Sometimes I just like a good flame war: The Week's Best Posts

Each week I go back over my Twitter and other posts to see what I found interesting. Follow me on Twitter (@nickdemartino) if you want the daily dose. Otherwise, just subscribe here and get the curated version.

Sometimes I just like a good flame war, those online arguments, usually among the tech elite, that carry a certain angry certitude about things that, meh, I can't really imagine getting so wound up about. Last week Robert Scoble launched one of them with his "open web" screed. You can read about the reaction here, and if you scroll down, there's a link to the original post. In addition, Dave Winer, mentioned therein, has his own flame to add: "Me and Facebook Are Over."

ON a completely different topic: I'm moderating a panel at the 2nd Screen Summit on Feb. 22 in Santa Monica called "Curated TV

The Impact of Celebrity, Expert, Influencer, and Ambassador Curation when exploring and consuming content." Please join me and 60 other speakers. 

I've also accepted speaking invitations for Transmedia Hollywood and WyrdCon, and a few others pending. I'll share details when they are firmed up. 

Storytelling and Transmedia

My post about BECKINFIELD, the fictional town in which an online sci-fi mystery series is set went live on my blog earlier this week. The interesting thing about the story-form is that all of the content is told via videos created in character by users who register on the site. Tribeca ran the piece on its Future of Film site, as well.  

I learned a bunch from this post about ebooks, transmedia, textbooks, and learning. 

ARGNet.com bids a "fond farewell" to "This is Not A Game" -- the original mantra of ARG "The Beast," which set many of the templates embraced and revered by the alternative reality game community. I liked the POV and historical info in this post a lot.

Netflix launches "Lilyhammer," the Norwegian TV series starring Steven Van Zandt as a mobster on the run in Scandinavia. It's the first push (in a while) into the content realm for the online movie and TV platform. The Sopranos, it ain't.  

"Hollywood by the Numbers" take a look at the movie industry's business models by analyzing data, including the profitability of genres, the summer blockbuster syndrome, why there are no start ups in Hollywood, and the impact of TV on theatrical release patterns. Fascinating. (Thanks to Rob Tercek: @Superplex).

Video

Verizon and Redbox are joining forces to offer a streaming video service, which of course will compete with Netflix, Apple and the others that are out there.  

Huffington Post's jump into online video continues to get a lot of attention. But, HuffPo isn't the only text-based publisher that's turning to video production and distribution, competing with the incumbent TV networks and cable channels. Everybody's doing it!

Oh, and online video viewing is up 43% in a year. 100 million Americans are watching. So are a LOT of TV execs!

The Tech Biz 

Silicon Valley's Dirty Little Secret is the fact that many, if not most "exits" for startup companies are "talent acquisitions," in which a larger company buys and often kills a company, just to lock down engineers or other talent in a very competitive labor market. 

Meanwhile, crowd-funding site Kickstarter is about to hit a new record, coming close to $1 million for a single project.

Tech superstar Pinterest has hit 10 million US monthly unique visitors in record time

Check out Zeega, a new open-source HTML5 platform for creating Interactive Documentaries.

Innovation Strategy is explored in this useful short post.

(BTW: I posted two book reviews this week: George Pelecanos' THE CUT, and Stephen King's 11/22/63. You can read all of my reviews archived here on Goodreads.com).