By Mitch Wagner
InformationWeek
Fans of the TV show Lost don't need to limit their thrills to TV. They can turn to the Internet to hang out with fellow fans, solve puzzles, and speculate about the mysteries of the show.
Lostpedia is a fan-built encyclopedia where fans create detailed episode guides, biographies of the major and minor characters, articles speculating about where the series is going, and more.
Fans in Second Life can join SL-Lost, to hang out with other fans, chew over previous episodes, play
games based on the show, and explore a recreation of the Lost island in the virtual world.
And ABC, the network that airs the show, is getting into the act, too, posting tongue-in-cheek Web sites for the fictional airline Oceanic Air, the enigmatic Hanso Foundation behind many of the shows mysteries, and more.
Finding Answers On Lostpedia
Kevin Croy, a programmer consultant in San Jose, Calif., got hooked on Lost through his girlfriend. He went to the Internet to learn more about the show, thinking that there had to be a wiki that would provide information for fans looking to learn more. Croy was startled to find there was no Lost wiki. So he made one.
"Within 20 minutes, I installed MediaWiki, registered the domain lostpedia, and we were running," he said. MediaWiki is the software platform underlying Wikipedia; he chose that software because he's "amazed and fascinated" with both Wikipedia and the software underlying it, he said. He wanted to learn more about building wikis, and thought Lostpedia was a good place to start.
The site took off quickly, which Croy attributes in part to his hands-off management style. "I try to let the community figure out answers to their own questions," Croy said. "Some of the users like to give my opinion on content more weight than the average user." He added, "Lostpedia has grown the most when I'm sitting on my hands."
The Lostpedia
statistics page shows that the site has grown to nearly 33,000 pages. The site has received 141 million page views. It has 26,000 registered users, of whom 10 have sysop rights, for increased authority to edit and manage the site.
Croy said the site has brought him professional benefit in that it's connected him with many interesting people. The Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) contacted him about two years ago to study Lostpedia. "Basically, they wanted to study the way that a group of users collects intelligence, brings it back to a central place, and processes that intelligence, categorizes it and analyzes it and decides what's good and bad," PARC looks at each new episode as a big new batch of intelligence dumped on the Lostpedia community. "They want to see how they can apply that to the national defense projects they're working on," Croy said.
ABC doesn't leave Internet activity to the fans. The company has built several sites of its own to fuel interest in Lost.
The company built a Web site for Oceanic Air, the fictitious airline company featured in the show. Oceanic-Air looks like the Web site for a small airline, complete with a form for reserving tickets.
Another ABC-sponsored Lost site, Find815, purports to be a project by an Oceanic IT manager trying to find his girlfriend, supposedly a flight attendant on the doomed plane. And TheHansoFoundation.org provides information about the mysterious organization featured in the show.
All the sites contain clues and easter eggs designed to help users figure out background and direction for Lost.
The ABC Lost sites are examples of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), a genre that blends real life activities and the Internet. Players follow trails of clues, usually starting with a single Web site or newspaper ad, and uncover a complicated storyline. Along the way, they look for more ads and Web sites, get phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters, and more.
The ARGs started before the show aired, with ABC putting messages in corked bottles and leaving them on beaches for people to find, said Michael Benson, co-executive-vice president of marketing for ABC Entertainment, who heads up the Lost ARG efforts.
Benson said he and his team, which includes Hoodlum, an interactive entertainment company out of Brisbane, Australia, works with the creators of Lost to develop ARGs.
They meet over the summer and plan out the next year's Internet activities.
Benson says he only knows what's going on one season at a time, and doesn't know how the show will conclude. "By having enough information, but not too much, it helps us have a better strategy. As I'm asking questions, I kind of feel like I can take the place of a viewer and create things that will lead to something bigger," he said.
You wouldn't want to live on the Lost island, what with all the bugs and humidity and crazy people running around. But now you can visit the island from the comfort of your desk chair, due to the efforts of a group of fans in Second Life. They're building a reproductionLost.
