The First Machinima Talk Show!

In-game machinima talk-show with random Halo players shooting guests.

Awesome post from Boing-Boing about “This Spartan Life” an in-game talk show for X Box Live HALO. The best part?

Of course, there are lots of Halo players who aren’t in on the gag, crashing through the “set” and opening fire on the apparently slow-moving and non-lethal guest, host and crew, which only adds to the general awesomeness of this thing (excellent commentary on this here).

Check out the BoingBoing article here:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/19/ingame_machinima_tal.html

The home page for This Spartan Life is here:
http://www.thisspartanlife.com/

The Thinking Machinima blog is here:
http://www.machinima.org/paul_blog/

Create Digital Music’s article here:
http://www.createdigitalmusic.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=806&Itemid=44

Seth Godin does it again – The Big Moo by The Group of 33

Today Seth announced his new book, The Big Moo by The Group of 33 on his blog:

Announcing this will be his last traditional book published (check out the remarkable Change This that he and his team launched last year) Seth has put a challenge to the movers and shakers of the blogosphere – get the galley copies (min order of 50 for $2 a pop) to share with your other early adopter/lunatic fringe/thought leader/maven friends – the kind of people who will share the book with their employees, clients, partners, vendors etc.

As usual, a brilliant idea from Seth that puts his faith in the market (he would rather take a chance on us) and at the same time tests his ideas about viral marketing, communication and business. When I was working at K2 Design in the mid 90’s Dave Centner gave every employee of the company Tom Peters In The Pursuit of WOW. At the time I thought it was incredible that a company would make any book required reading (other than Teach Yourself HTML in 21 Days).

Here is an excert from the 1800 CEO Read ordering page:

But how do you create a big moo—an insight so astounding that people can’t help but remark on it, like digital TV recording (TiVo) or overnight shipping (FedEx), or the world’s best vacuum cleaner (Dyson)? Godin worked with thirty-two of the world’s smartest thinkers to answer this critical question. And the team—with the likes of Tom Peters, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Mark Cuban, Robyn Waters, Dave Balter, Red Maxwell, and Randall Rothenberg on board— created an incredibly useful book that’s fun to read and perfect for groups to share, discuss, and apply.

I plan on taking up the challenge and ordering the galleys for my friends. I cant wait.

Brilliant – Sony, Cingular, Ford go D.I.Y.

http://mediameld.typepad.com/mediameld/2005/07/sony_cingular_f.html

Thanks to the guys at Media Meld for pointing to this new campaign from Sony, Cingular and Ford.

Basically, people who subscribe to this site get forewarned about 10 surprise (“Flash”) concerts throughout the year via the web or their cell phone. But here is where the cultural connection happens. The promotion contains all these details that play off of recent DIY web-culture. We get it all: a blog, a piece of software that allows us to create music Mash-ups a la Dangermouse’s Grey Album, they even throw in some podcasts for good measure.

I love it. Ford is a past client and I am doing work for Sony now. The program they have put together is great – spontaneous, web enabled, wireless, citizen media, PR… cant wait to see how this turns out.

Four Docs from PSFK

http://www.psfk.com/2005/08/four_docs.html

Thanks to PSFK for the following:

Four Docs is launched today as a new opportunity and avenue for anyone to make and upload a four minute documentary. Hosted and run by Channel 4 (in the UK) the website also offers many guides for people planning on making their documentary.

FourDocs represents the democratisation of documentary film-making. Everyone can join in, not just those who are already making films.

This fits in with the citizen media ideas I have rolling thru my head and the really cool stuff Marc Canter and JD Lasica have been sharing on their blogs.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia Guest-blogging Lessig.org

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003067.shtml

Jimmy Wales (who founded the wikipedia and my buddy Ace met at TED Global) is guest-blogging

I will be presenting the ten things over the next ten days, but I will let you in on a little secret. I haven’t finished the list. In true collaborative style, I want to invite you to participate in the finalization and formation of the list.

Watch this space.

FUN – AIMFight.com

Found this through my buddy Ace:

http://www.aimfight.com/

Why Fight?

What can fighting really prove? Using a complicated algorithm, AIM® Fight crawls through the depths of the Internet to answer the all-important question that plagues us all: How popular am I right this second?

How do I win?

Your score is the sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees. This means the score is constantly changing, and the winner of the battle will constantly change with it.

This is a blast. FUll disclosure – AOL is a client.

Cool – AlwaysOn conference archive

There were three conferences I wanted to attend this year – Gnomedex, Reboot and AlwaysOn.

Gnomedex rocked (see my posts in June)
Reboot – missed it, but I am definitely going next year
AlwaysOn – missed it thanks to crushing amounts of new business (I know, a lot of companies wish for problems like that).

Check this out from AlwaysOn – http://www.alwayson-network.com/ao2005/

They have an archived webcast of the event. Now I would prefer it if they offered the whole event as a bittorrent download (once again, reinforcing the use of bt for something other than downloading pirated TV), but the fact that they put it out there is great.

In a similar vein, Doug Kaye from IT Conversations has recently talked about creating a non-profit archive of conference audio… check out the post here.

Apple’s Moves – curiouser and curiouser

PBS | I, Cringely . July 14, 2005 – More Shoes

As usual, Cringely lays out a completely plausible and clear theory on Steve Jobs moves with Apple, RE: Intel and Clickstar.

See, we’re back to Apple. As I have written in previous columns, Apple is working on its own movie download service (HD movies at that!), and I believe that service and ClickStar are one in the same.

Good pricing is not enough reward for Steve Jobs kicking IBM in the corporate groin at the behest of Intel. Let’s guess, then, that not only will ClickStar morph into ITMS, but that Intel’s “digital home entertainment devices” will be ITMS-compliant. No Microsoft, no Real, just H.264, FairPlay, and something behind Door Number Three, where we’ll find yet another shoe.

This third shoe is Apple’s closeout sale on the iPod Photo, which is suddenly and inexplicably $150-off all over town. Get ready for the Video iPod, which will presumably be available from more than just Apple. HP is already on board and these clues suggest Intel is likely there, too.

I am not a MAC fanatic, but Cringely makes it sound so realistic that I almost want it to happen.