Can GTA 4 drive me across the digital divide?

I’ve recently taken on a project to create a personal profile page for the hero of a popular video game that will be posted on social networking sites. I probably haven’t logged more than two hours total gaming time in my life.  Publicly, I follow the game industry for professional and academic reasons. Privately, I’m one of those old pharts who just doesn’t get it.

But thanks to my new assignment, and my perpetual fear that I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and be declared professionally obsolete, I’m going to force myself across this generational digital divide by playing Grand Theft Auto 4.

Grand Theft Auto 4, (GTA 4) one of the most successful and controversial video games to date, went on sale at midnight and is expected to ka-ching over $400 million in sales this week.  Previous versions of the game raised alarm from content watchdogs about the story line, in which players take the role of a East European immigrant who steals cars, shoots cops and beats up prostitutes.

GTA 4 sells for $60 and its success is more evidence of the paradigm shift in the entertainment industry.  Only 7 movies have grossed more than $400 million, and none of them in the first week of release.  Game software sales are up 63 percent and game console sales up 46 percent over this time last year. Hollywood is looking on with envy.

Today’s NY Times quotes males in the game’s core demographic of mid-teens to mid-twenties as saying that, if it came down to choosing priorities, they’d sooner give up their cell phones than forego GTA.   For them, it’s not a question of  ‘Can I afford it?’ but of “How soon can I get it?’

It’s hard to imagine even the most hard core Star Wars fan making a comparable sacrifice to buy a movie ticket.  The article also quotes  game industry analysts and business school professors as saying that the game industry seems to be recession proof, and speculating that it’s thriving in hard times because of the escapist, and addictive, nature of the gaming experience.

My sons, ages 18 and 22 are life-long gamers and have tried many times, in vain, to get me engaged.  Despite my natural escapist, addictive tendencies, I’ve never come close to playing any game a second time. They will surely score a copy of GTA 4 this week, and I’m giving myself the assignment of spending at least several hours playing it.

If I have to shoot a cop and beat up a prostitute to stay current, well, it’s a living.

Podcast review: When is a podcast not a podcast?

I play acoustic guitar and have been thinking about how to incorporate music into podcasts in more integral ways than the catchy intro and exit stings we lift from Garageband. The first result to turn up under a search for “acoustic music podcasts” was a winner called “The Acoustic Version of the Hits, the Unknowns, the Covers, and the Originals.” t’s like a podcasting version of MTV’s “Unplugged.”

The home page offers a menu of four categories: Originals, Covers, Humor and Lessons. The format includes text previews of featured performances along with the YouTube videos. I give it high marks for offering a variety of styles and artists in a format that’s easy to surf and sample. One of the headaches, or should I say ear-aches, of surfing music performances on YouTube is that there’s usually no way of telling if a video is going to be of listenable quality until you invest at least 30 seconds in it. More often than not, even videos of well-known artists turn out to be crap shot on a fan’s cell phone.

One of the great things about The Acoustic Version is that they’ve addressed the crap problem by being an old-fashioned gatekeeper. They’ve done us the great favor of weeding out the crap. The quality of the videos I sampled were perfectly adequate, which passes for excellent by Internet standards. The Goggle ads are relevant to musicians. Even the guitar lesson on how to play George Harrison’s arrangement of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was good instruction that even beginners could follow.

The podcast part of this package consists entirely of the music performances, and, alas, the audio of these do not appear to be downloadable for obvious copyright challenges, since many of the videos are covers of published songs. Which raises the question: does podcast audio have to be transferable to a device other than my computer for the content to be technically be a podcast?

Summary of 2 Blogs and 2 Podcasts

Blog: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/

A parody of what Steve would blog about if Steve blogged. I didn’t laugh once, but I am impressed that it’s become “a Forbes.com Site, and features advertising from Canon.

Blog: Breaking News and Opinion on the Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-blog

Technorati listed this as the current “most popular blog” so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I counted 19 blogs posted on one day, covering all the topics you’d expect from a Huffington blog roundup. The writing here seems a notch above typical blog quality. This would be a good first stop for left-leaning readers who want to arm themselves daily for anything that might come up around the water cooler.

Podcast: Free Talk Live
http://freetalklive.com/netcast.xml

You can take control of the airwaves – just call the toll-free number. This is a libertarian podcast with two co-hosts who do a good job of letting the callers drive the show. I like how they’ve hit upon filling a very distinctive niche – providing a forum for Libertarians, who typically get cut off after 30 seconds on mainstream radio call-in shows, to go on at length.

Podcast: Diggnation
http://digg.com/podcasts/Diggnation/954839

Ranked at the current most popular podcast on Digg. I’d heard of these guys as the big podcasting success story. Production quality in the current episode is surprisingly poor, with one guy sounding like he’s inside a 55-gallon drum. They spent the first two minutes yammering that they’ve been nominated for a Webby. Banal banter, wit-free opinions and obnoxious sound effects. If this is all it takes to make a podcasting hit, excuse me while I quit my day job and find a kazoo.

