This article from io9 is an interesting discussion of the pros and cons of Alternate Reality Gaming campaigns and how they work (or don’t). Many of the points they make are things I think I agree with, specifically about relying too much on puzzles and schwag and not enough on compelling storytelling.

Here’s some key quotes:

Lost is running an ARG at Comic-Con this week where the fictional Dharma corporation tries to recruit new employees, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles had a tie-in ARG that was quite artful in which employees of the Enitech Corporation discover a camera that takes pictures of the future and predicts the rise of the machines.

One reason I liked the Sarah Connor Chronicles ARG so much was that it actually functioned as its own, compelling story. It was almost like the Heroes webisodes – stories set in the same universe as their parent story, but shorter and with a lower budget. The Dark Knight ARG, on the other hand, felt like it really was just advertising with a few perfunctory interactive bits thrown in.

Well I’m glad the author dug our work and I can’t complain about having our project called “artful.” He makes some good points and I’m glad this discussion is going on now. ARGs are walking the fine line between art, entertainment, and advertising, so it’s important to start pushing these questions out there.

Read more HERE.

Join the conversation here .  I’m with Tim Kring, creator of Heroes today and Thomas Tull, CEO of Legendary Pictures who made Batman the Dark Knight.  I’ll have them weigh in .

I started a tradition back then, when we were 6 months old.  I used to record a call with someone interesting for the length of my drive to work.  This one with Mark Wallace, which dove into Taxation of Virtual Transactions and Second Life’s population and economics, was awesome. BTW, back then Mark was writing the blog 3Pointd.com .  He’s now the CEO of a very ambitious and cool company releasing something revolutionary soon.

I ended up only doing 7 of these Roadcasts.  Here they are.

This is close to my heart because my son Theo turned 4 this week. His grandpa bought him a Playmobil Castle, which only took me 4 hours to build.

Anyway, with all the interest in kid’s virtual worlds recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a kid imagines as they’re playing with toys and dioramas. Maybe something like this if they’re lucky. It’s such an epic that there’s also a “The Making of Barbarian”, which is also done in stop motion animation with Playmobil figures. Genius.

If you haven’t heard of the obscenely popular machinima short series called “Divas“, then you my friend have been missing out. Now, you could rush over to the site to check out all the episodes, or you could join us on Friday night for a 3 hour marathon at the New Globe Theater! We plan to stream all six episodes back to back and have a Q&A session for all machinimaists (is that a word? help me out!) out there. Best of all? Phaylen, Kit & Evie have agreed to allow an exclusive to this event: a preview of their latest project! There will be schwag, hot ladies and lots of laughs. While I’m all for going out on a Friday night, I highly urge you to stay in this weekend, dress to the nines and join us - it’s sure to be divalightful!

Friday, July 18th @ 6pm SLT – Millions of Us, New Globe Theater! IM Lyra Millionsofus if you are having difficulties finding the place!

As reported by Virtual Worlds News in March, we’ve been working to create spaces for Playstation Home the last several months. Today, we got a little shot of excitement, as SCEA CEO Jack Tretton gave a sneak peak of HOME and our work. Nice job all. I think I heard applause at 1:57. . . . .

[Edit 7/16] Here’s a better copy of the video from gametrailers.com.

The social and interactive web is going 3D in a big way and Millions of Us is feeling lively! We are thrilled to unveil a brand spankin’ new experience in a brand spankin’ new virtual space! The product may be new, but the names behind this experience are globally recognized. The product we are referring to is “Lively by Google” and we are honored to partner with National Geographic Channel to bring you the first of many experiences this product will offer. Today, we are launching National Geographic Channel’s LA Hard Hats into Lively by Google.

Eliana Sur as a Lively avatar - a feisty little buccaneer!

