From my vantage point, it seemed to this point that the weird ways of “the biz” eluded the tech giant – an oddity for a behemoth used to conquering all things. The question on everyone’s mind was: will Google acquire an entertainment company? A studio? Well, they’re obviously not that stupid…we all know the profit models for entertainment are sketchy at best, no matter the product. So it was with great interest that I observed the acquisition of not a company, but an individual – Netflix veteran Robert Kyncl, whose job as VP of Content Partnerships would solder that soft link between the two worlds of tech and entertainment. As the blog AllThingsD noted back in September, Google “needs someone who can talk to Hollywood and big media companies; many of the folks who have done that work for it in the past have moved on, including Jordan Hoffner (IAC), Dave Eun (AOL) and Tim Armstrong (AOL, too)” Well, they were right, in a way…but talking is only half the battle.  Content is the other half, and well, even these industrious folks mentioned in the article haven’t exactly emerged as the kings of content.

On the YouTube blog, Kyncl posted a blurb about the new program (which includes lots of celeb-owned or driven content proferred by Madonna, Jay-Z, Amy Poehler and more) pitching the program as:

channels created by well-known personalities and content producers from the TV, film, music, news, and sports fields, as well as some of the most innovative up-and-coming media companies in the world and some of YouTube’s own existing partners. These channels will have something for everyone, whether you’re a mom, a comedy fan, a sports nut, a music lover or a pop-culture maven.

YouTube thus far has been pretty much “something for everyone”. I gather then, that this is just a higher quality version of what we previously knew to be YT. If, as the Wrap says the program is “expected to generate about 25 hours of new programming a day on YouTube”, I wonder how that will differ from the hundreds of hours of unwatched cable programming I zip by every day on the remote control. I’m not sure how that ultimately challenges the cable TV experience, except that it’s free.

So this may just be an exercise in how much ad revenue so called premium content can command online. But of course I keep wishing that Google– which has the resources to innovate–would actually take on the challenge not only as a means to find the frontier, but also to speak to the growing shifts in our own consumption interests, which I contend here, may not be as passive as Hollywood wishes it would be, and as easy to solve with a pocketful of celebrities.

After watching the heavily publicized, highly anticipated premiere, I found myself wondering what the “historic cinematic event” really was. As cinema, it is not a film I would call historic in structure, tone or style. The Guardian‘s Jeremy Kay said it well in his review: “We get the picture. We’re different but really we’re all the same: waking up, going to work, giving birth, talking, laughing, weeping, fighting, coming out, eating, getting drunk, lying, stealing, doing and seeing amazing things, doing and seeing nothing. After about 30 minutes, the film ceases to be engaging and sensory overload diminishes any appetite for the experiment.”

As an experiment in scale I, like many defenders of the project, am similarly awed by the magnitude and ambition of it but unlike Wired‘s Jason Silverman the result did not seem any better because I knew how the project was created. “Knowing where the content came from — users from 120 countries shot footage on cellphones, consumer cameras and webcams — makes Life in a Day feel like an entirely new form of storytelling.” is Silverman’s reaction. In fact, I would have to say it suffers from the expectation that it should be a new form of storytelling simply because the clips were crowdsourced.

I would be willing to bet that if I sat down with a team of smart programmers and documentarians, we could create an algorithm that sources and and assembles a 90-minute montage of existing random YouTube clips in an order that would produce some very interesting and perhaps even innovative results. That is…if we are talking about innovation in the way we use YouTube. Otherwise, we are just talking about an experiment to see how many people will take on the challenge of being part of a prestigious project backed by a massive media/technology brand (Google), an iconic film/entertainment brand (Ridley Scott) and a stalwart art/filmmaking institution (Sundance).

So let’s cut through the hype and get down to why Google/Youtube, Sundance and Ridley Scott did this project. Branding. Pure and simple. I can’t think this project cost YouTube more than $1 million and that might be a generous estimate. Let me put on my producer hat for a second and break it down: maybe Ridley Scott gets a nice fee, say…$200K for his involvement, the director Kevin McDonald gets something like $100K for his 6 months of sitting with the editor; the editor gets maybe $75K for his work, and his assistants get a total of $100k for their collective work. Then translation, post-production sound and picture etc cost somewhere around $250K and the rest they spend on small marketing efforts here and there, getting us roughly under a million for an expansive world-wide brand campaign.

