Thanks to Agnes Varnum over at the Resources Blog for reminding me to watch the VPRO doc on Wikipedia. I heard about it via various tweets and blog posts from the Next Web conference in Amsterdam and finally got a chance to watch it earlier today.

As a fan of documentaries I am fascinated by debates around the idea of “truth” and the endless unpacking of the nature and meaning of the word. But I am also aware that sometimes you need to just get on with it and accept that you are always going to be telling a subjective, manipulated story and that you can only hope it is fair to your subjects and does not knowingly mislead your audience. This is NOT to say that anything goes. The “fair and balanced” claims of Fox News are laughable precisely because a news channel should strive to tell stories about the world that reflect the world, rather than a particular political viewpoint. Context is key here, as is media literacy. I know that I need to take Wikipedia entries with a rather large grain of salt although I’m always amazed by how accurate they usually are. Fox News on the other hand requires such a large dose of media alertness to weed out the factual snippets from the moralizing that I’m not sure I’m up to the job.

I think everyone in The Truth About Wikipedia makes some valid points but many of them are so determined to drive their point home that they miss the bigger picture. Andrew Keen is right that Web2.0 has resulted in a “cult of the amateur.” One of the results of this is that there is some really idiotic content across the web. Take for example this brilliant exchange in the YouTube comments for the Wikipedia doc:

NaNlolz
Andrew Keen is an narcisistic dumb@ss who just ‘doesn’t get it.’
Ignore him….(or in web2.0 lingo: vote him down!)

hemansunderwear
I bet you have 10 myspace pages and no girlfriends.

Some of these amateurs, however, produce incredible work, and in the process re-define all these terms we use so loosely: expert, amateur, producer, consumer etc. Knowledge and talent do not only, or even necessarily, come with a university degree. Keen speaks as though “experts” are somehow completely free of bias, inaccuracies and power struggles. And what defines an expert anyway? I wrote my Masters thesis on electricity and I still can’t change a plug! Sometimes I think people get stymied by their own logline. In Keen’s case: we are in an age of the amateur ergo all amateurs are incompetent and all experts are right. It just doesn’t follow.

Anyway, without getting into further debate about the nature of truth and knowledge, here is the doc about Wikipedia. See what you think. I like the quote from Ndesanjo Macha toward the end when he explains that the original meaning of amateur is people who love what they do. I think that Web2.0 at its best provides a platform where this love can be fully expressed, without any meddling from gatekeepers who may or may not get it. And if you want experts and curation, well you can have that too. Either/Or makes for good soundbites but it doesn’t explain the world we actually live in. What we need is more digital literacy that will help to explain this world and empower the next generation of expert amateurs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about participatory culture recently as I’ve been desperately trying to get up to speed with all the exciting things happening online. Just watched the video below from a TED talk by Howard Rheingold. It’s fascinating to think about how so many of the new systems and sites use collaboration to work - in fact the more people that use them the better they work for everybody - from the folksonomy of tagging to the hive mind of Wikipedia to the server network of BitTorrent. I feel like a hopeless dilettante in this arena but I love it all too. Here’s the vid:

I discovered the Whole Earth Catalog when I was at college and working in a small independent bookstore in Brighton in the UK. The catalog was originally published in 1968 and contained a wealth of information from books to tools to classes and beyond. It had a joyful DIY, countercultural feel and every page contained huge amounts of amazing ideas. I discovered Buckminster Fuller through Whole Earth and immersed myself in his ideas about “whole systems.”

Whole Earth had a profound influence on many technologists. People have described it as a kind of pre-internet internet. Steve Jobs called Whole Earth one of the bibles of his generation, “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues have shaped many aspects of our contemporarty digital world, inspiring the birth of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) and WIRED magazine. As Tim O’Reilly says, “A huge amount of the O’Reilly sensibility, a mix of practicality and idealism, was learned from the Whole Earth Catalog. And of course, the Whole Earth Catalog is one of the wellsprings of the modern DIY movement, for which Make: magazine is now carrying the torch.”

The sections of the catalog included industry and craft, communications, and community, all ideas that continue to inspire us at Shooting People as filmmaking moves into the world of Web 2.0. In this spirit we have launched our new TOOLS blog where we will continue the fine tradition of communicating and sharing resources with each other. It’s not quite as nice as the Whole Earth Catalog to hold in your hands but I hope that it will be useful nonetheless.

I’ve moved Shooting From The Hip over to Wordpress so the design might be a bit wonky while I iron out a few teething problems. We are also in the process of launching a brand new blog called TOOLS which will be live very soon. TOOLS will be full of great resources for DIY production and distribution and it is something I have wanted to do for a long time so I am very excited that it’s finally happening.

Speaking of tools, check out the very handy DIY Manual from Hunter Weeks, the director of 10MPH. Weeks shares info about the distribution of 10MPH from festivals to theatrical to digital downloads and includes lots of great links to other useful resources. You can buy a printable version for just 99cents.

