It looks like I’m going to give a quick talk on Digital Theatrics at IgniteDenver. John Wilker made the announcement in his “Ever wonder what Duke Nukem would twitter?” blog post.
Maybe I’ll see you there for my 5 minutes of fame. I mean, literally, 5 minutes. The Ignite format gives you 5 minutes with 20 slides that rotate automatically every 15 seconds. It sounds like a fun little format and a cool way to get a quick dose of what’s going on in the Denver/Boulder area. Come check it out.
Back in April, I defined the term Digital Theatrics. Since then, I’ve had slews of conversations talking about the finer points of DT.
I’m often asked to expand on the concept of “the stage”. Everyone is familiar with seeing theatrical productions in the theater, on television, or in books. We embrace the opportunity to get to know new fantasy characters. We enjoy learning the story of their imaginary lives.
Digital Theatrics is a character-based story-telling process that happens through social web sites. They can be social media sites like Flickr and Youtube. They can also be social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. In fact, it can be anywhere people meet each other online. It can be based around anything from a classified ads site to a directories of businesses - so long as users can interact.
Now that you know the stage, how do the characters come to life?
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One year, one month, and one day ago - on 7/7/07 - I posted the first blog entry. Today - on 8/8/08 - I have two exciting things to post about. The first: Webcraft Studios is now in Boulder, CO. WCS is still based out of my home office - and *I* moved to Boulder. Today I turned in the keys on my Westminster apartment and have fully moved into my new place. Well, all my stuff is here now - but I still have a lot of boxes to unpack.
Boulder is a fine city. So fine, in fact, that my previous employer longs to be here. Gaiam recently relocated out of Broomfield (a rather nice place for a business, actually - very near a nice airport) to “Boulder Rd”. However, they still aren’t in the city of Boulder. Gaiam is next door, in Louisville, CO. (note: maybe I should update their Wikipedia entry, it still says Broomfield).
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A year ago today, I posted the first post to this blog. Holy crap, a whole year! Gee, that went quick. I’m on the same laptop I wrote my original post on a year ago. I’m still running Ubuntu Linux. We’re 1.5 months into our first campaign. We’ve earned a whopping zero dollars. Things are rock’n.
I feel as though I haven’t accomplished a lot for a “year”; however, things really only began rolling a few months ago. In that light, a lot has happened in a relatively short amount of time. Most of which was fairly well covered in the last progress report.
I just got home from a two week trip. While disconnected, I had a sudden brain fart. I saw Twitter reinvented as a distributed system and provided free as open source. This morning I woke up to find the ‘Twitter Fail Whale’ in full effect. Twitter is, once again, overloaded with users. This is so common, that the Fail Whale is now a t-shirt! I believe it’s time to re-think Twitter.
Twitter is not the only service of it’s kind. Birghtkite bumped the concept up a notch by adding imagery and positioning. Meanwhile, Plurk found a creative new way to display a user’s timeline. It’s great to see innovation; but this brings us to the same problem that service like Ping.FM, HelloTxt, and Socialthing were created to help us manage - too dann many segregated service providers!!! And as the alternative providers become increasingly popular, they too will suffer the same ’single point of failure’ issue that hinder Twitter today.
About 2 months ago, I announced that I was no longer a corporate gnome. In that post, I mentioned that Webcraft was no longer slated to be [just?] a web development company. Two weeks later, I explained the first service offering, Digital Theatrics. I mentioned that I was sending off the first client proposal that night.
Two months later, things are on track. Of course, few things have gone exactly as planned and most things have taken twice the effort I expected. However, this week joyfully marks the beginning of the first ever Webcraft Studios Digital Theatrics campaign. I couldn’t have accomplished what I have without the support of some awesome individuals (thanks guys). The client seems excited and I think this campaign will serve their product well. This entire project is a huge experiment. I would tell you the details of the top secret campaign, but then I would be forced to kill you. We don’t want that.