As marketing expenses go “Life In A Day” a small one that also buys YouTube some entertainment and “high art” affiliations not unlike the Guggenheim partnership (which I also wrote about) to “discover” video artists on YouTube. It’s a win-win all around. Ridley Scott and Sundance both desperately need to feel like they are relevant in the post-cinema YouTube era, and YouTube needs to somehow insinuate itself into a more premium market in the hopes that they can get a piece of that action soon. After all, YouTube’s value proposition isn’t getting more attractive as time goes on–the UGC wave will soon be a like a 1980′s prom dress.

My challenge to the folks at YouTube who come up with these marketing and innovations projects disguised as art is this: create a challenge that’s as meaningful and innovation-inducing in the world of art/entertainment/media as Google was in the world of technology when it was born. If they applied the same level of mediocrity to their technological innovation, I am absolutely sure they wouldn’t be Google. So don’t take the low road, Google–take these things a little more seriously if your contribution is to be valuable to an ever-evolving world of visual, interactive and cinema arts.

Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald has spent the last six months with his team directing and editing the 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries into a contiguous feature that will screen as part of the Premieres section of the fest. All of the contributors whose footage was used are credited as co-directors, and 26 have been invited to attend the premiere (full list below).

The trailer below is the first glimpse we have of the direction the film took in the editing. A single film from a Spanish contributor, the piece suggests a feel-good personalized world-scape as it were…but I will have to withhold further comment until next week. Watch the premiere here share your comments here – I look forward to your opinions!

Thursday, Jan 27th at 9PM EST
youtube.com/lifeinaday

In just a few minutes, the media onslaught began. And one can cynically regard the non-stop FoxNews and CNN live coverage as exploitation business as usual – after all, television news outlets have been known to run endless live news commentary on highway police car chases. But looking a little deeper into this event finds us inside a narrative with fragments across media, and a backstory embedded in the fabric of the web in a way that suggests a shift in how we understand these kinds of events.

It instantly became clear to me that we have entered an age in which the narrative of real time politics has gone beyond monolithic TV spectacle and entered into a complex mode in which the collective consciousness of a nation and a people surfaces with the kind of depth and breadth that was simply not possible in a pre-web era.

As I attempt to piece the fragments together, I discover an underlying narrative built around artifacts, not merely evidence in the sense of the law, and the justice to be meted for this crime but rather, a trail of moral imperatives, political certitudes and unspooled dogma. It looks something like this:

PART 1: AN INCIDENT

In March 2010, Gabrielle Giffords votes for the Health Care Bill. The Tuscon Sentinel reports that her Arizona office is broken into and vandalized.

On March 25th MSNBC interviews Giffords, and, she says does not perceive this as a serious threat. However, she expresses concern that Republican ex-Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin has targeted her publicly.

PART 2: THE CROSSHAIRS

Sarah Palin targets a handful of Democrats on her website using as a graphic representation, a crosshairs symbol that resembles that of a gun. Giffords is disturbed by this image and says in the MSNBC video that this is dangerous and may incite violence but the image stays up on the site.

PART 3: A RANDOM GUY WHO LIKES MEIN KAMPF BUYS A GUN

Eight months later, on October 25th, 2010, Jared Loughner signs up for a MySpace page, on which he posts his love for books such as Mein Kampf. Less than a month later, on November 19th, Loughner purchases a Glock semi-automatic handgun in Arizona.

PART 4: THE SHOOTING

A surveillance video in a Tuscon Safeway captures the shooting of Representative Giffords and the other victims. The video is puportedly on Youtube but quickly removed as is the identified shooters MySpace page (screengrabbed above).  Bystanders instantly document the scene.

PART 5: WHO DID IT?

Police apprehended and identified Loughner on the scene. Artifacts from his Youtube channel, are found, downloaded and re-encoded by several youtube users following the removal of his channel.

PART 6: WHAT MOTIVATED THE SHOOTER?

At this point, little is known about the shooter or his motives. But then in the hours following the shooting, Sarah Palin’s name begins to surface and her map with the crosshairs makes its way around the blogosphere. Many commentators see Palin’s map as a call to arms and a violence-inciting graphic that could be related to the shooting. The Huffington Post reports that the map is taken down from Palin’s site and a controversy ensues about why.