Blogs and Podcasts I’m Following

Blogs: Wall Street Fighter <http://www.wallstreetfighter.com/>

The taglines for this blog is “Insider News From the Outside.” and “The Funny Side of Trading.” I found it doing in a search for “Humor in Business,” to see if there are any other blogs or podcasts attempting to be funny about business and finance (so far, this is one of the few blogs and I’ve found no podcasts with an approach similar to my concept for “Where’d the Money Go?”)

Advertising Age: Garfield, the Blog <http://adage.com/garfieldtheblog/>

Bob Garfield is a venerable critic for Advertising Age magazine and is co-host of NPR’s On the Media. I have a bad habit of letting weeks go buy without paying close attention to what is happening in what is still my fundamental profession — advertising — and I can count on Garfield to keep me current.

Podcasts:

Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter for all self-promoters, from the timid to the fearless.”

The tagline is “Zen marketing for all self-promoters, from the timid to the fearless. Heidi Miller, a successful small-business guru/public speaker has been producing this podcast for 4 years. She seems to do a comprehensive job of giving sound advice to small businesses on how to leverage new media.

Slate Culture Gabfest

Steven Metcalf, Slate’s Critic-at-Large, Julia Turner, Slate’s Culture Editor, Dana Stevens, Slate’s Film Critic had an interesting, civilized discussion on “The viability of personal virtue” relevant in recent news stories on global warming, ethics failures in the travel writing industry, and Errol Morris’s latest documentary about Abu Gharaib prison. I liked that the show had an umbrella theme and managed to cover diverse and current cultural ground while staying under it. They made me want to tune in to hear what they take on next.

Curb Your Podcasting Enthusiasm

An expected side-effect of taking the Podcasting in Business class is that I’m more keenly than ever on the lookout for opportunities to propose to my clients that they launch a business-related podcast. Fortunately, I’ve learned to restrain my tendency to get excited about new technology-enabled marketing tactics and recommend them to everyone I meet — an impulse I think of as “when you have a shiny new hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

I leaned my lesson about a year ago while developing branding and web content for a company which shall go nameless, which provides market intelligence to government contractors, including bid announcements, competitor activity, and contact information on the decision makers. One project was to write series of educational web pages to help new and inexperienced contractors get started on the “How-To’s” of bidding and winning government contracts.

My source for this information was to be one of the company founders, whom I’ll call Fred. To download the info from Fred’s brain, I proposed that I record a series of interviews with him. Here’s where my enthusiasm got ahead of me:

Hey, since I’m recording these interviews, I reasoned, why no do it with an eye to slicing and dicing them up into podcasts? The client liked my argument that contractors will appreciate being able to get the content without have to sit still long enough to read it. They especially loved the idea of “multi-purposing” the interviews, which I said, would give them better ROI on the cost of Fred and I having these conversations.

I was about to produce my first podcast! I bought a few lapel mics and a small mixing device to enable me to record the interviews into Garage Band through my Mac laptop. My business is ahead of the curve, I thought. I imagined having a lucrative Podcast Division within months. Then I had my first interview with Fred.

It was in a company conference room with a loud fan. The first topic was, “Completing the necessary registration to qualify to bid on government jobs.” Fred had a monotone that could stop a runaway locomotive. Listening to the recording of our interview, the only sign of life I could detect was the edge of desperation in my voice as I tried in vain to get Fred to lighten up, get off the company script and convey some excitement to “our listeners” about the opportunities that lay beyond the process of filling out all the paperwork he was talking about. Fred did digress from the company line a few times, but only to tell mildly sexist jokes. In a monotone.

Lesson learned: Before you get a client, and yourself, all excited about having a podcast, make sure that you have something interesting to say and interesting people to say it. And no loud fans. I’m now considering proposing a podcast to a client that makes an email archiving solution, but before I say a word, I’m putting thought into topics, talent, production logistics, promotion tactics and budget. To be continued, I hope.

Where’d the Money Go?

Today’s title is potentially that of weekly entertainment podcast, a kind of “Daily Show” or SNL “Weekend Update” news spoof that focuses on issues of business and personal finance. The intro might go like this:

“What’s in your wallet? If your answer is ‘Nothing!’ then join us for ‘Where’d the Money Go?’ a weekly roundup of business news from the front lines of the Bush economy.”

The biggest challenge of executing this concept is obvious: coming up with enough funny material to fill at least five minutes a week. This material could be standard news fare delivered by the shows anchorperson, me most likely. News items such as:

“With the price of rice tripling over the past year, Kellogg today announced the layoffs of two of its most venerable employees, Snap and Crackle. Upon learning that Rice Krispies would now only make the sound of ‘Pop,’ nervous principals across the country immediately banned the cereal from school cafeterias.”

“The student loan industry is feeling the squeeze of the current credit crunch, and many students are scrambling to find money for tuition. The White House came to the rescue today with a proposal to provide low-interest loans to students who agree to work in low-paying public service jobs for two years after graduating. Students who qualify could borrow up to $50,000 over four years. Upon graduation they will work as housekeepers, gardeners, chauffeurs and nannies for strapped hedge-fund managers who have been forced to cut back as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis.”

