Is Looking for Attention the New Paying Attention?

Very interesting read by Dee Harvey

Excerpt:

Do we really want to be teaching our children that passive activities like listening and watching are a waste of their time? The old adage was that you should listen twice as much as you speak, the idea being that wisdom came from paying attention, not from looking for attention.

…

If the response to the Internet and its ability to connect us to one another in new ways is to think “brilliant, now I can make my very own TV show and put it on YouTube”, then that’s pretty depressing and very limiting. If we’re all a little bit less consumer and a little bit more producer, then in fact we’re all something else entirely. It’s not what you produce (or consume) that matters so much as how you connect with other people and what use you put those connections to.

Read complete blog post at Dee Blind Mice

(via @michellegallen)

It’s Check Week: 77% bigger than last Check Week

stevewoolf:

bliptv:

It’s Check Week again here at blip. Mashable has the story. This Check Week is 77% bigger than last quarter’s check week. The number of shows earning $1,000 or more is up 57% (this number grew 30% last quarter too). This quarter’s top earner is getting a check for $123,000. We were thinking about giving them a giant Ed McMahon style check but decided against it. It’s just not our style.

All of the payments for this quarter are earned in the same way: fantastic producers who use the blip platform and participate in our advertising program. Everyone receives the same 50/50 revenue share and reaps the hard work of our national sales team.

Facts and figures are important, but that’s not what Check Week is about. Check Week is about building sustainable shows from the ground up. Check Week is about turning passion projects into lifestyle businesses and lifestyle businesses into major media properties. Most folks aren’t earning enough to quit their day jobs yet, although some certainly are and have. As always: be responsible.

That said, we said in our post about last quarter’s Check Week: we’re building the next-generation television network. Our mission is to make independently produced shows sustainable. These checks put food on the table for show creators. They help people quit their day jobs. These checks prove that it’s possible to start your own show, to bootstrap, to have full creative control, to own your show and still make money.

I’m writing this post from Los Angeles where we’re opening our new office. I’m out here with our West Coast Director of Content Development Steve Woolf and our head of sales Evan Gotlib. We’re working on getting our new office up and running, meeting with advertisers, partners and awesome show producers. We can feel the electricity in the air. It’s incredible.

Every new communications technology — film, radio, television, cable and now Internet video — leads to massive shifts in society, business and creative expression. We’re just at the dawn of a new age. And we’re just getting started. We now have thirty incredibly dedicated and talented people on the blip team, more than fifty thousand amazing show producers, incredible advertisers and a great group of syndication partners ranging from Sony to YouTube to Apple to NBC. And we’re just getting started. We’re building an alternative to the traditional studio and network system that’s dominated entertainment in this country for sixty years. This new alternative is meritocratic, it’s democratic, it’s open to everyone. It takes a long time to build. But we see it happening right now. The electricity is in the air.

Nice. I really love that independent web producers are making strides. Be responsible. Work hard… the rest will follow. It is a very exciting time. :)