I met with the club leaders of SL-Lost twice: First, in the sitting area of their reproduction of the Swan, the underground research station where much of the action of the second season of Lost takes place. They sat on the sprung-out couch next to the bookshelves and we talked over text chat. We were constantly interrupted by incoming visitors, testimony to the popularity of the new area.
The second time we met on a small platform, high above the island, where we'd have more privacy.
In addition to the Swan, the SL-Lost group has created a reproduction of the survivors' camp on the beach, the menacing jungle, Jacob's cabin, and more. In the Swan, an alarm goes off regularly and users have to press the button on the computer every 108 minutes to re-set a panel of numbers, just like on the show.
Unai Rodriguez, 18, whose Second Life name is Campetin Hoorenbeek, is one of the leaders of SL-Lost. He's a high school student who lives in the Basque region between Spain and France. The other leader is Karen Fuller (SL: Samantha Kuncoro), 34, of Syracuse, N.Y., a mother of three, homemaker, and part-time provider of respite care for families of children with developmental disabilities. They met through Second Life.
"One day he came, closed the island for everyone, and then the island and his avatar disappeared. He said he was very busy in RL [real life]," Rodriguez said in text chat.
After a month asking Linden Lab to reopen the island so SL-Lost could retrieve its digital creations, the company opened it for 24 hours.
Club members copied as many buildings and other elements of the landscape as they could, before the island shut down again, for good.
Later last year, the SL-Lost group, now headed up by Rodriguez and Fuller, built a new meeting room and, later still, they started to rebuild the island. The area is growing. SL-Lost is financially supported by Rodriguez, Fuller, and club members out of their own pockets.
See original article on InformationWeek
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RIYADH (Reuters) -
A Saudi blogger detained without charge
for more than four months after expressing pro-reform opinions
has been released, a colleague said on Saturday.
Fouad Farhan was detained in early December after running
an online campaign over 10 men arrested since February 2007 on
suspicion of financing militant groups, but whose supporters
say they are being punished for pro-democracy activity.
"I spoke to him and he's in good spirits. He said he was
treated really well," said Ahmed al-Omran, who published the
news on his website (https://www.saudijeans.org).
"It was surprising. After blocking his website, I thought
his detention would go on longer. It's good news."
Saudi authorities blocked Farhan's website
(https://www.alfarhan.org) earlier this month.
An Interior Ministry spokesman was unable to confirm
Farhan's release. The ministry had declined to say on what
charges he was arrested, but said it was not security related.
Saud Arabia, a key U.S. ally, has no political parties or
elected parliament, and many Web forums calling for reforms
have been blocked by the government.
An Islamist preacher was detained for nearly two weeks in
2006 for an Internet article that criticized government
ministers.
(Reporting by Andrew Hammond; Editing by Giles Elgood)
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By Kristina Cooke 1 hour, 50 minutes ago
NEW YORK (Reuters) -
While Isabella Rossellini enjoyed her
foray into new media with her short films about insect sex, she
is not sure they could turn a profit, given that so much
content is available on the Internet for free.
While a strike by screenwriters recently brought television
and movie production to a halt over the issue of Internet
royalties, actors and directors are also concerned about what
they should earn for work distributed online, Rossellini told a
panel discussion at New York's Tribeca Film Festival.
"It is unclear how the money comes back," said Rossellini,
55, who wrote, directed and featured in a series of short films
about the sex life of insects called "Green Porno" that were
made for the screens of cell phones, iPods and laptops.
Rossellini, who after years of acting and modeling is one
of the world's most recognizable faces, said it was easy for
her to be experimental with the backing of Robert Redford and
the Sundance Channel, but added she was still trying to work
out how to make money in new media.
Her 20 minutes worth of short films cost $70,000 to make,
out of which she paid herself $3,000.
"My agent won't like me saying this, but I have a lot of
time on my hands and I have money saved from my modeling days,
so I can work for very little money, I have that possibility,"
she said. "But I do feel sorry for people who try to make a
living out of this because the money's not there."