Lively enables users to visit, chat, and interact in a catalogue of 3D spaces, each space having its own unique style and experience. Users can customize their own space to add to the catalogue and share their spaces with friends. Creating a space can be as easy as picking a room shell, decorating it with objects from the Google 3D Warehouse, and naming your space. Integration with YouTube and Picasa Web allow users to stream video content and display photos right in their 3D environment. Evangelizing your freshly created Lively experience is important and this is simple as well. By adding a short piece of html code located under the room window, you can embed the space on any website, indicating this platform has great potential for viral content distribution. Lastly, and most importantly I would argue, Google’s scale and distribution places this product firmly in a category all its own.

Shrug : )

To inaugurate this new product, Millions of Us has teamed up with National Geographic Channel to create an experience in Lively based on the “LA Hard Hats” series premiering Sunday, August 3rd at 9 pm. The television series chronicles the heavy-duty work of a construction crew as they build an LA high-rise for nearly 2 years. Our interactive Lively experience captures the best features of Lively while immersing the user in the LA Hard Hats story. Download the Lively application, create an avatar, and come see what “Mud Men” and “Rodbusters” are all about by clicking here or on the embedded room at the bottom of this page! Then, grab a hard hat, some caution tape, a couple of barricades, and the LA Hard Hats room shell and create your own custom “under construction” Lively room. Or, you can just steal ours by grabbing the code.

Special thanks to Matt Zymet and Brad Dancer at National Geographic and Mel Guymon and Danny Parks at Google for all their enthusiasm and insight during the production of this project. Big thanks to Kess Quin and Bill Wrentmore at Millions of Us for development. It was an honor and a pleasure working with you guys.

For Inquiries:Mat Small, Media Director - mat(at)millionsofus(dot)com

Today brings one of our biggest announcements yet - along with our valued clients at the National Geographic Channel, we’re very proud to say that we’re bringing that network’s new series “L.A. Hardhats” into the just-launched virtual world, Lively by Google. We’re thrilled to say that we’re a participant in the Preferred Developer Program for Lively by Google, and that the L.A. Hardhats room is the first branded space in Lively. Given Google’s unrivaled stature in more than one of the overlapping industries that we operate in, this is an incredible honor. We look forward to bringing you more news about respectfully and contextually integrating brands into the Lively community, which will no doubt thrive.

I’m sitting in Mill  Valley recuperating from Wednesday’s surgery, entitled a “Left Side Lapiroscopic Micro-Discectomy”.  It means they cut out all the fragmented piece of my L4-L5 disc.  Apparently this removes the materials that are abrading my spinal and sciatic nerves.  Anyways,  I’ve been super uncomfortable and unable to move, so I’ve tunneled deeply into the web, which between iTunes, Hulu, Youtube and general weirdness, is perfectly capable as a long-form intertainment vehicle.  More on this later, but for now, here are some real treats.

First off, Orishas’ El Kilo.  These guys are Havana’s top hip-hop purveyors, and everything about it is genius.  Apparently they caused Castro to ask Harry Belafonte at a state dinner, to explain hip-hop.  After doing so (imagine that), Castro connected the dots and proclaimed “Hip-Hop is the Revolution!

Also, John Popper of Blues Traveler (who I went to high school with in Princeton, NJ in the late eighties), playing “No Woman No Cry” with Ziggy Marley.

And finally,  Tony Rice playing Norman Blake’s “Church Street Blues”.  My friend Tim Kring wrote to let me know that “By the way, that is the most famous dreadnought guitar in the world. Once owned by Clarence White.  He had the guitar hole expanded and it became a legendary guitar that made its way around to many famous players and ended up with Tony Rice.”  Thanks Tim.  Do you have a link for that?

Anyway, please enjoy.  I’m sitting here, physically not so free, but on the road to being so, and really feeling inspired about the possibilities of the year to come.

Also, if you have real Youtube musical gems to share, please put ‘em in the comments.

To Life!

AdAge has our CEO Reuben’s latest blog post up and it has provoked a lively discussion. “Has the internet failed to create stories? I think it has (and often begin my presentations by throwing down this gauntlet). Let me explain….”

