that. So "worldbuilding" is the draw from a fan perspective.-- #Lance Weiler: It feels weird when you come up with the marketing ideas of transmedia after the original idea... How do you put a price on people's enjoyment?"

"#Gail De Kosnik: Collective intelligence is more than deducing already authored info, or whatever - if you want to have more content produced, fans know that you have to use collective intelligence: get enough people motivated to create stuff for a product to generate. -- #Kevin Slavin: One thing to look at is World of Warcraft where everyone who's part of it pays $10 a month, versus Asian games where they're mostly free but premium items cost money. In that model the goal is not to get everyone who's playing to pay money, the reason that 10% is in the superfan relationship and can pay is that the other 90% is there. The 90% forms a passive audience for the 10%. And it's more interesting for the 90% because the 10% exists. So it's a complex interdependent relationship and I don't think the goal is to get "total fandom," the goal is to have fans catalyze a larger process."

"#Henry Jenkins: If Fan fiction is peer production. Multiplicity of narratives. In that case, peer production thrives. Only if idea of unified vision of the whole holds strongly... #Yochai Benkler: Well, what would you define as the cultural unit? Is it the individual statement in relation to the underlying entertainment product or is it the conversation and the exchange?"

Paul! -- "I'm the person responsible for the tweets of @don_draper, and thus kicking off that whole crazy adventure." -- Haha. I never guessed. 9000 internets to you, sir.

'"The internet allows networks to view an instant fan response and then react to it," says [John Ramos]. "Of course, that doesn't always mean that they will respond. Buffy's creator, Joss Whedon, famously said, 'I'm not giving you what you want - I'm giving you what you need.'"

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."

"Serving you into the 21st Century" (Meta-Cortex)

"This yellow Luma has been fed with many star bits from Mario Galaxy; that's why he's so chubby!"

"Asimov unsuccessfully tried to end the series at the end of Second Foundation. But, because of the predicted thousand years until the rise of the next Empire (of which only a few hundred had elapsed), the series lacked a sense of closure. For decades, fans pressured him to write a sequel. In 1982, following a thirty-year hiatus, Asimov gave in, and wrote what was at the time a fourth volume: Foundation's Edge. This was followed shortly thereafter by Foundation and Earth. Foundation and Earth (which takes place some 500 years after Seldon) ties up all the loose ends, but opens a brand new line of thought in the last dozen pages. As a result, some fans (wanting a tidy end to the series) consider this finale to be a failure."

"My life as a Mad Man began as a lark. On August 26, just after AMC lawyers changed their minds about closing down Mad Men twitter accounts (persuaded in part by bloggers and journalists who couldn't believe AMC would toss away a brilliant promotional idea that did not cost them a cent) I went on Twitter to see which character was still available, and signed up @francine_hanson. I found a nice photo of her on the AMC website and started to tweet, trying to engage @betty_draper. But she wouldn't tweet back. Instead, she sent me a nasty direct message. So I went back on twitter and registered @bettydraper; now I had a Betty to play with."

"My fan made Rorschach trailer based on one of the best graphic novels ever. 3D models created in 3DS Max and animation composed in After Effects."

"Neo vs Robotcop and Yoda"

Fringe Division: The Official Site of the Creative Team Behind The New Fox TV Show "Fringe"

"The rumblings you've been hearing in the criminal underground since July indeed are true: At long last, we are seeking new applicants to the League. Aspirants to new heights of Evil should submit an application video that meets the terms below..."

"A critical look at the Mad Men on Twitter shenanigans..." -- Narrative Anthropology

'Though the archives destroyed the videotapes of the lost shows, the audio tracks remain. The "Beeb" offers narrated audio productions of the lost stories. In addition, the section of BBC's website covering classic Doctor Who offers free photo novels using the old programs' original scripts and still photographs taken during production. So, some industrious fans took it upon themselves to fill in the gaps. Borrowing the audio tracks, they merge their own visuals to reconstruct the missing story -- sharing the videos freely on services such as YouTube.' -- Leave gaps.

'"Opera was invented to bring young people into the symphony," Tallarico says. "They said, Let's build sets and use costumes and tell stories.' We consider ourselves the opera of the 21st century."'

"The Fringepedia.net Wiki is the original, fan-created, online encyclopedia for the Fox TV Show Fringe."

"Mad Men is a TV show on AMC. These are my drawings of people and things from the show."

Wario vs Back To The Future

"... this genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage. For lack of a better name, let's call them supercuts." -- Loads of YouTube links

'“We’re delighted with the Twitter profiles,” Ellen Kroner, an AMC spokeswoman, said. (Mr. Draper’s character would surely be impressed by the free advertising the accounts provide.)'

'Who, indeed, is Sterling Cooper? Is it the authors, is it the production company, is it the network, is it the actor, or is it the viewers? At the very least, if ownership becomes "socialized," content developers and authors are well-advised to make the echo of the social web an integral part of their creations.'

"A brief look at the Big Bang birth of a fandom: the explosion of 'Dr. Horrible' fandom in just 47 days. Quite a lot of "more inside" follows." -- Campfires...

The first Blade Runner fanzine.

"The longevity of a media property is elongated by the desires of the community to keep it going. I wonder if it's possible for game designers to create products with the intention of ludic activity spraying beyond the boundaries of the games they create."

"Now, I have no idea if these character Twitter feeds are AMC-sanctioned or not (I DMed Mr. Draper but I did not hear back) but it doesn’t matter. All of them are tweeting completely in character. There is no break. There are no sneak-ins of the true personality of the user(s). I actually feel like I am interacting with the characters on the show and, as silly as this may seem, I almost feel like I am there with them at Sterling Cooper when I am reading their tweets."

Nah. Not real. Still waiting.

'... consistency is a tyranny. It gives power to rapid fans who define their fandom by their knowledge of the narrative. Some of these people are not cocreators of the narratives. They are jailers, constantly vigilant for any, even unimportant inconsistency. On the other side, the newcomers look at the detail of a narrative enterprise like Lost and think to themselves, "there's no way I can catch up."'

"The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms."

"two core questions: #Did the unlicensed use 'transform' the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original? #..."

"I don't know of another book which provides so much detailed information on how to transform its alternative visions into realities... one group of coders is hard at work developing the ParanoidLinux program described in the novel"

Supporters' names written on the threads of the All Blacks Jersey.

"... that’s where the MMO industry is going, a seamless experience between the web, between wikis that have information about the game... the wiki communities never sleep. They’re more passionate about information being correct than the developers."

"Designers who want happy gamers should [make] their work conducive to appreciation...games [can] do wonderful jobs of appreciating themselves first, and drawing players in with that enthusiasm. It's great to play something that effuses self-celebration."

"...producers must accommodate [fans] with structures that allow for guided user-generated content, story material that dovetails with the current storylines set in-canon, and perhaps one day, the opportunity to touch and interact with the canon itself."

"After seeing some of my favorite television shows get canceled in the past -- as well as the 'save this show' campaigns that followed -- I had the idea that a fan campaign BEFORE the show begins may be the best thing to do." -- Haha!

1,000 True Fans: "A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."

Raph Koster: "Small scale creators are better suited to monetize passion versus monetizing scale."

SL used as a world-building prototyper. Why would I play an 'official' Lost game [http://lostgame.us.ubi.com] over this?

"I think people just want an ultraportable Apple so badly that an order for glue or paint would somehow be contrived as evidence for it." Pffff-hahahahaha.