Rossellini said she was particularly protective of artists
given that her mother, Ingrid Bergman, was paid a modest salary
while working on the hit "Casablanca" movie and never saw a
penny in royalties.
After the damaging 100-day strike by screenwriters ended in
February, major Hollywood studios and the main actors' union
are now in contract talks that also feature the issue of
Internet royalties.
LACK OF CONSTRAINTS
Rossellini enjoyed making Green Porno so much that she is
working on a new series about the animals we eat.
"I'll be eating clam and then, when I'm about to eat it, I
say 'What if I were a clam' and then there will be me in a clam
costume," she said.
One thing she likes about new media film-making, she said,
is the lack of constraints on length or format.
"The reason I made them very short, though, is because you
are going to be watching them in a context that is more
distracting than if you are watching TV on your couch at home,
or a movie in a movie theater," she said.
She also found the interactive aspect of new media
interesting.
"The films triggered a dialogue with the audience, which I
hadn't foreseen," Rossellini said.
And, of course, on the Internet the key is to find a
subject that travels around the world.
"That's why I chose sex," Rossellini said with a laugh.
(Editing by John O'Callaghan)
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By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Business Writer
SAN JOSE, Calif. - An executive exodus from troubled online brokerage E-Trade Financial Corp. is continuing, with the chief financial officer's and general counsel's departures announced Friday as the company grapples with massive losses stemming from its hemorrhaging mortgage business.
The New York-based company said after the market closed that Chief Financial Officer Robert Simmons will resign on or before May 9, while General Counsel Arlen Gelbard's resignation was effective Tuesday.
The CFO slot will be filled by Matthew Audette, E-Trade's controller, while the company searches for a permanent replacement. The general counsel position will be filled on an "extended interim basis" by Russell Elmer, who served in that role for six years before leaving the company last year.
The company did not detail the reasons behind either executive's departure.
The resignations come just four months after Chief Executive Mitchell Caplan was forced out as Wall Street drove the company's stock down from around $25 a share in the summer of 2007 near $2 a share this year, while E-Trade teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.
Caplan left with $10.9 million in severance pay under the terms of his employment contract and was replaced on an interim basis by Chief Operating Officer R. Jarrett Lilien, who also has submitted his resignation.
The company's proxy filing from April 16 says Lilien's resignation will be effective on or before May 16.
Turmoil in the credit and real estate markets have hammered at E-Trade's finances, triggering huge losses, including $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter last year, and forcing the company to take a $2.55 billion cash infusion in November from hedge fund Citadel Investment Group to stay afloat amid chatter the company would be sold off or broken apart.
But there are signs the company is turning a corner, reining in the losses in its troubled mortgage portfolio despite ongoing distress in the housing market, and strengthening its core stock brokering business. It added 62,000 accounts in the first three months of the year, bringing its total to 4.8 million.
E-Trade shares rose 21 cents, or 5.5 percent, to close at $4 per share before the departures were announced. The stock fell 5 cents in after-hours trading Friday.
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Grant Gross, IDG News Service
The ever-growing Internet economy should be less susceptible to a U.S. economic downturn than many other industries, with more and more people shopping and doing business online, a group of commentators and businesspeople said Friday.
Although many segments of the U.S. economy are slowing, there's little indication of a downturn in online sales, with e-commerce growing four to five times faster than traditional retail, said Rob Atkinson, president of the Washington, D.C., think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. IT, including the Internet, is currently the major driver of economic growth in the U.S., he said at a Google-sponsored event examining the Internet economy.
While some commentators have worried about a second Internet bubble bursting, Atkinson suggested the first bubble in 2000 and 2001 may have been overstated. Many of the companies publicized as failures during that time frame are either still operating or their business models have become successful through other companies.
"The Internet is not a bubble," Atkinson said. "A lot of dumb, bad companies went out of business [earlier in the decade], but the industry continued to grow."