The other staple feature of this format would be interviews with real or fictional business news makers and personal finance gurus. If anyone knows of this concept being executed elsewhere please point me to it.

To Love, Honor and Display

This blog has at least four reasons to exist:

1) It’s a requirement of the Podacasting class;

2) It gets me to pay closer attention to how podcasting is being used by human beings in general – which I can write about here;

3) It gets me to look at and think about business-related applications that I can suggest (and sell to) my clients – which I can write about here;

4) It gets me to think about potential formats for my personal podcasting project, which I could write about here, as well as produce and post experimental comps of.

This week’s most interesting application of blogging and podcasting by humans was reported in The NY Times about angry ex-spouses airing dirty marital laundry in blogs, podcasts and web videos. A chilling example is a video posted on YouTube by playwright Tricia Walsh Smith in which she directly addresses the camera about the dirty deeds of her estranged husband, Philip Smith, the head of the Schubert theater organization.

“Oh, and another thing,” Tricia tells us as casually as if we were all sitting in circle at a meeting of her divorce support group. “We never had sex. Philip told me it was because he had high blood pressure. And then I found his Viagra, porn movie and condoms…”

What is obviously great therapy for the aggrieved party dumping their grievances onto the Internet can be painfully embarrassing for the other spouse,regardless of whether they are guilty as charged. The article notes a estimate by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that more than one in ten adult Internet users in the US now have blogs, and that increasing numbers are using them to tell their side of relationships gone bad. Spouses who have sued to stop the public rants have thus far received no comfort from the courts. Apparently, the only way to fight back is to post your own side of the story online , but the only realistic hope of winning an audience or evening the score is to respond in kind, i.e., make your defense as salacious and revelatory as your spouse’s original accusations.

Surely, prenuptial agreements of the rich and famous now have standard clauses prohibiting online exposés as a condition of any financial settlement. But the trend raises the specter of spouses amassing embarrassing video snippets and recorded sound bites whenever they’re feeling at all unhappy and filing them in a “just in case” vault of media assets. Will any of us dare clown in front of video camera again? And forget about even letting a Polaroid camera into the bedroom. On the other hand, if everyone thinks that their any marital move could turn up on YouTube, it could having the effect of keeping us on our best behavior, for better or for worse.

The New Way Out of the Chorus Line

One of the most revolutionary consequences of digital media is the shift of production and distribution capabilities from the traditional media gatekeepers to the People. We ordinary schmoes who used to exclusively sit in the audience now have new roads to publishing or entertainment success, whether that’s defined as having an audience wider than our friends and family, or actually generating income from blogging, music, video or creating an entertainment personality.

One of the more inspirational examples of the latter was recently pulled of by the son of a professional colleague of mine. I’m not at liberty to disclose the details, but this 30-something individual had been teaching science in New York city high schools for several years when he began creating vodcasts for a How To/DIY website for negligible remuneration. In the process, he developed a quirky, entertaining persona that might be described as Bill Nye the Science Guy for the YouTube attention span. His vodcasts became the most popular feature on the site, and as they say in show biz, one thing led to another, and the vodcaster landed a contract to produce a pilot series for a popular cable channel. This is the classic Cinderella story 2.0 that every band and self-proclaimed comedian on My Space and YouTube dreams of, and points to whenever parents or spouses show any impatience with their career path. And point to it they should, because it’s a great example of the democratization of opportunity that digital media is enabling.

Death by Blogging

The front page story in last Sunday’s NY Times about the recent fatal heart attacks of two popular technology bloggers, Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant, and the growing consensus among professional and wannabee bloggers that the 24/7 workstyle is hazardous to their health, helped me succinctly sum up why I’ve thus far avoided starting a blog or podcast: The last thing I need is another relentless writing deadline. As a self-employed advertising copywriter and creative director, I should have been blogging for years now, adding the mantle of thought leadership to my brand, as we say. Whenever I’m asked why I, of all people, don’t have a blog, I say that blogs are like puppies, and that I don’t want to start one unless and I’m prepared to commit to the care and feeding thereof. Then I usually add a skeptical remark such as “And who the hell is reading all these digital Dear Diary entries anyway?” A big part of my blogging reluctance is that the dash-it-off-and-publish-it approach that regular blogging requires is anathama to my professional grooming. Advertising copy involves painstaking word choice, reviews, revisions, tweaking conjunctions in headlines, focus-grouping three-word taglines, taking the comma out one day and putting it back the next. The idea of dashing-off and publishing anything just seems like a bad idea to me, like shaving in the car on the way to a job interview. But now that I’m required to blog for the business podcasting class, I shall seize the opportunity to get over my fussy self. No editors, clients or gatekeepers of any sort to reject, revise or otherwise stomp on my prose. What’s not to like? Actually, my opening sentence above seems a bit long… Next: a podcasting tale with a much happier ending than the NY Times story.