A press release recently went out about Film Triangle. Here it is.
(Man was this an easy blog to write!) ;)
Film Distribution Now Easier with FilmTriangle.com
Ankeny, IA – Feb. 13, 2008 – Film Triangle is a new online service for independent film. It’s designed to help filmmakers expand the reach of their art.
Through the FilmTriangle.com website, filmmakers can network with other filmmakers, fans and distributors. They can sell their films directly to the audience for download and market their films for traditional distribution. Fans of cinema can see truly independent films they might not otherwise have access to. Distributors can easily find the most marketable films from the hottest new filmmakers.
“It’s like a film festival and marketplace, except it’s completely online,” says Film Triangle creator Jake Kerber. “It’s a new way for filmmakers to self-distribute and even make money for their short films, which haven’t really had much of a market in the past.”
Film Triangle’s guiding philosophy is to let the artist keep as much control as possible.
Their deal with the filmmakers is completely non-exclusive, meaning that the filmmakers that sell their films through the site are still free to sell through any other channels they wish. And filmmakers can choose to stop selling through Film Triangle at any time. Membership to the service is free. Filmmakers upload their films in whatever format they want and set their own prices. There are no censorship rules, or restrictions based on any content or genre. The submitter must of course have the legal right to post (be the owner of) the content.
In January Jake Kerber discussed Film Triangle with filmmakers at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. “This is a service we really need” said DJ Halferty, an excited filmmaker from Los Angeles. There was wide agreement from the other filmmakers in attendance.
The Film Triangle service has officially launched and registration is now open to the public at FilmTriangle.com. The film upload and setup portions of the site are currently available, but the download portions are not yet activated. Those portions will go “on line” after an initial catalog of content is built up. The listing fees, typically charged to filmmakers in order to sell through Film Triangle, are being waived while the service is building up its content catalog prior to launching the download service, expected in Spring 2008.
The networking features of the site will come online as they are developed and implemented over the upcoming months.
Film Triangle is run by Kerber Technology Solutions, LLC (KerberTech), an Information Technology (IT) services company specializing in custom web-based application development. KerberTech is based in Ankeny, Iowa.
A quick post today...
Last night I sent a text message to Twitter. Something like this:
"Picking up all the cliche valentines day gifts for my wife."
My phone (a Mogul) automatically put an accent on the e of "cliche", (which was the correct thing to do). I sent the message and didn't think anything of it.
Today my friend (and co-host of Whats Up with Tech -- which we'll get back to soon hopefully), Tim Fisher (@TimFisher), asked me, "What was up with that post from last night?" Then he showed me how the message was delivered to him from Twitter:
@P@i@c@k@i@n@g@ @u@p@ @a@l@l@ @t@h@e@ @c@l@i@c@h@?@ @v@a
It was the same way on the Twitter web site. Uuhhh, what?
The only thing I can figure is that Twitter couldn't deal with the accent on that e. Between the @ symbols in the messed up post you can see that all the original characters are there up until the accented e which is replaced by a question mark.
So when Twittering, if your phone automatically changes standard English alphabetic characters to ones with accents, tildes, umlauts, or that backwards "c" thing under the c in Francais, and the like, you might want to undo that before sending it on to Twitter.
I don't really need to add another post to the sure-to-be thousands of posts about this, but the WGA (west) strike is over as of last night.
I'm glad the strike's over in that I'll finally have something new to watch on TV. I'm not much of a fan of reality shows.
When I was at Sundance, I met and spoke with David Blue, who plays Cliff on Ugly Betty (he also acts in other shows). He seemed a little concerned about the future of his character and the show. I asked him if they had any episodes "in the can". He said they didn't and were just waiting for the strike to end. So all-in-all the end to the strike is probably good for most of the people working in Hollywood.