PART 7: THE AFTERMATH

A few days later, Palin takes to her Facebook page to defend herself against any association with the acts of violence by Loughner.

Within hours of her video, President Barack Obama gives a speech memorializing the victims of the shooting. He calls for civility, and his rhetoric addresses a the wide swath of political animus generated in the previous days. His message: reconciliation.

PART 8: POST-MEMORIAL

At this writing, Representative Giffords appears to be recovering if still in critical condition. The shooter, Jared Laughner, is in police custody, awaiting his trial. In the six short days since the shooting, millions in America alone have watched video coverage and commentary, read accounts and opinions, stared at the web artifacts online, and written hundreds of thousands of comments on blogs, youtube videos and tv and newspaper sites. A Google search for “Gabrielle Giffords shooting” yields 87 million references, and a YouTube search finds nearly 5,000 videos.

THE MAKING OF A NEWS NARRATIVE

The core of the narrative cycle of this story has played out in so broad a field that it is almost impossible to catalogue it all. But what we can observe based on the myriad ways in which information was both generated and revealed is that we are no longer in an era where a handful of journalists report to the public what they have observed or what they consider “the facts” of the story to be. For example, had the presence of the Palin crosshairs map not been widely blogged about, then the disappearance of the map may have sounded like an outlandish conspiracy to defame Palin. Even the sudden emergence (by a youtube user) of the nearly year old MSNBC video in which Giffords refers to the Palin map is a function of a narrative that refuses to be corralled by any one source.

As information surrounding the shooting surfaced from social media, news, and first person sources, what became evident was that the substance of this tragic narrative –the story itself, would become one in which America both plays out and questions its love for and discomfort with the rhetoric of violence. After all, these calls to arms are documented in many places – every leader, in politics or media who has ever called for or suggested anything close to assassination of a rival or other public figure can be found online and studied and/or played ad infinitum. In what other era has this been possible?

And in the broader political scene that is a backdrop to this chilling story, many narratives are aggressively being played out including the one that pits Sarah Palin as a presidential contender in 2012 against Barack Obama. In constructing this narrative, political operatives on both sides will use as their tools, the artifacts of this incident, now over 87 million strong, to build the fabric of the presidential history of America and the moral tenor of its people. Within the chaos of it all, there are a number of stories, not the least of which is the question of how our rhetoric can so seamlessly become narrative.

Naturally, studying the thread of this narrative made me question how it is that some of the most relevant moral and social issues of our time are patently NOT present in the more “constructed” narratives that we consciously create for television and film.  There is something here, inside this story–this wide-ranging “news” narrative that floats from Facebook to FoxNews to the rabid comment section of the Huffington Post and beyond which I think we ought to observe very closely. We are in an era that spins constantly – it is not the “web” for nothing, after all. Though the loom has become invisible to us with our tethered devices and time-wasting digital blithering, let’s not forget that we are weaving rapidly, frequently and without conscious regard for what the fabric is saying. Yet that fabric is where the handwriting of our story lies.

Over at The Consumerist, they offer an elegant, simple explanation:

The Consumerist / Meg Marco

The graphic indicates a steady and solid defeat of Blockbuster by Netflix. Looking at the trajectory of this “war” we see steady neck-and-neck growth from 2000 until 2002 when Netflix began to pull away, rising at what looks like a meteoric rate.

So let’s return for a second to the landscape of 2002 for a moment: Remember, it was the year My Big Fat Greek Wedding busted indie box office charts? Remember way back then, when indie film was booming? Friendster was a fringe player and MySpace had just launched. Social networking was pretty much just for tweens, fan-seeking indie musicians and pornographers.

As a population, although we had begun to rely heavily on the web for goods and services, we had not yet become reliant on it for social purposes and entertainment nor become tethered to it via every device imaginable…perhaps because there weren’t THAT many devices back then.

So why 2002?

The answer is simple: It was the year Netflix went public, raising $82 million and expanding its then mail-only business aggressively throughout the US, building on three new ideas to potential customers: 1) No Late Fees,  2) Home delivery and 3) Fixed monthly plans that included an all-you-can-rent option. These clever pitches eased the pain Blockbuster was clearly causing consumers and there were enough reasons to sign up for that free Netflix trial.

But that was just the short term game. It turns out that the infusion of cash didn’t just benefit their DVD-by-mail business; it helped them build the business of the future–streaming.