The Google event seemed to be targeted at commentators who have predicted a second bubble burst, particularly following the hype in recent years surrounding social-networking sites.
But the overall state of the Internet economy is strong, even though the percentage of Google searches for things like real estate and luxury goods have dropped off in recent months, said Hal Varian, Google's chief economist. Those Google searches reflect the state of the overall U.S. economy, he added.
E-commerce has continued to grow in recent months, Varian said. "Yes, we are seeing an economic slowdown," he said. "No, we're not seeing an Internet slowdown."
Online retail sales, not including travel, reached US$175 billion in 2007, an increase of 21 percent from 2006, according to Forrester Research. Forrester expects online sales to exceed $200 billion this year and exceed $300 billion in 2011.
While some kinds of advertising may suffer in an economic slowdown, Internet advertising may do better, Varian said. Buyers can measure the effectiveness of Internet advertising, and online ads are often directly linked to a place where consumers can buy the products advertised, he said. Internet advertising based on user behavior can also deliver more personalized ads than traditional mediums, he noted.
While Varian and other speakers sounded optimistic about the Internet economy, venture capitalist Michael Avon, of Columbia Capital, expressed some caution.
Venture capital investing between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008 was down about 10 percent in the U.S., he said. However, venture capitalists looking for long-term investments still see good opportunities out there, he added.
Still, Avon urged new companies to diversify their business plans and not depend on one revenue stream. Columbia Capital asks the Internet companies it funds to look beyond advertising for revenue or to branch out into multiple product lines, he said.
New companies should also watch their spending in uncertain economic times. "Just be incredibly careful with cash," he said. "Cash is the number one resource for a startup, and it's never guaranteed."
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Yahoo may resemble islands of Web properties, but the company is launching a renovation that could turn it into one huge platform. On Thursday, Yahoo announced its Open Strategy at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
"Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound," wrote Yahoo's Neal Sample on the company's Yodel Anecdotal blog.
'Latent Social Network'
Open Strategy invites developers to use Yahoo's huge scale, he added, "to write applications that build on our existing properties," such as Mail, Sports, Search, the front page, mobile, My Yahoo, and others. Yahoo-owned properties also include the photo-sharing site Flickr, the bookmarking site Del.icio.us, and the social-calendar site Upcoming.
Sample also noted that, with 500 million unique users spending 235 billion minutes each month on its sites, and with 10 billion relationships in buddy lists and Yahoo address books, the company has "a massive, latent social network." The new initiative, he added, will "bring it to the surface."
In other words, he told news media, Yahoo is not building another social network, but "building social into everything we do."
He described it as a "rewiring" of Yahoo by building structures that change how its pieces work together. He said developers will be able to take advantage of the "vitality" that will exist within this unified platform. An application written for a Yahoo property will be able to integrate with other properties and with the extended social network.
Example: Search Monkey
An example is Yahoo's Search Monkey, where developers can blend other data with search results so that, for instance, an Italian restaurant could have reviews and ratings along with the link to its Web site. Search Monkey officially launches in mid-May.
Charlene Li, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester, wrote on her blog that Yahoo's rewiring "is a significant step forward in the next phase of social networks and the social Web."
Social networks, she said, will at some point become "like air," with no boundaries between friends or work colleagues, regardless of where their personal network is based.
In March, Yahoo announced support for OpenSocial standards so that applications created by developers for Yahoo will also work on MySpace, Google and other sites accepting OpenSocial.
Li wrote that she does not see Open Strategy as a "Hail Mary pass" from Yahoo to counter Microsoft's efforts to acquire the company. She added that it's only a matter of time before Google, Facebook and other sites respond to the huge social environment and social driver that Yahoo can become.
"Open" has had a major emphasis by Yahoo recently. Earlier this month, for instance, it released an online advertising-management platform for businesses that includes an open set of application-programming interfaces, or APIs.
Also this month, Yahoo released a new version of its oneSearch technology for mobile devices, which it described as "an open technology platform."
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