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.

Hoo boy. Some days, the heat and light around next-generation press releases, effective communications with bloggers, and all the rest of it are enough to blind you and leaving you dripping in a dazed sweat. It’s important, but as is so often the case, a certain proportion of the self-styled experts in this field are, I might venture, all hat and no cattle.

Valleywag today chose to lay into one of my fellow PR professionals for an unfortunate misrepresentation: conflating social and business time in a disingenuous way. Now, I know work and personal time - and contacts - are getting very blurry everywhere; and that is certainly the case here in the Valley. But if you are going to extract professional or commercial value out of spending time with me, I will appreciate your honesty in characterizing the proposed interaction that way; and I will extend the same courtesy to you. In my experience, journalists, bloggers, and human beings of any occupational stripe seem to appreciate this no-bullsh*t approach.

I don’t want to be too hard on this seasoned and accomplished PR person - she appears to have done some interesting and innovative work - but look at the pitch note Valleywag printed. In addition to asking one of her blogger contacts for hotel recos - which takes a certain chutzpah, although it’s harmless enough - she asked him/her to spend “’social’” time with her. Yup, social was in quotes. So does that make it really social? Or a trojan horse for a pitch to be soft-peddled over candlelight and absinthe? The quotes say it all, or at least make an unsavory impression. There was a different, better and more honest way to propose this very interaction, but it’s too close to quitting time on the Friday before a long weekend for me to figure that out. There was definitely, however, a better way.

I’m all for greasing the wheels. As my buddy Steve Kerns has memorably said in so many words, “free sandwiches and beer help when you’re networking.” But as a businessperson - let alone a PR person - I have always found that the most effective business partnerships emerge when both parties understand (at least at a high level) one another’s motives and the possible tension between them. You see this in New Yorkers arguing about a restaurant choice. Self-interest is presented nakedly and accepted without judgment, and a mutually acceptable choice quickly emerges. This is incidentally one of the things I love most about New Yorkers (although you’re welcome to ask me again if you ever run into me at 3am in Chelsea).

For the benefit of any blogger or reporter contacts I may be so lucky as to have reading this blog: if I ever propose “social” time with you, it will be really social, and it won’t feel forced, and you will have met me in person before. In the interim, I’m happy to give you a great scoop or a creative pitch over a few beers I buy with the company credit card, we’ll understand one another, and it will be a nice way to kill an afternoon. Have a great long weekend - and enjoy your social time.

Sometimes the most amazing things happen right under our noses and we miss them because we’re not in 4th Grade.

Take a stroll down the aisles at your local Target, Walmart, Walgreens or Rite-Aid and you’ll notice an interesting phenomenon — pre-paid gift cards for as many as 26 virtual worlds. Let me try to explain what this means (if you have a 4th Grader, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs).

There are roughly 100 million people in virtual worlds at the moment and the vast majority of them are kids and teens. These worlds, which in general are rather simple looking, allow kids to hangout together on the web. Jeff Yang of Redpoint ventures, a prominent investor in a variety of these worlds (he was also the sole Venture Capitalist behind Myspace) likes to call these worlds the “New Mall”. Collectively, the kids in this “mall” are spending over $1.5 Billion on avatars, clothing, pets and the like. That’s real money on virtual stuff.

Now here’s where the cards come in. While these kids have a seemingly endless appetite for virtual goods, they don’t have credit cards. Even if they did, the stuff they’re buying costs between 20 cents and $5 — creating a problem when the cost of clearing the transaction is greater than the value of the item. The cards solve this by allowing a parent to buy their child $10 or $25 worth of virtual currency. The card company takes a fee off the top, generally somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% (nice business model, huh?) and the rest goes to the kid to spend at the virtual mall.