Liz Rosenthal has always been an advocate of all things digital and was the Programme Director of Digimart’s Global Digital Distribution Summit, in Montréal. Last Friday she organized Power To The Pixel, an industry forum running alongside the London Film Festival. Speakers included: Ira Deutchman (President & CEO Emerging Pictures), David Straus & Joe Neulight (Co-founders, Withoutabox), Kelly De Vine (Content Consultant, Renew Media), Robert Greenwald (Director, Iraq For Sale, Walmart, Outfoxed), Susan Buice & Arin Crumley (Directors, Four Eyed Monsters), Lance Weiler (Director, Head Trauma, The Last Broadcast), Matt Hanson (Director, A Swarm of Angels).

Like all good digital events there is a blog/website online with lots of interesting links and resources to learn about copyleft, DIY distribution, and digital cinema.

And hopefully some podcasts soon for those of us who missed the event!

Interesting post I just stumbled upon (and I mean this literally, I wasn’t using StumpleUpon!) on Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog. He has posted an email he received from a filmmaker who is finding it very difficult to make a living in long tail land and who argues that it benefits big companies and consumers but that small producers are still struggling to survive:

Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER. But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom. Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.

It feels like niche markets and the tools of Web 2.0 are ideal for small producers but how does everything add up? I would love more stats on this stuff. Anybody know where to find them?

I mentioned Lance Weiler’s Workbook Project in an earlier post but I forgot to put a link to this article from the Winter 2007 edition of Filmmaker Magazine. It has lots of tips from Weiler on setting up websites, syndicating content, increasing your Google rating and links to some useful sites you may not already know about. It’s an inspiring article because as Weiler says: “In the end, there is no one right way to distribute or market your film. But if making Head Trauma has taught me one thing, it’s not to lose the sense of empowerment experienced during the production of a film when you get to the distribution phase. With the new tools of the Web you do not have to be powerless once you finish.”

I was having a browse on the always interesting London-based bigshinything website and rediscovered this video about Web 2.0 - I know it’s been around for a while and the music is just a tad irritating but it’s a nifty little examination of what is happening online.

Bigshinything also have a post which talks about a possible MySpace/Facebook class divide that is very interesting although the whole “hegemonic/subaltern” vocabulary is bringing back my academia-rash! The issue of how divisions and inequalities in the offline world get manifested online is an important one. The research in Danah Boyd’s essay is a little tenuous and incomplete, as she herself admits, but it’s good food for thought.

For some reason I read Wired magazine virtually from cover to cover yesterday. I came across an article about Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who has invented a game called Matchin’ where two players compete to accurately describe a series of random pictures found on the web in a given space of time. It doesn’t sound like the most fun you can have with your clothes on to me but apparently it’s very addictive. The key element here though is that the game is using networks of humans to solve problems that computers cannot (describe photographs, make aesthetic judgments etc.) Von Ahn is all about making every time-wasting element of being online productive. He invented Captchas, those stretched and distorted words you often have to type in to fool spammers. His new reCaptcha system is not only fooling spammers but also using humans to translate smudgy words that computers can’t read for the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization that is putting public-domain books online for free.

I mention this here because I think that the possibilities of the “global overmind” - millions of human brains working together online to do things that just wouldn’t have been possible before the internet connected them - is fascinating and I’m excited to see what this can lead to in terms of film production and distribution. How are our expectations of what is even possible going to change over the next few years?

I have to say, however, that all this talk about productivity makes me a little nervous. I’ve always been a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut who said: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different. “

If you haven’t checked out Lance Weiler’s Workbook Project yet then go there now because it is fast becoming an invaluable toolbox for indie filmmakers. The Workbook Project describes itself as “a social open source experiment for content creators” and Wired Magazine have called Weiler “One of twenty-five people helping to re-invent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.”

Here’s more about it from the site:

Our goal is to create a free resource for content creators that will become a user contributed repository of information. The concept is part of a “social open source experiment” called the workbook project. It’s a simple concept, the workbook is meant to be spread and edited. Meaning that content creators can add their own info, war stories, advice etc. We’re hoping that the workbook can grow as a resource. We’re building it with an open source “client side” wiki called tiddlywiki that can be saved to the desktop, edited and then uploaded again.

The goal is to have it grow organically as people add what they feel is important. Then over time, the various “additions” can be collected or at least interlinked so that the information can be shared. The first edition of the workbook will include extensive info about:

* Raising capital
* High Production Values with no money
* Putting together a 17 city theatrical release
* Building a fan base and creating buzz
* Clearance and Delivery issues
* A look at actual contracts
* Getting your work into retail and rental outlets
* Making a TV deal
* How to deal with world sales
* Emerging Markets

If you are making or distributing a film and want to learn more about how to use the tools of Web 2.0 to help you then The Workbook Project is a good place to start.

www.workbookproject.com