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links for 2010-03-26

• David Mamet's Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit | Movieline
  David Mamet chews out the writing staff of "The Unit" in a very memorable screed about how to (and how not to) write drama.

  The whole thing is written in caps - Mamet is screaming at his writers to use more finesse. Love it.

  "HERE ARE THE DANGER SIGNALS. ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

  ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

  DO NOT WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR AND HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU."

  
  
  (tags: via_DaringFireball david_mamet screenwriting tv rants)
  
  

for the new york times, a little step forward, a little step back

The New York Times is my favorite newspaper (hell, my favorite newsanything) and in spite of the fact that I have lived in the UK for the last year, it's still my first port-of-call for news. But for all the time I spend with the paper, I can't figure out their Web strategy.

Just two days ago the Times announced the launch of TimesCast, a daily Web video that would give viewers an insight into their esteemed newsroom. It's great Web-era thinking: we've got these bright people having these conversations every day, why not turn that into content? I love it.

And it's monetizable content, too - TimesCasts already have a major corporate sponsor.* But then there's this baffling decision: TimesCasts can only be viewed between 1pm and 2pm Eastern time. I should expect that this would go without saying but the Web isn't television. Why on Earth should users have to conform to anyone else's schedule when all the other content on the Web is available on-demand?

This dichotomy of forward-thinking ideas and self-sabotaging implementation is standard practice for the Times. On one hand, they've built an enviably large network of excellent New York Times blogs whose content never appears in the print edition - that's the act of an old media company that's serious about transitioning to the Web. On the other hand, they're less than a year away from putting all that great content behind a paywall and cutting it off completely from the viral Web.

There's got to be a Romulus-and-Remus struggle about how to handle Web content happening at the Times: each side reading the portents differently and fighting for their own interpretation. If TimesCast's implementation is any indicator, I think the wrong side is winning.

*Disclosure: the sponsor is a client of Ketchum, my employer. I have no connection with their sponsorship of TimesCast, however.

links for 2010-03-17

• Bing Advertises On Farmville, Acquires 400,000 Facebook Fans In One Day
  This must have been one hell of an interesting media buy. Zynga is a company to watch.
  (tags: socialgaming microsoft advertising facebook socialnetworks socialmedia marketing games zynga farmville bing search)

links for 2010-03-06

• It's Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans
  There's just a smattering of pages with over 100,000 fans, and at the time of this article being written in November 2009, less than 300 with over a million.
  (tags: facebook statistics socialmedia pr marketing graphs sysomos analytics techcrunch)

comments lol

After 3 years of abstaining, Yahoo has decided to bring back comments on Yahoo News. Yahoo's new comment system "has added filtering technologies to its comment streams, in order to ensure that higher quality comments are highlighted."

In honor of this momentous achievement in semantic technology, I present you with a randomly selected question from Yahoo News's sister product, Yahoo Answers.