Now I’m guessing a few of you are wondering why on earth anyone would spend real money on virtual stuff. Let me try to explain this in truly simple terms, because I think it’s a really fundamental concept, no different than what goes on when we buy stuff in the real world.

First of all (and this is beyond fascinating), teenagers view their avatars, or characters in virtual worlds, very differently than adults. While you or I might refer to the avatar as “my avatar”, a teenage just calls it “myself” or “me”. Perhaps an equivalent for us older folks is that we’d never ask someone if they received an email from our “email account”, we’d simply say “did you read what I wrote you?” So these teens see their avatars as themselves, which makes sense when you’re spending over an hour a day communicating through that character. And when that’s the case, how your avatar looks is critical to the way in which one’s social status is perceived. So virtual goods become the markers of social hierarchy — we are social creatures after all (even non-4th graders) and that stuff really matters.

If you’re still thinking “This is beyond bizarre”, let me leave you with a little thought experiment. How much does your average pair of jeans cost? The truth is that if you bought jeans based simply on utility (in other words, discounting social perception to zero), you would spend $10. This means that the difference between what you really spend on jeans and $10 is the value you place on what other people think. In my case, it’s embarrassingly high — over $100.

Guess those 4th graders spending $2 on virtual bling aren’t so crazy after all.

Eric Caoili over at Worlds in Motion was among those picking up today’s big MoU staffing announcement: adland veteran Brian Dunbar, most recently with Goodby, Silverstein in SF, joins us as EVP for Client Services. Read all about it here.

• Flash
• iPod

Last Friday we had a BBQ out at Paradise Beach in Tiburon so, of course, I had to bring my camera along (reposted from my videoblog).

OK, so the seasons here in Northern California are much milder than what I grew up with in New Jersey, but there’s still an optimism and general sense of rebirth that happens every year around this time.

For me, this year is especially poignant — we’re pulling up on our 2nd anniversary as a company and looking forward to the next year. While we began as a company building presences in Second Life, we’re now operating in a wide variety of worlds, building worlds from the ground up for major entertainment companies, creating Alternate Reality Games and asking ourselves, “What do we want to be when we grow up”? Will we continue to focus on connecting the real world and the Internet? Or maybe go more broadly into Social Media? Or maybe all of the above. It’s Springtime after all, and these questions seem normal and healthy.

Second Life has a new CEO — as Mark Kingdon’s start date approaches, we’re curiously watching, wondering and wishing well.

I’m mostly happy to be back home — for the last two months I’ve been traveling at least 2 days every week. It’s so nice to be able to take a deep breath now and spend a couple months (semi) stationary. We’ve got some big announcements coming out in the next few weeks, so that’ll keep things interesting. Aaah Spring.

Any Summer predictions?

For over five years I’ve had the extreme pleasure of knowing an evocative, intelligent individual in both RL & SL. The first time I met him in Second Life, he could have filed an abuse report on me. The talented writer of the New World Notes blog (with a bevy of other writing credits under his belt) has written his first book, “The Making of Second Life“.

Please join us for a “mixed reality” party in celebration of Hamlet Au’s (Wagner James Au in meatspace) latest achievement!

Past
Thursday, April 24
5:00-8:00 pm SLT

It’s going to be a “mixed reality event”, meaning that he’s also having a parallel party in a penthouse in New York City! While he’s chatting with us in world, he’ll also be hanging out with friends and wine IRL and posting pictures of the party there on a laptop at the penthouse.

Contact me (Lyra Millionsofus) with any questions! See you tomorrow.

Given the ongoing conversations he has across the interactive advertising, social media, entertainment and virtual world spaces, Reuben is fast becoming an oft-cited authority at the messy intersection of these disciplines. MediaWeek’s Mike Shields today quoted Reuben weighing in on the implications of the recent reorg at Fox Interactive for advertisers pushing into social media. MySpace is obviously central to this discussion.

“Social networking pages are dynamic assets, where you are constantly tweaking what matters to you. That’s unlocking the value of social media.”