The strike was actually beneficial, in my opinion, to certain groups such as independent producers, filmmakers, bloggers and podcasters. Since no new content was being created for TV, anyone who creates original content was filling a vast chasm of need left open by the strike. Soon that chasm will be closing, but hopefully the audience is now more aware of alternative sources of content such as podcasts and independent film. Nielson (the firm that monitors people's viewing habits) even says that many viewers won't go back to their old TV viewing habits that they had before the strike.
What's the most surprising to me however, is how little the mainstream media has said about this so far. This should be front page news. It should be a headlining story in TV news. The strike's been affecting everyone who watches American TV, which is basically every American. So why is the media so quiet about it? Maybe they're just slow (old media, you know) and I should give them more time to put together their story. If I don't hear more (I expect to be inundated) by tomorrow I'll assume conspiracy. ;)
I first learned about the end of the strike on the Today Show this morning. In between telling about other stories rapid fire style, Ann Curry said something to the effect of, "and last night the WGA members voted to end the strike" and then she rolled right into the next story! What???!!!!
They gave no indication of what the actual result was. Did the writers get anything they wanted (the reason they were striking)? When will they go back to work? When will we start seeing new shows? Nothing.
As of right now, there's nothing on the front page of cnn.com, msn.com, or yahoo.com. Everyone seems to have a story about Uno the Beagle that won Westminster, though.
Here are a couple sites I found that actually do talk about the end to the strike:
The Economist
AdWeek
The Hollywood Reporter, of course
Variety, of course
In those last two, the story is actually front page news (shown prominently on the homepage), as you would expect.
Then on the WGA site, there are a bunch of stories about it. Go to those sites to find out how the writers made out.
In summary, I'm not sure if the writers got enough to make up for potential future losses that were caused by the strike. Hopefully the little guys in Hollywood will end up with a better deal than they would have had before the strike. Also, hopefully independent producers, podcasters, etc. were able to attract some new viewers, listeners, etc. during the lull in new content form Hollywood.
If you're in a band or a solo artist playing the local music scene, of even if you tour regionally or nationally, but aren't signed to a major label, this post is for you. If you're pressed for time, just check out the Dick Dale interview referenced at the bottom of this post.
Continue playing live and use the internet and related social networking and media to your advantage. If a major label approaches you for a deal, my recommendation is: don't accept it. If you're big enough for a label to be interested, then you've already made it. Keep doing everything independently and keep all your own profits. Most bands that sign with major labels won't make any money -- the label will get it all. Plus they'll own the rights to the music. In this modern world there are a ton of ways for indie artists to make their own money without a label. The one thing a label can get you is publicity, but you can do that yourself, too. And you can do it for free -- it just takes time.
Most decently successful local bands by now know the power of online networks like MySpace. Local bands can have fans worldwide by investing some time into a good MySpace page. You can sell you CD's as well as shirts and other merch online just as you would at a gig. And you get to keep all the revenue. And you answer to nobody but yourselves. Your art is yours.
People that listen to music don't care about your label. A label can get you airtime, though -- often through payola (which does still exist). However, a bunch of radio stations have "local music" shows on which they showcase local acts. Check out the websites of local stations to see how to get on one of these. Maybe check with the venues you play at to see if they can put some of your music in a radio spot advertising an upcoming gig.
Most of the following advice works for anyone trying to use the internet for marketing in the web 2.0 era, but specifically for musicians:
Use MySpace. It's probably the best social network for local bands (because it has the crowds -- it's by no means a quality site otherwise). Embed your music (at least samples) into the page. Tell the crowds at your shows about your myspace page and include it on your marketing materials (posters, etc.).
new content: Add new content to your myspace page and/or your other blogs you may have. This will improve your site ranking with search engines and get people to come back to your site(s). Also, as with any other kind of blogging, it will make it more likely that other bloggers and social media people will end up linking to you.
The idea is to grow your community -- whether online or not. As you can afford to (time or money), play gigs in other big cities in the region.
Advertising: get your gigs listed on local events calendars -- in print and online. Submit your gig information to sites like pollstar.com.
