The Cat Ate My Blackberry

Summertime is flying by, no? Next week will mark round three of Blogger Book Club, during which the ladies and gents will be gathering to type about The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt. Quick, somebody Twitter about it!

But seriously, I'm expecting this to be a pretty fantastic down and dirty on the subject. We've been watching the performing arts community adopt (and in some cases heedlessly lunge and in others scream and kick) their way into social media/web 2.0 technologies. This book seems like a solid way to branch into a discussion of the wondrous potential and the scary, scary sinkholes we're navigating.

I would like to admit going in that I harbor some skepticism about the "time waste vs potential" here, but I also have to acknowledge that while I'm still on the the early side of 30, I'm came late to blogging and haven't waded into this pool much deeper than that, so I'm also a very inexperienced judge. A de.licio.us account here, a test run in Friendster back in the day, but really, I'm pretty innocent. Composer Alex Shapiro, however, has wrapped her arms around these applications and discovered all kinds of opportunities and successes, so I'm going to get off my jaded pony and follow her lead next week. I have a feeling my mind is about to get blown.

Related on both the music and social networking sides, the NYTimes reports on Mass Animation's recently completed short "Live Music," set to hit theaters in November. The 5-minute animated tale of love between an electric guitar and a violin is headline-making because it was built "using the Wikipedia model, with animators from around the world contributing shots, and Facebook users voting on their favorites," reports the Times. And talk about crowdsourcing: Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony's entertainment division, tells the paper that he hopes to produce a feature-length film the same way. I don't know how pro animators feel about this, but the people who contributed to "Live Music," 51 in all, earned $500 per scene and a film credit.

So the real money line in the Times report is probably this one: "The marketplace -- advertising, gaming and, of course, Hollywood -- is hungry for content, animated in particular, that is done in a faster, cheaper way. "Live Music" was made for about $1 million and took about six months to complete. Intel, hoping to peddle its new Core i7 processor to animation geeks, was the principal backer."

The Brave New World of creative commerce, indeed.