Check out the entire series - Absolute genius. And Australian too.

Technorati Tags: Great Writing, Lamp Posts

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In 1959, William Castle produced The Tingler, a B-movie horror film staring Vincent Price. Castle had earned a reputation as a showman with his previous films due to his crazy promotions, such as insuring the audience for $1 million in case of death by fright, and he needed to top himself. In his autobiography, Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America, Castle described pitching The Tingler to Vincent Price:

“The character you play has a theory that the ‘Tingler’ is in everyone’s spine. Usually, people who are frightened scream, and screaming keeps their ‘Tingler’ from growing. Judith Evelyn will play the part of a deaf-mute who runs a silent movie theatre. Experimenting, you scare the hell out of her. Because she can’t utter a sound — is unable to scream — her ‘Tingler’ grows, crushing her to death. You operate, remove the ‘Tingler’ from her spine, and keep it in a glass jar in your laboratory. Then it escapes and gets into the silent movie theatre. We’ll then make believe that the theatre is where the picture is actually playing. The ‘Tingler’ will attack the projectionist and then get onto the screen. It’ll be a movie within a movie. Audiences seeing it will think it’s loose in the theatre they’re in. We’ll put your voice on the sound track and after the lights go out . . . you announce that the ‘Tingler’ is loose in the audience and ask them to scream for their lives…. All hell will break loose.”

“Do you think it’ll work?” Vinnie asked.

“I know it will.”

The movie folding in on itself was an audacious gamble at the time, but Castle took it even further — he had every third seat in the theaters playing The Tingler wired with buzzers to give the audience a shock. He turned the audience into participants. If you went to see The Tingler, you walked in to see William Castle’s story, but you walked out with your own story to tell, because Castle turned you into a (minor) character in the Tingler myth. “The Tingler went into my theater and I felt it in my spine!”

This is a powerful way to think about constructing narratives online. Instead of thinking about how you will tell your story, think about how you can give people a piece of the story to tell.
This requires the storyteller to put the audience at the center, to give them an active role. It’s not something that comes naturally to traditional storytellers, because it requires ceding some control over how the story is told, but when done right it can be very effective on many levels.

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Lot’s of time left! Go to Brian Albert’s post on MyHome2.0.

Technorati Tags: Innovation, MyHome2.0, Animatronic Birds

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We have a tie in the Caption the Wedding Photo contest:

1. For best writing in a Campfire Caption Contest, 2008, the winner is:

Ball of Steve for “Hold on just a minute, Steve Wax just radioed from the previous post to say that he’ll be right over to join the pile.”

2. For most imaginative use of imagery from a Disney movie, the winner is:

Walt Jr., for his evocative image shown below.

Since we have a tie, I’m going to give each winner a $25 iTunes gift card instead of half a Nano. Just send your name and email address to steve.wax@gmail.com. And I’d also like to clear up one mystery. Who is “Training for ‘09″? — and is “Pratt Course Catalog photo shoot” insider information about the picture?

Technorati Tags: Award Shows, Campfire, Campfire Caption Contest, Disney, Gaming, Marketing News

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EDIT: SOMEONE attempted to change the picture on the site, so to make up for lost time we’re extending the competition to Thursday! Get ‘em in quick!

Best caption for this picture of Steve Wax wins a My Home 2.0 Crew T-Shirt!
Post your captions in the comments below.

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Last week I wrote about Paul Westerberg’s unusual release of 49:00 online, and how it wasn’t just an innovation in distribution, ala Radiohead, or a promotional gambit, ala Coldplay, but a piece of music in a format that likely would not have been released if it wasn’t for the Internet. I also wrote about the favorable reactions and the number one ranking on Amazon’s MP3 Chart.

Well, a few days later, 49:00 mysteriously disappeared from both Amazon and TuneCore, with no explanation. Today, a new track appeared, 5:05, and lyrically it suggests that 49:00 was taken down due to a legal squabble over the cover song mash-up that ended the release.