At that moment, what Blockbuster had which Netflix did not, was a deep well of Hollywood relationships which, as most insiders can attest to, is the key to any successful enterprise built around film. So it seemed that despite Netflix’s rapid growth, it would remain the underdog and there were many naysayers who felt Netflix was a clever young upstart that could never ultimately crack the Hollywood code. But by the end of 2002, this underdog Netflix (NFLX) was trading at about $9 a share and Blockbuster (BLOKA.PK) at $12.

In the years between 2002 and 2008 when Netflix launched its completely game-changing streaming service, Facebook was invented, YouTube came on the scene, and the whole new worlds of entertainment and engagement flourished. In those six years, Netflix rolled the dice on a DVD-free future, a model that would put them so far ahead of their competitors that it would be difficult to catch up.

Turns out Netflix was right. After their streaming service launched, Netflix saw a rapid incremental rise in the price of its shares that put it well over $40 by mid-2009 and into the $100s by early 2010. Of course their recent deals with major Hollywood players like Warner, Relativity and Epix have contributed to their current position–a fact that only suggests their growing weight within the business.

I look at the facts and wonder: why didn’t Blockbuster play a better game? They had money, connections and a very well-developed brand. And while I have no particular interest in the company itself (I might even join my fellow art-house video aficionados in throwing some dirt on the grave of the big bad wolf that killed a lot of great video stores), I am sure that the way this drama played out has a larger meaning in the way Hollywood and the media business establishment deals with the “future” and the inevitable changes it brings to our world.

Nobody could have predicted in 2002 that Youtube and Facebook would transform the world the way that they ultimately did. BUT, we could see that just as Google had transformed the experience of information, that it was inevitable that a future–though uncertain–would involve the re-thinking and re-use of the web as an entertainment and networking portal. What frontier has not looked to expand when there was opportunity? We need only look to the history of Blockbuster’s own home turf, the state of Texas, to find compelling historical evidence. This was common sense, not some far-out techy-imagined future.

So who did Blockbuster and the studios really think was going to occupy the frontier? Martians? Or did they just close their eyes and ears to the rapid evolution of viewer habits and technology that supported and expanded them. To CEO Reed Hastings’ and Netflix’s credit, they planted where the soil was fallow and and they are reaping the benefits of that risk today.  (As of this morning Netflix was trading at a whopping $164 a share while Blockbuster was at .04 cents.)

Over the last few years, the only response to questions of how Hollywood is moving into the digital age have been equivalents of “we won’t let it happen”. I get it: new models mean new thinking and new strategy and people have to change (gasp!) the way they operate and analyze and do business. Listen folks, I didn’t invent this concept. This is America and that’s how it works. Businesses adapt in changing times – that’s what Netflix did with the major first corpse of the industry – DVD rentals, and the failure to follow suit is what killed Blockbuster in less than 10 years.

A word to the wise: The Ostrich Method didn’t work for Blockbuster and there’s no reason it will work for the studios as that frontier begins to open up.

Before you throw me into the the hater camp, hear me out. I don’t hate Ridley Scott. In fact, I admire him a great deal. The man was and is a legend to all aspiring filmmakers who at some point encountered the stunning, prescient piece of filmmaking that is Bladerunner while learning to make films. It was with some excitement that I examined his recently announced “Life In A Day” project, launched in collaboration with the Sundance Film Festival and Youtube.

Below is the video explaining the project, which is fairly self-explanatory: The film director Kevin McDonald will accept crowdsourced video from YOU, shot on a single day, and will create a feature length “experimental documentary” to be shown at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

On the surface, it seems the focus is to engage viewers, aspiring filmmakers, and create a narrative that ties the globe together in a neat way, sort of like, um…a commercial. At three minutes, Nike’s Write the Future World Cup ad is exactly THAT, only shorter, more exciting and actually ABOUT something. Nike’s spot is a brilliant, energetic, beautiful and poignant celebration of a world’s fascination with a single sport – about how the love for a game can be experienced across cultures.

While I’m not saying that such meaning and profundity as soccer sometimes inspires cannot be found randomly around the globe about other subjects. I just want to know – what subjects exactly? What is it ABOUT, people? I wish these large scale, commercially overblown so-called experimental projects would have meaning, otherwise it becomes a waste of the crowdsource, just another marketing ploy to keep the old school relevant in the new media world, something I referred to in my post about Ridley Scott’s initial foray into this arena, via the (now defunct)Purefold initiative back in November of last year.

