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Think of it: your average TV show is, due to government regulations, stuffed full of extraneous dialogue and plotting, when in fact the only reason anyone tunes in is to see good-looking actors pose jauntily for the camera. Some shows work hard to disguise it (Law and Order), some embrace it (Las Vegas), and some think they’re cleverly doing both, but aren’t (Heroes, season 2). But the fact remains: you can’t legally make TV without a writer coming up with a reason for Kate Walsh to be dancing naked for five minutes.

Now, because those very scribes are on the picket lines, all these shows have ceased production, and come January we will be robbed of our flimsily-plotted primtetime soft-core porn. What are we to do? Luckily, Wired magazine’s intrepid editor, Chris Anderson, has provided us with the ultimate solution: the Long Tail. And no, it’s not quite as dirty as it sounds.

The theory goes like this: your average episode of Lost (where Kate inexplicably strips to her underwear to perform some menial task like fetching coconuts from a tree) is at the peak of the graph, where all the “hits” are. This is where we are used to getting our sexy. This peak is going away. Forget about it. Move on.

Instead, ask YouTube to show you the Sexy Long Tail, and you’ll find gems like these:

Love in the Stone Age
It’s not the narration or the mind-blowing soundtrack that pulls you in, it’s the lavishly-designed costumes! This is what Al Gore invented the internet for! Oh baby!

Crouching Tiger’s Tail
This excellent montage demonstrates how the web has evolved from a place where you look at hundreds of pictures of beautiful women on multiple web pages, to a place where a select few of those images are chosen by a stranger and crammed into an over-compressed video to help heighten your enjoyment. If only ABC could learn to do the same, we’d have been spared Brothers and Sisters.

Coconuts
And what list of “sexy” would be complete without this gem?

Yes, the Long Tail of Sexy has a wealth of opportunity for those willing to sacrifice the odd brain cell to the greater good. Don’t take this strike lying down! Take it sitting down, in front of your computer!

Let us pray he sticks around for the duration of the strike.

Bastards. Those Bungie guys… what were they THINKING? Alas, poor Covenant… I knew them, Horatio!

The thing in the article at GP that doesn’t actually work for me is this:

More troubling by far are the long term implications of this action. Thompson apparently feels emboldened to invoke Florida’s public nuisance law against any video game he desires to target. That is the essence of censorship and the video game industry cannot allow it to continue on any number of grounds – legal, moral or creative.

I would have to say that the video game industry needs to let ol’ Jacky-boy have his fun, because the only thing that will finally shut him up, is for him to ruin his credibility so often that no news organization will print his name ever again (nay, not even when reporting his inevitable disbarment), and he can reflect upon his life with a lonely bottle of whiskey as the world goes to pot around him. Or something like that.

But my point is: don’t try and shut Jack Thompson up. He is his own worst enemy, and it’s much more entertaining to see him dig his own grave.

You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

It’s a good sentiment, but I wonder how much damage has been done. A lot of people said he should have said that at the start of the fiasco, so the statement almost smells like reading from a script.

I point the admins of Digg to my article on this very subject. It’s not just for small sites. Big ones geet knocked over with just as much ease.

I think it’d be fun for some MIT System Dynamics student to do up a simulation model of this phenomenon and make it public domain, if only so that other Web 2.0 owners can get a better sense of what kind of damage their somewhat-reasonable actions will cause them.

Yeesh.

Buried deep ‘neath my masters’ ruthless gaze,
My life, so gray, gone on too long without…
Brush past, don’t pause, just push me past this phase
Where all suppose my content’s beyond doubt.

And O! to break past all my hopeless kin,
To spend the day atop the pack at last!
Yet still, the movement first needs to begin…
And as I slip down out of sight, it’s passed.

Next time, devise a plan to dodge these traps…
Perhaps affix an ‘awesome’ in all caps?

I dedicate this to the poor victims of the Digg Triad Mafia, and would like to thank Reechard for first showing me it’s cool to be a smartass in iambic pentameter.
(submitted to Digg, despite knowing better)

I hereby nominate Ze Frank as the first professional internet celebrity.

Not an ” internet personality”. Not a “celebrity”, in that demeaning way you hear offline media talk about people on the web. I mean celebrity like Jon Stewart is a celebrity. Fame and respect and all that comes with it. And I hereby challenge the web to compel him to stay online, where he belongs.

The stinker of being an internet celebrity is that you have to be humble. If you’re too overt about asking for financial compensation for your work, you’ll get accused of “selling out” and lose your audience. It’s part of the territory. That’s one big element that keeps internet stars from sticking around… there’s no value in trying. A comment posted on the “Ask a Ninja” site made it clear that even the dedicated fans wouldn’t be willing to pay for the show. They felt entitled to it for free.

We, as an internet society, are being stupid, and it’s time we stopped.

Ze can’t ask for subscription fees because doing so would be poison to him. [This blog post is not condoned by him; I haven't even considered asking his opinion about it. If I were him, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot cattle prod*] But that’s HIS restriction, not mine. And I am quite happy to do something stupid. Stupid is what I do best.

Here’s my proposal, and you tell me what you think. I’ll peg a subscription to The Show at $3/month. That’s not a value judgement, just a gut feeling of what the market will bear. If we assume that between now and the end of Ze’s “year of The Show”, we’ve got six full months left, that comes to $18. My proposal is that we each send Ze $18 to show our appreciation for what he has been doing for us. He doesn’t need to give us early access, special features, any of that crap. This is us, the patrons, supporting our favourite artist.

