I meant to say in my title: [Are candidates paying attention to this?]
Its a great communication tool, user friendly and everything, but the idea of it holding long term sway is far and away overated.
Politicans are slow to adapt, and myspace might not even be worth the time or effort to get involved with.
MySpace PING
In the past, vaudeville, the Broadway stage, nightclub acts, radio, TV, standup comics, foreign, art and independent films, shows like SNL and In Living Color, rock'n'roll and graphic novels/comic books have all been the "farm teams" from which Hollywood drew and co-opted new talent. Now it's the Internet. The usual gatekeepers will make the selection and the winners will get fame and fortune, while the also-rans will continue to post their videos on the web. It's already happening just this way.
Welcome to your nightmare:
. . .
The central message of Life After Television for the film industry is that the new technologies are targeted directly at Hollywood. Today some 70 percent of the costs of a film go to distribution and advertising. In every industry -- from retailing to insurance -- the key impact of the computer-networking revolution is to collapse the costs of distribution and remove the middlemen. In an information industry such as the movie business, distribution costs will predictably plummet. p 203
Anyone with access to the information highway will be able to distribute a film at a tiny fraction of current costs. Moreover, webs of glass and light will free the producer from the burden of creating a product that can attract miscellaneous audiences to theaters. Instead producers will be able to reach equally large but more specialized audiences dispersed around the globe. Rather than making lowest-common-denominator appeals to the masses, film-makers will be able to appeal to the special interests, ambitions, and curiosities of individuals anywhere, anytime. p 204
Just as digital desktop publishing equipment unleashed thousands of new text publishing companies, so the new digital desktop video publishing will unleash thousands of new filmmakers. The video business will increasingly resemble not the current film business, in which output is a hundred or so movies a year, but the book business, in which some 55,000 new hardcover titles are published annually in the U.S. alone. After all, scores of thousands of screenplays are already written every year. In the next decade, thousands of screenwriters will be able to make and distribute their own films. p 204
Of course what makes the Web attractive is that there are no gatekeepers — managers, agents, studio executives, or film-festival programmers — to get past. ...
All your gates are belong to us.
Gn 22:17 your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies
Newspaper sale$ decline should be blamed on the Journos
. . .
People who work at journalism full time ought to be able to do a better job of it than people for whom it is a hobby. But that's not going to happen as long as we "professional" journalists ignore stories we don't like and try to hide our mistakes. We think of ourselves as "gatekeepers." But there is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.
bttt