Make sure to interact with your community. If someone comments about your band, in any social network, comment back. If they tell you about their band, check them out and let them know if you like them. They'll then be more likely to come to your next show or link to your site(s) because there's a personal connection. You're always more likely to check out a local act if you personally know someone in the band. Run "ego searches" on your band to see who's talking about you. If you're mentioned in a blog, make your own post and link back to that blogger. Make a comment to the blogger's post and thank them for the link -- assuming the reference is positive. If the reference isn't positive, maybe you can still start a dialog with the author and convert him. As you write new content, link to other bands' sites or blogs. Then they may link back to you. And don't think of it as being in competition with these other bands. Because people don't buy only one album and call it good. They want to find all the music they like. If someone buys an album from a band that's like yours, they're likely to buy your album too.
In addition to all the social networking you can get into, I would recommend online sales/distributions services that can sell your songs via the internet to the worldwide audience. The biggest one the comes to mind is cdBaby. I'd check the terms of use of such sites to make sure that you're not locking yourself into an exclusive deal, though. You'll want to be able to sell through as many channels as possible. Another service is Magnatune. Users of that service pay what they feel the music is worth, but there's a set minimum, I think.
Dick Dale gave an excellent interview a while back where he agrees with me about staying away from the labels. He instead recommends being a good business person and retaining the rights to your music. Credit: the interview was done by TommyLiberto.
Who's in those photos? It's a local band in Des Moines called Only.
I have a site or two that I want to add News and/or Articles to. I basically want to add a Blog to the site. However, I don't want the user to have to leave the rest of the site to go to the "blog" page(s). I want to be able to put the blog on a portion of some of the pages of the site and if the user links into one of the articles, I want the article page to look just like the rest of the site -- with the same navigation and everything.
I've decided to write my own blog engine to accomplish this. I'll be building it with .NET, since I do most of my sites and programming with .NET. I figure the main things it has to do are as follows:
- have some kind of interface to accept a new post (by me only to start with) -- at first this might be a very manual process until I develop a nicer admin page type interface later
- be able to save/persist the content of the post to include a headline, the body of the post, some information about the poster and possibly images referenced in the post. It will have to allow some html tags such as bold (<b>) tags, hyperlinks, and img tags. I'll save this information into a database rather than files.
- create a URL for each post (a permalink). Rather than create an actual file for each post and naming the file based on the headline, I'll probably just have a convention like: "Article.aspx?id=312", where the id value is the unique identifier for the particular article. Later I might create a dummy name for the post based on the headline and store that in the database with the article. Then I might create something called an HttpModule that will be able to translate the post name back into the id value and correctly redirect from "site/Articles/sample_headline" to "site/Article.aspx?id=312".
- update the rss xml file(s) for each new article posted. I'll just view the source xml of some blogs and decide what parts are really necessary. I noticed that my vox blog has a "summary" feed and a "complete" feed. The summary feed has thumbnail versions of the images and only the first sentence or two of content.
- eventually allow people to post comments. This isn't a top priority for me, but I do plan on adding this feature. I'll probably only accept comments from registered users and then just save the comment in the database linked to the article and their user record.
- allow people to easily subscribe to the blog. If you view the source of my vox blog, you'll see several link tags that refer to syndication files for the blog. My guess is that containing a similar link in the main page will include the rss icon for the page in most current browsers.:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://jakekerber.vox.com/library/posts/atom-full.xml" title="Full Atom Feed for Posts" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://jakekerber.vox.com/library/posts/rss.xml" title="RSS Feed for Posts" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://jakekerber.vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml" title="Full RSS Feed for Posts" />
After some searching, I found a post about creating a blog engine using some new features of ASP.NET. I probably won't do it quite the way the author of the article went about it, but this might be a good reference. The site, aspalliance.com seems to have a lot of articles for .NET developers.
Something else I found was BlogEngine at CodePlex.com. They have the complete source code you can download, so I might take a look at some of the things they've done to get some tips, too.