Crowdsourced art isn’t about broad, jumbled collaborative initiatives asking everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It should be about taking a point of view on a real subject and hunting down the truth and beauty in an idea, like artists are supposed to do, if they care about their art.

Such is the case in the new partnership announced last week between the illustrious Guggenheim Museum and Youtube, called YouTube Play. According to the Washington Post article on the launch, the Guggenheim sees this collaboration as an opportunity to “raise the standards” of YouTube. The writer of that piece takes issue with this idea, arguing that the beauty of user generated and curated content is precisely the randomness of it, and that it’s “strange to introduced a juried sensibility to a relatively new, user generated world”.

I feel as though this is a conversation I’ve had with folks who find “curation” as an idea to be yet another way to limit the forms and bind the creativity of artists, media makers and their audiences who are freely discovering all the randomness of the video/film art frontier on the web. While I don’t think institutions like the Guggenheim are well-informed enough about what is really happening in the frontier they are seeking, I do think there ought to still be curatorial forces that engage in thoughtful considerations of what is happening now, AS it is happening. We don’t have to wait a decade to figure out what the movements in video art were in the first decade of the 21st century. Information is readily accessible but it has to be searched for, studied and considered, before any grand pronouncements can be made.

In the museum world, there has traditionally been a very small pipeline leading to the galleries and eventually museums, and in order to have access to it, an artist had to be somewhat “in the know”. So I wonder now whether an open call for artists to submit their work publicly via YouTube isn’t just taking opposite yet similarly limiting tactic – that is to say the fact of YouTube doesn’t make for a better considered curation, it only makes for more submissions. It isn’t terribly different from any kind of open call, even a blatantly populist one like American Idol.

I wonder if institutions like the Guggenheim wouldn’t do better to study the troves of video ALREADY out there, and curate something based on real discovery, wherein a serious study of emerging video art forms is undertaken, and the discovery of video artists who may or may not consider themselves artists, might actually occur. We live in a culture of over-abundant content, and that is why I support curation. In my estimation, there shouldn’t just be a choice between clueless high-art curator vs. engaged user-curated option. There are lots of interesting movements happening right under our noses, and we don’t need a competition to discover them. Alright, Guggenheim?

Time was short but I promised that I would post a followup with video and here it is.

From Aramique Krauthamer, who works at Syrup as a story director.
Flashback”, directed by Marco Brambilla. it’s an interpretation of 6 stories of 6 perfumes. the perfumes are about experiences of nature and this film is imagining if we have destroyed natured and the experiences are gone how they will be remembered in the future.

And for Puma, a short documentary about the making of a painting. The painting shows the “Unity Kit” which is the first time a jersey has been made for an entire continent as a symbol of solidarity

Then from Writer/Director Hunter Weeks, who is often the subject of his own films and featured in the video, a collaboration with the sandwich chain Quiznos, in which he travels to 50 states in 2 weeks.

Weeks’ new project is “Ride The Divide”, for which he has raised $100K in product, marketing, and cash before making film (about 50% cash). He’s partnered with Lance Armstrong’s foundation Livestrong, YouTube and a few other major distribution channels for a unique release strategy that combines online events and a theatrical tour that benefit Livestrong.

Ride The Divide Movie Trailer from Ride The Divide on Vimeo.

Ritesh Batra, who worked with Cisco on a project called “Digital Cribs” is a fascinating profile of a homeless entrepreneur:
Embed removed. Click link here to watch video: CISCO’S Digital Cribs

From Jake Abraham, formerly of Dandelion (division of Epoch Films) are two branded entertainment examples, the first for Sun Life, and the second directed by Brett Morgen for International Trucks:

There was MySpace, then YouTube, then Facebook, Twitter followed by every other niched and slightly varied social network. I love the idea of social media for a number of reasons, aesthetic, personal and political. Nothing warms my heart more than the idea that someone behind a firewall in Iran could connect with me sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles during the controversial political situation that arose from the 2009 Iranian election. I also enjoy the casual exchange of interesting ideas and happenings that is the stuff of Facebook friendships.

