This topic is close to my heart for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, I care about it because I’m running a company that is attempting to use the Net to tell stories. As such, I often begin my presentations by throwing down the gauntlet and accusing the Internet of having failed as a storytelling medium. Secondly, I’m having trouble filling an Executive Creative Director position. Many of the likely candidates for this search bring with them impressive resumes from the interactive world. They are familiar with the broad array of technologies and tools that define digital production, but often have gaping holes when it comes to creating compelling narratives as opposed to beautiful websites or effective campaigns.

So let’s begin by asking, “Just what is a story?”. This may seem self evident, but bear with me. Rather than giving my definition, I’ll just use the one from Dictionary.com

Story (noun): a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale.

Stories also traditionally have a beginning, middle and end as well as a Who, What, Where, When and Why.

The Internet, since it’s beginning, has played host to an astounding variety of stories. The majority of these have been in formats derived from other media, either prose, animation or video. In the case of prose, the innovation came in the realm of hyperlinking, effectively using the Internet to provide deeper insight or back story without derailing the direction of a story line. For video, once broadband enabled the streaming of pre-existing content, a barrage of filmed content sprang forth, leading to battles over DRM and debates over what formats worked best and how to monetize this new distribution channel.

I would argue however that neither prose nor video is truly unique — in both cases, the content lives at a dedicated URL which is nothing more than a digital version of the magazine page or television screen. The big breakthroughs in each case have been innovations that allowed both prose and video to do more than just be played on the Net. Consider, as examples, both blogs and video sharing sites like Youtube.com. I would argue that blogs and Youtube are perhaps the killer storytelling apps to date. In the case of blogs, by simply putting simple publishing tools in the hands of the mainstream, a story with millions of authors has emerged. And from the readers’ perspective, this is very different type of story. We can begin by reading the compelling diary of an individual, deepened and made more interesting by the sites to which the blogger links and the comments left by other readers. In the case of of Youtube, it’s never the individual pieces of content that blow us away, but rather the comprehensiveness of the archive and our ability to jump from one bizarre video to the next, essentially visualizing a stream of consciousness.

If blogs and video-sharing sites represent the web’s heritage as a storytelling medium, then how do they fail and how might the future look brighter? I would argue that they fail because they succeed. What I mean by this is that while both work beautifully by being custom-tailored to the short attention span and interconnectedness of the Internet. Unfortunately, neither provides the polish and ability to hold a viewer’s attention that NBC and Fox’s recently launched Hulu.com does. So what? Well, creating great stories (regardless of medium) is expensive. This means content creators need seed capital which can be repaid either by transactional revenues from selling content (not too effective on the Internet) or from advertising (works well). But until the Net proves itself able to attract a large audience to great content built expressly for the web, advertisers will continue to be difficult to bring aboard to underwrite that content.

So where are we now? I believe we’re at a truly fascinating point in history where a bold group of content creators, advertisers and digital artists are seeking the Holy Grail of online content: the ability to fund and create large-scale stories that attract and engage large audiences. I would argue that these stories will take one of the following forms (and in many cases, a mix of all three).

Alternate Reality Games: Otherwise known as ARG’s, these have become very popular within the past few years. An ARG is a story that draws the audience in through mystery and intrigue and invites them to participate in unearthing clues to solve the puzzle. These ARG’s have been sponsored by brands ranging from Audi to McDonald’s and all the major movie studios and TV Networks. The results have been impressive but to date, the genre has struggled to reach true mainstream appeal because much of the viewing experience requires investing dozens of hours of time.

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games : Often abbreviated as MMORPG’s, these include games like World of Warcraft. Like ARG’s, these games tell stories in a user-driven, first person manner and are incredibly compelling.
Transmedia Content: This is perhaps the most exciting of all. Transmedia Storytelling refers to stories that are told across a broad array of media. A great example is the hit TV show Heroes, which in addition to its TV broadcast, has created as many as 200 websites, most of which allow heavy fan participation and collectively reveal and evolve storylines that may not appear in broadcast. The results have been staggering: the web experiences have delivered viewership figures rivaling or in some cases exceeding those on television. A recent Fast Company article gives a deeper look at the breadth of this trend in Hollywood.

As television audiences shrink, the desire of consumers to be entertained by stories will not. This leaves those of us interested in telling those stories with a fascinating and inspiring challenge.

For anyone who has spent more than an hour with me, it becomes pretty clear that I’m obsessive about finances. I’m a faithful reader of Barron’s, The Economist, and Bloomberg.com, to name just a few of the publications I build into my weekly agenda. I follow the movements of the Dow, the S&P , the Dollar, the Euro, and Brent Crude Futures (i.e. Oil), Gold, and all my investments with glee and trepidation both, sometimes simultaneous. At this point, you have only a taste of what it’s like to be with me for any length of time.