Hopefully I'll have something ready to use in a couple weeks. I do NOT plan on releasing this to the public (either for free or for sale). It will be very custom and will be integrated into some of my other code. It would probably cost significant additional effort on my part to make it generic enough for it to be useful to anyone else. But anything's possible and I won't completely rule out the possibility of having something to distribute (full of disclaimers, though). ;)
I have too many things I want to blog about today (an unusual concern at times and probably a good problem to have), so I'm just going to start with the first thing on my mind.
I attended the first ever Des Moines Tweetup last night. There were about 6 of us there. I had previously met only one: blogging evangelist Mike Sansone (@mikesansone). Also in attendance were: Nathan T. Wright (@nathantwright), the organizer of the Tweetup; Andy Brudtkuhl (@abrudtkuhl) (I'll need to learn how to pronounce that one) who's a fellow developer and tech blogger; Mike Templeton (@miketempleton), a marketing specialist at The Members Group trying to infuse new media into the company; and Scott Phillips (@scottatdrake), who I didn't get to talk to much, but I expect I'll see him around.
Pretty much everyone who attended is a blogger of some form. I learned much more about the Iowa blogger community than I knew previously. Through some of their blogs and other people we discussed last night, I discovered the I-List, a list of Iowa-based bloggers being maintained by Focal Point.
We discussed how we each use Twitter and very few of us actually use text messaging, which is usually the one part about Twitter that people know about. Some use the twitter web page, but have to refresh it every so often because it doesn't auto-refresh (something we complained about). Others have messages routed to IM clients. Some use twitter-specific applications like twitterrific (on the mac) or tweetr on the PC. I'll probably install and start using tweetr pretty soon. I currently miss out on a bunch because I only have a notifications sent to my phone via text for a handful of people I follow. I of course have unlimited text messaging on my mobile plan.
One cool thing that happened (for me) is that several of the attendees had read that post I made yesterday about the tweetup before we got together, having never met me before. There's something to this whole new media, blogging, social networking thing! ;)
Another outcome of the meetup for me is that I'll start using RSS more again. Previously I got so overwhelmed that I stopped using an RSS reader altogether. I'm going to look into Cullect, something I learned about last night that helps separate out the good stuff in your RSS reader from the noise.
Wow! Two posts in two days. I'm pretty sure that's a first for me (but probably not the last). Thanks to everyone last night for the inspiration!
I recently heard about a TweetUp happening in Des Moines tonight. I'll have to go check it out.
A Tweetup is a meeting of people that use the online social networking/microblogging tool, Twitter.
It's happening tonight at Shorty's bar in downtown Des Moines at 5:30 on Feb. 7th, 2008. I heard about it through Nathan T. Wright of LavaRow.com.
The way I heard about the TweetUp is because I track "Des Moines" on Twitter. You can track any phrase you want on Twitter. Then whenever someone sends a tweet, or twitter message, with that phrase in the message, you will get a copy of the message. It's a great technique for finding people (at least Twitter users) who have similar interests as you. You can track a certain phrase, then when you get a message about that topic from some random person you can start following that person, too.
Because I tracked "des moines", I got Nathan's tweet that said: "Don't forget: The first ever Des Moines TweetUp is tomorrow night (Thursday) @ Shorty's at 5:30pm! Who all is coming?". Before that moment, I had never heard about the TweetUp (or any TweetUp for that matter). The tweet said it was sent by nathantwright. I then replied to Twitter with a "follow nathantwright" message and now I'm a follower of him. Incidentally, he is now a follower of me, too.
Since I've never been to a TweetUp, I'm not sure what it will be like, but I hope and expect to meet a bunch of people interested in new media and internet technologies. In a recent blog post, Nathan gave a shout out to Mike Sansone of Converstations, who taught me a bunch about blogging.
Not actually knowing anyone who's going to this thing, hopefully I'll be able to find the right people. I expect to just look for all the people text messaging.
