Red66 Linkblog

Why ABC’s ‘Lost’ Is the Future of Online Media

ABC’s “Lost” has done more than any other media before it to enable interaction around a brand on multiple platforms. It is the first truly pan-media experience, and that holds lessons for content producers everywhere.
“Lost” is everywhere. It’s a television show that was born in a traditional analog world but came of age in a digital world where the very idea of “television” is giving way to the idea of ubiquitous, platform-agnostic video.

But the show’s presence extends beyond just video. Viewers interact with the brand on multiple platforms. There are Web sites devoted to translating the whispers heard on the show. People track the literary works mentioned. ABC has even created fake Web sites for elements of the show, like for the band Driveshaft.

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks.

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

How much is that Web company in the window? | News.blog | CNET News.com.

Companies have learned a few lessons from the last dot-com boom, the paper says. This time, buyers are looking for sites that “cater to niches but that have the potential for broad appeal.” Size is a factor, too; to be considered for takeover, a site needs to have 5 million unique visitors, the paper says.

My First Screen Kiss

Walking through Tokyo’s Ginza district one Friday evening last month I saw an extraordinary sight that will soon become an ordinary one: A businessman was talking into his keitai (the Japanese word for cell phone), holding it out in front of him rather than to his ear. Suddenly, smiling, he raised the device to his lips and kissed the screen. It wasn’t hard to piece together an explanation — the man was making a video call to his lover. His lover had asked for a screen kiss, or perhaps they’d synchronized one. It was my first glimpse of this behavior, and it happened in Tokyo, but I knew it wouldn’t be my last. Soon enough we will see this scene repeated in New York, London, Paris, Berlin and San Francisco.