So here we are, in 2010 with so many ways to connect, form communities and find kindred spirits online. Yet for all the fun we have watching viral videos, getting recommendations from friends on what movies to watch, or playing Mafia Wars with them on Facebook, are we really accessing the best and brightest of what’s in that enormous web-o-sphere?

Let’s imagine for a second that the web is like a frontier, say, how most of America was before the 19th century. And suddenly, from literally a few hundred thousand settlers, 100 million people showed up and populated the land. You’d have something akin to the chaos that happens when people are displaced after massive disasters or wars. Nobody would what the rules were, how to find anything and the one guy who had the map of the entire land might be the most valuable person around.

I’m going to call the Mr. Wise Sage Google. So Google comes in and says: ask me a question, any question. You need to know where the nearest river is so you can access water? I can tell you? You need to know where you can find lumber to build your houses? Here, I’ll show you. Then slowly but surely, this massive number of people settle down, with the help of Mr. W.S. Google. A few years goes by, Mr. Google teaches a few classes, and people learn more about their world, how to find things and they come up with their own maps and books and ideas.

Then, another few years go by, and as people get when they are well fed and comfortable, they get bored, restless. They have a few books and games and songs they brought from the old country which they’ve read over and over again. The kids want something new, different so soon you get some young whippersnapper called Mr. Hot Stuff Youtube who invents a new, novel idea: anyone can come up with a brand new game, or story and share it with the rest of their community. Wow! The kids go wild. They love it. They tell stories of birds falling from trees; babies laughing, dancing, talking in funny ways. And everyone laughs heartily. A few of these kids become really well known all over the land and everyone agrees: the new age is upon us.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the adults are thinking: hmm, these babies dancing, are they really that interesting? They’ve seen babies do all kinds of extraordinary things in their lives and so this just doesn’t seem that exciting. But every once in a while, they see something beautiful, a performance that makes them think and look a little harder. But in between working, eating and sleeping, it’s hard to find those beautiful interesting ideas. So they just give up because mostly it looks like rubbish to them.

Then suddenly, riding on a gorgeous, shiny black horse, a familiar face from the old world appears, but he looks very different from what they remember, and his name is Mr. Slick Interface Hulu. He brings fantastic entertainment and beautiful packaging and everyone is happy, young and old because it gives the old folks what they want and does it just how the kids like it. For a while, everyone is happy. But as humans are inclined, they get bored with Mr. S.I. Hulu’s offerings and the rumblings for more entertainment begin.

At this point, the kids, who are still playing with Mr. H.S. Youtube’s ideas have grown up a little. They’re talking about politics, and music and art, and real stories, not just babies and animals and farting. Even the old folks notice that they are drawn to the new wave of inventions. But now, there’s a problem: there’s so much of this stuff that no one can find what they like. Even the kids are starting to get frustrated because there’s so much out there.

Enter a new-old character: Ms. Smart Thinking Curator. Ms. Curator was once a kid who played with H.S. Youtube ideas. Now she has traveled, been educated by curators of from the old country and developed some tastes of her own. The old folks love her because she understands their language, and the kids like her because she’s one of them. Ms. S.T. Curator suggests a simple new idea: How about if I figure out what everyone’s into: so the people who love puppies and babies can have as much as their hearts desire and the best of the Shiba Inus in the universe. Then those political rabble-rousers, who want to hear and participate in arguments all day long can have their own little corner. And same with the people who love food, clothes, horses and so on. And because Ms. S.T. Curator knows that people want to taste the product before they sign up, she spends a little time explaining why those puppies she selected are the best puppies in the entire world. And Voila! The curation of entertainment is born.

So now I ask, is it not time to trust some new voices and tastes to curate entertainment for us? I don’t discount the voices of the masses, nor am I unaware of the significant challenges in aggregating and distributing video/film in a meaningful way online. BUT, with the advent of interfaces like Boxee and to some extent Roku (and other such devices) which make it possible to combine many entertainment sources this is imminently possible. I see that Clicker is attempting some such organization although my argument about them is that they are still quite neutral in their aggregation and not aggressively curatorial.

I believe we are entering the age of the Curator. There is plenty of entertainment being created that is difficult to access or find. What we need are assured voices who understand contemporary tastes and can do a better and more effective job than the crusty and outmoded TV and film studio executives of bringing relevant content to the attention of interested audiences.

So while technology inventions and killer apps are amazing, can somebody please invent the Human Curator – that would be killer.