This is one of our extras when we shot “Beyond Conflict” episode one of thirteen for the Beyond The Search documentaries.

I love this photo, there is just something about it. What do you think it is?

~ Anonymous

I was just on a popular Sydney morning paper that was heralding (pun intended) its particular views and I decided to add to the conversation and make a comment. Hours later I came back to view the conversation to find that only half my comment had been published and its context was skewed because it lacked the full message, and it had my name on it!!

I know that papers (historically) have determined that it is in their best interest to maintain full control over content but does this model fit when you include social media into the mix? If you give people the space comment online then people expect to speak their mind, fully. The future profitability of newspapers is dubious if old models are to be continued, yet if they cannot embrace the new models of new media fully into their mix, will they indeed have a future?

Film making is a team sport, so I’m not to sure who I should demand the 2 hours and 20 minutes of my life back from. ‘Funny People’, a film by Judd Apatow starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, has officially hit the top of my “Worst Films Ever List”.

I should have liked this film, it had everything going for it but it failed to deliver by a long long way.

First the story this film is built on is nothing short of brilliant, a famous comedian has to deal with his own immortality due to a terminal illness and conscripts a novice comedian to write jokes for him and help him deal with the issues in his life. There is so much to work with here but it is this opportunity that sets up the greatest failing of this film, it is genuinely unfunny.

At two hours and twenty minutes long ‘Funny people’ could have easily been forty minutes shorter, it just seems to go on and on and on. Ultimately this is an indulgent film which exposes a director whose first priority was to make a film for his own reasons without thought to the audience.

This film has some great actors in it, Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler, Leslie Mann and Eric Bana to name a few, all of these actors are capable and have proved they are capable of excellent performances, but they are never given a chance in ‘Funny People’.

There were some glimpses of how good this film could be, with some great scenes that would give me hope that the film is turning a corner, starting to go somewhere, but just as quickly as the hope surfaced it would be dashed by some of the worst comedy, concepts and storytelling I have ever seen. Ultimately the greatest failing of this film is its storytelling which is totally is incoherent, it could have easily been a story made up by a distracted drunk who had no idea how to get to the end of the story, repeatedly getting stuck on unimportant side aspects, with his mind and hands in his pants, trying to be funny but failing to be.

This is a film that could have been, but never had a chance to get there.

BlogTV, a blogvideo streaming service (live & pre-recorded), is the latest social platform rushing over to offer its services mobile. Their new site m.blogtv.com offers live streaming to almost any ‘video’ capable phone with the exclusion of the iPhone.

BlogTV enables the host and viewers to communicate and therefore create a more engaging experience rather then just providing pre-recorded video content. They claim that the entire interaction experience is available on most modern phones.

If you are wanting to find out what currently the best content or conversations are on the web then head over to popurls.com. This is a smart little web aggregates that collects the headlines and latest (popular) material from a host of different news, social, and sharing websites.

It is available directly via your web browser or directly to mobile, iPhone, PSP, PS3, twitter, jaiku and Wii.

Basically popurl is a nice GUI of RSS feeds that you don’t have to set up yourself, anyone who uses RSS will understand the logic behind it buy ultimately use their own setup. If you are wishing to explain how RSS feeds work, this is a great place to take people as an example.l

Do you have Games listed as a legitimate place for your marketing in 2008. Do you know the opportunities that games can provide for you? If not then here a a few quick facts for you.Games are the fasted growing entertainment platform and is growing faster then film, television and the music industries.The biggest first week takings of any entertainment medium was Halo3 the Xbox game, beating all records for any film or album release.Gaming is fast becoming more social with ‘networked’ games like World of Warcraft, SecondLife and Kaneva.EA is releasing a free networkable game which will be funded entirely by in-game advertising.Games, including platforms like the Nintendo Wii, Xbox and Playstation, are opening up as the next marketing frontier that provides enormous value to the martekeer. The model of in-game advertising is very different to oldmedia advertising, where oldmedia advertising disrupted the activity the user was engaged in (the 30sec spot) in game advertising becomes part of the experience of the user, not disrupting the activity.The question is, can you ignore games as a legitimate medium for advertising and marketing?

Yahoo shut its premium music download service today, redirecting all traffic to Real Networks’ Rhapsody service. This is in direct relation to Apple‘s dominance of the online music service through the iTunes Music Store. Although this may be fairly short lived if Microsft is successful in its takeover bid of Yahoo who will be seeking to strengthen its music delivery channels for its Zune music player.

Facebook has announced the launch of a new ‘service’ which enables anyone to include Facebook applications on their own website. The breakthrough comes with the ability for Facebook to execute the server code on their system while you simply have the face of the app showing on your website.

There are two exceptions which is photo uploading is not supported and some profile editing is not supported either.

This opens up the ability to develop your website as an extension of the Facebook social community. This has been seen as a cleaver move by Facebook who are seeking to extend the reach of their services. For more information visit the facebook blog

It seems that everyone is adding a mobile channel to their platforms. youTube has just launched m.youtube.com which enables users of 3G and WiFi phones to log in and view video content.

To use the mobile channel you need to download a mobile application which is only available for a limited number of late model phones including the iPhone

For more information visit the youtube blog