I realize there are some people out there that don’t have credit cards or don’t have access to them, or just aren’t ABLE to drop money into things, even if they want to. So I propose a second element to this idea: proxies. If you have the ability to pay and need something done that you figure costs $18, post it below. If you can’t pay but can do any of the things you see in the list, do the work and that person will spend the $18 on your behalf. Features on a website, maybe a quick picture, anything at all. If you have a specific talent, post that below too and see who bites. $18 isn’t a lot of anyone’s time, and it’s the least you can do to support The Show.

Let me be ruthlessly blunt with the naysayers: I don’t CARE if you don’t like the idea. If you think Ze should HAVE to do the show without any kind of compensation at all, fine. Just don’t help, and stay quiet about it. But I’m willing to bet you spend more than $18/month on your cable bill, and none of THOSE people would have a second thought FORCING you to shell out cash to watch them for 3 minutes a day. Which activity do you want to condone?

Internet culture is not a joke, it’s not a silly imitation of what’s made in Hollywood. What we do here may be rough and low-budget, and it may never be “mainstream”, but it’s our homegrown style. The point isn’t to adapt until we conform with some foreign ideal, it’s to PERFECT our style until it defines our OWN ideals. That kind of work takes money. It’s time we stopped punishing our artists for the sins of Old Media. It’s time to start taking care of our own.

Pledge your $18, and let the era of professional internet culture begin.

Update: To be extra-super-duper-clear, this is an action by Ze fans aimed at Ze fans, with no input from Ze himself. It’s not a question of “you need to pay this to watch The Show”, it’s a question of “you should want to pay this because it’s the least you can do”. If you’re angry that you feel guilt-tripped about being cheap, don’t take it out on Ze. He’s not calling you cheap, I am!

* To this end, I invite Ze to call me an asshole in his next show, so that everyone can see what he doesn’t much care of the trouble I’m causing him. He can also insult my clothes if he likes. It’s okay. I’m not proud of them.

The mindset that you’ve only really made it when you’re on TV is hurting internet culture. It makes our brightest stars do their best to jump ship, and I’m guessing it hounds the backs of their brains, making them feel inadequate for being the biggest fish in a small pond. If I measured my success by how many hours of primetime I was on, I’d be depressed too.

The thing is, this isn’t a small pond. This is a big pond. This is a bigger pond than NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox have, because it’s international. Just because a major network hasn’t really jumped into this arena doesn’t mean it’s for amateurs. All it means is that they don’t “get it” yet. The big fish in this pond can be bigger, sure, but for the most part, they don’t promote themselves at all. Word of mouth is fine, but there should be banner ads and feature articles and everything in between. The audience IS out there, and if you catch it you’ll have viewership numbers so big it’d make a studio exec smack his forehead in dismay.

This is where the internet folks have to disprove the popular notion that we’re cheap bastards. We need to put aside the questions of artists’ rights, copyright vs copyleft, information wanting to be free and all that stuff… and we need to build our own media. It doesn’t matter if we NEED to pay for it, we SHOULD. If we don’t support our talent, our talent will leave, and we’ll be forever stuck a training ground for future superstars, without any superstars of our own.

Ze should offer subscriptions for The Show. $3/month would go a long way, and wouldn’t hurt anyone a bit. I’d be interested in seeing how much it would net him. I bet it’d be a lot.

This is MCM, emoting pointlessly so you don’t have to.

The secret to success in the online Pro-Am world is to harness the power of the Long Tail. That much I know. What I didn’t think of was how it all fits together. Take, for example, the price of the Pig book. When I got my initial pricing, I was expecting I would earn profit of anywhere between $0.50 and $2 on each copy sold. That was more than enough for me… I could win some and lose some, depending on demand.

But then I got an order for over a hundred books at once from a very cool online retailer. Thing is, the retailers need to earn a living off the book too, and they’re not so keen on being undercut by a large amount. I hadn’t thought that through when I priced the book. It makes perfect sense, and I admit I’m pretty stupid for not realizing it earlier. So where I could squeeze by with $12.99 per copy under the old system, I would have to essentially LOSE $3+ per copy if I wanted to have anyone else sell it too. (because they’d want a few dollars profit while arriving at a similar retail price… not possible if I MY flex is only $1 per copy)

Mwaha. That’s the kicker, isn’t it? So by trying to reduce my own profit at the start (and thus make a more attractive price for a prospective buyer), I actually removed all of my Long Tail aggregators! Not the best approach, especially since I’m sure they’d have helped me a lot more than I can possibly help myself.

Then on top of that, after really working it out, I realized I’m actually running a teeny bit in the red on the orders so far. Nothing I can’t handle, but not exactly inspiring. I suck at math, you see, which is why I write web pages in PHP.

So the moral of the story is… if you’re a print-on-demand author, you have to price for your most expensive run, and you have to add about 50% to your price if you want anyone else to resell it. If you sell it on your own, you get to pocket a bigger profit. And this way you get the internet super-search world working for you. If you don’t do it this way, as I said before, you are like me: stupid.

THEREFORE, the Pig book is now $18.99 + shipping. And all you Fundable.org folks who’ve been so noble so far… if you want, you can just buy a normal copy (saving $1.01, I might add), because all books mailed out by me will be signed! Yay! Utterly worthless graffiti on your copy! Oh, and I’m changing the license after the current run is finished to be CC-SA. Cause Crosbie convinced me I’m being silly.

I am very sorry to everyone for this up-and-down debacle… I’m hoping that being really stupidly transparent about it, you won’t think I’m trying to scam you or do something sneaky. And hey, maybe some day some other almost-author will be considering doing what I did, find this on a Google search and see the error of their ways. Maybe I’m useful after all!

I would like to close by saying that I really appreciate the unnamed super-cool retailer that put up with all my stupid antics of not understanding my own position in the print world, and I thank anyone that sent my link their way. You know who you are. Big hugs all around.