So it may come as a surprise to those that know me well that I’m a complete disaster when it comes to tracking my personal finances. I have no idea where I spend my money. This is mostly because I run on a cash-in/cash-out system. I simply stop spending money when cash is low and spend it when cash is high. My only saving grace is that at an early age I happened to come across Robert T. Kiyosaki, author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” with its single biggest lesson being “pay yourself first”. I’ve always put money away in investments before paying the bills or buying toys.

This however is no way to plan for the future (or taxes, see below). Over the years I’ve tried various pieces of software ranging from Quicken and Microsoft Money to budget spreadsheets in Excel (one in fact developed by my CFO father in-law that is more detailed than anything I’ve ever seen). None of them worked simply because I’m too lazy to input data and keep it up to date.

My lack of financial tracking all comes to a head when tax season hits. I have an extremely painful month as I try to figure out where everything has gone and come up with the money to pay my taxes. Every year I swear I will do something about it…. and I don’t.

Well, this year I did.

After some careful analysis, reading reviews, and research I’ve come across what may be my solution: mint.com. From their own website: “mint is easy, automatic and online money management. Mint.com connects securely with more than 5,000 US financial institutions” - including the ones I use!

Ok, so what does it really do? It converts all my spending from credit card, debit cards, automatic payments, and bill payments into one dynamic stream of data, while also converting finance notes into English text like “GOTBLUEMI8439, Vacaville, CA” to “Got Blue Milk, Photographs.” It gives you your spending trends. It automatically creates budgets based on your personal historical data and alerts you by email when you pass those budgets. In other words it does what I should have been doing all along. And the price is right: Free (it’s add/offer supported)

The catch: You have to give them access to your online financial accounts. This was pretty scary for me. I’ve not done all my accounts yet simply because I’m not willing to give them that much trust and I’ve used an anonymous email address from a generic hosting provider. The upside is that they do address the security issue head on. Plus the financial backers are deep-pocketed VC’s like Benchmark and Shasta. A question I would love to have answered is: do mint’s board members trust mint.com with their financial information?

I’ve only got about a month of data in there, I’m still living cash-in cash-out, but mint.com almost has enough information in there that I may be able to start making better-informed financial decisions. The big test will come next year at tax time when I’m running around looking to pull all my finances together. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

In the past 2 years, virtual worlds have received a great deal of media coverage. The Gartner Group predicts that by 2011, 80% of internet users will participate in at least 1 virtual world. Globally, sales of items in virtual worlds account for $1.5 billion.

About a year ago, I became fascinated by the almost complete absence of copyrighted material in the virtual goods market. This was especially weird given that the audience was largely teenagers with a provable affinity for celebrities, heroes and copywritten material. What I discovered was that legally, “virtual merchandise” had never existed as a class of rights and therefore belonged to the owner of the core IP (in some cases a recording artist, in others, a studio). As we struggled to think how to use this insight to transform this market, we also noticed that from a distribution perspective, the market was extremely fragmented; globally there are 130 million users split between some 60 different worlds. The problem this presents IP owners is that they would need to seek out dozens of worlds in order to achieve scale.

Today, I am proud to announce the launch of a company built to address this market, bringing incremental revenue to IP owners and virtual world operators while allowing the audience to aspirationally connect with the stars they idolize. We’re upping the ante in virtual goods by introducing “virtual greats” – premium virtual goods.

To achieve this, we have entered into partnership with the world’s most iconic personalities and characters. Starting today, we will begin making announcements about our exclusive license and distribution partners. The story will break in Variety in Hollywood, with a press release and general coverage to follow.

The virtual merchandise we create and market in partnership with celebrities will fall into several categories:

1. Personal Likeness
2. Animations and Signature Moves
3. Catchphrases
4. Clothing Lines
5. Furniture Collections

Most importantly, I’d like to thank all the people who made this launch possible. First my wife and kids. Second, my partner Christian Lassonde and all our colleagues at Millions of Us. Then, our friends and allies at Omnicom – Jonathan Nelson and John Wren. Then Gary Stiffelman, Jamie Young and Alicia Sydney at Ziffren Brittenham. Also Craig Sherman and Joe Hyrkin at Gaia Interactive. And of course, Mitch Kanner.

Finally, and most importantly, our leader. This is a completely separate company from Millions of Us. We searched long and hard for a great CEO, capable of building a game-changing company and leading it to large scale. Dan Jansen is that person. Prior to joining us, Dan led the Media and Entertainment practice at the Boston Consulting Group. He is dynamic, expert and lots of fun to work with.

This is going to be a brilliant ride. Can’t wait.