5:05, which is available for either $0.99 or $5.05, you decide, is an energetic tune loaded with spiky barbs that recall the classic punk rock attitude of The Replacements. It’s rock n roll middle finger to an unnamed legal team and an musical message to his fans about what is going on with 49:00.

I think this is a far more interesting example of a musician using the internet to release music and engage fans than most of the bigger stories getting all the attention, but this one doesn’t have an economic angle so it will likely be ignored, unfortunately.

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Update to my previous post: I think it’s interesting that such a raw piece of music is able to sit at the top of amazon’s MP3 album list, above the Mamma Mia! soundtrack, the new Coldplay, and all the other usual suspects. ABC News has a thoughtful review by Allan Raible, but more importantly, a member of Westerberg’s official discussion board has taken note of the number of guests surfing the messages (not just the front page but the message board, where the hardcore faithful hang out), in the past 24 hours.

And to continue the dialog, Westerberg got around to making some official back cover art.

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While Radiohead gets all the love for experimenting with the distribution and business aspect of selling music online, Paul Westerberg has taken the next step and released an album that simply wouldn’t exist without the ability to go directly to his fans. “49″ is an entire album in the form of one-long MP3, a noisy, self-recorded burst of rock n’ roll energy that violates the traditionally accepted structure of the “album,” and you can download the entire thing for $0.49 from Amazon.

Westerberg’s site contains the following message:

WARNING: DO NOT LISTEN WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE

THIS PRODUCT IS NOT FAULTY - ALL SOUNDS ARE INTENTIONAL AND VALID AS A WORK OF ART

There’s no track listing, some parts are snippets of music cut together with other songs, crashing in and out of each other, it’s chaotic and charming, brilliant and maddening all at the same time. Darren Hill, Wetserberg’s manager, was quoted in The Guardian:

“He finished it on Monday, sent it to me on Tuesday and it was out this weekend,” Hill explained. “It’s just wonderful that you can actually do this. The freedom an artist can enjoy these days is fantastic. Can you imagine me pitching this idea to a label?”

The surprise release is grabbing a lot of attention, (see Pitchfork, The Onion AV Club, The LA Times, Wired, Stereogum, and many others), but Jim Connelly over at Medialoper has an interesting take on the release:

Because its not just full songs, it’s also song snippets. Then its two songs playing at the same time, and excerpts from cover versions that fade in and out, and then, suddenly, I’m in love, what’s that song?

No really, what’s that song?!?

It’s all a bit of a mess, really. But that’s OK, because it only costs forty-nine cents. In a strange way, Westerberg has used the internet to bootleg himself.

Because it’s such a mess, you might wonder who is going to listen to it more than once, and then you realize that because it’s a nice big digital file, what will eventually happen is that his fan base will come up with consensus names for all of the songs, and song snippets, and the time codes for everything.

And that’s exactly what’s happening on the discussion boards at PaulWesterberg.com, where the new album is receiving overwhelmingly positive response from his fans, who are dissecting and discussing every minute of it.

Best of all, it’s rumored that Westerberg doesn’t even own a computer.

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I love baseball. It’s the perfect blend of nuance and number-crunching. GDIP, WHIP and BABIP. Deep flies to left field to score a runner from third, long leads off first that draw a throw from the catcher.

And then I catch the Home Run Derby last night. All sizzle and no steak, the marketing equivalent of a :30 spot in the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at anthropomorphic animals, beer-hungry fools, and women who bathe in peanuts to make men swoon. But I still prefer more compelling entertainment: the complex conversational sell, the pitcher who can induce the double play, the brand story infused with character and nuance, VORP over HRs.

So let’s enjoy Josh Hamilton’s epic performance (he really was mashing the ball!). But let’s also remember that his team, the Texas Rangers, still can’t pitch a lick and haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade.

For more interesting baseball content, check out this DIY segment from My Home 2.0. It features Ryan Howard of the Phillies (a monumental slugger) and a bat we hacked to measure his swing speed.

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This truck was spotted making deliveries on White Street. I’m not accusing anyone at Campfire of being a vampire just yet, but I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw Brian Cain out in the daytime…

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