[ 9. The lonelygirl15 Series | YouTube ]

[ The lonelygirl15 Series www.youtube.com/user/lonelygirl15 ]

Another internet phenomenon, lonelygirl15 (the preferred spelling is without any capital letters) is a relatively long-running and very popular Videoblog. The series began back in June 2006, where a 16 year old girl named Bree and her best friend, though not boyfriend Daniel under the anonym DanielBeast regularly posted Vblogs of their life onto YouTube.

[ In Detail ]
Bree first hooked viewers with humorous and engaging videos featuring popular YouTube directors and videos. Under the suspicious alias lonelygirl15, she achieved massive success on YouTube, with 91321 subscribers to her channel, who arduously followed her everyday life through the eyes of a webcam in her room. The widespread availability of good quality digital cameras and webcams and good editing software would have made her series possible and the cheap cost of fast broadband made it possible to both upload and download her movies. Many fans commented on her videos, which she sometimes replied to in the next in her series of blogs, showing that her blogs were not prerecorded, but were genuinely filmed around that time. However, the videos seemed far too regular and well edited to be real, many critics proclaimed, although many many of her closest fans believed that she was indeed a real person. She had her own pet likes and dislikes, and the story became too dramatic to be realistic, and was eventually found out to be an actress named Jessica Rose, with the suspicions about her username being simply a lure to pique the internet community’s interests… even a fan website and a whole section on wikipedia were created for her.
Many fans and viewers made the connection between this and the viral marketing campaign [ viral marketing ] launched by the Blair Witch Project [ Blair Witch Project ] to advertise their movie, and thought it could be a taster for a new television series or an alternative reality game [ ARG ] or possible for some covert online surveillance.
Still as of yet, the monetary purpose of the series is not yet known, as no profit is made from the series, directed by Glenn Rubenstein.

Her series is groundbreaking. It is also a good example of how the internet combined with the huge reach of YouTube can be manipulated to gain massive media interest.

[ 8. The David Lehre Website | MySpace ]

[ The David Lehre MySpace www.myspace.com/davelehre ]

Dave Lehre has been a true internet phenomenon. A college dropout who still lives with his parents, he began his fledgling career with some highly entertaining and extremely popular videos, one of which is called “MySpace: The Movie” which parodied the social networking site, posted primarily onto his website and have made their way swiftly onto YouTube and various other similar sites. He and his self-founded production company Vendetta Studios now have a deal with Fox to produce his own untitled as of yet, late night half-hour show with a $300,000 budget for the pilot episode, self described as “an open-format sketch-variety show with music videos, short videos and comedy skits”. He has also made an appearance in recent parody “Epic Movie” as a look-alike for Ashton Kutcher. His main audience is anyone who is up for a good laugh and mostly, these tend to be the younger generation to late-20’s who are his main fans. He has built up quite a cult following, especially amongst the more technically minded audience, as his career was born from the internet.

[ In Detail ]
Straight from whence his career was born, he still utilises the internet to great extent, and especially both his own site and his MySpace page. They are used to raise awareness for his work and himself and also advertise subscriptions to his work, with plenty of direct hyperlinks [ hyperlink ] to iTunes, his Blog, his YouTube account and his own site. He embeds many of his videos and trailers on his page, and website, which makes it easier for new audience members to find his videos faster and more effortlessly.
Dave uses his blog to inform the fans of what he is doing and what he has scheduled in the coming weeks. He also posts up videos and pictures of things that may be interesting about him, such as his front-page appearance on MySpace or his TV appearances, or even his budding Vendetta Branded Clothing. Unfortunately, he isn’t able to post up the footage he has been filming, as the studio owns the rights, not himself, though he does try to post up as much as he can. This allows his fans to feel integrated and informed in what he is doing, increasing their loyalty and ‘fanship’. The fans can post their comments underneath the main post for him to read and he does read these and replies often. His blog contains an RSS feed to automatically inform his fans when he updates his blog.
His website and blog are good examples of a wide reach, good quality movies, democratisation and vertical integration.

[ 7. The NME Website | Homepage ]

[ The NME Website www.nme.com ]

The NME homepage invites the readers of its magazine, which has tended towards the indie demographic and has swayed away from the wider genre appeal that the magazine first started with, as it has been criticised by the press recently, an example of narrowcasting in progress. It has always been a huge support for upcoming British bands such as Kaiser Chiefs, The Libertines and Franz Ferdinand. The website provides music news, reviews, downloads, merchandise and message boards. The website also features Gig ticket searches, competitions and various feeds from eBay and other mainstream online auctions and shops, to compare prices on certain merchandise without having to leave the site. The large amount of content on the site to do with all aspects of indie music culture has supported NME and made it one of, if not the largest British music magazine. The sorts of Flash animated adverts that are littered around the site are aimed at NME’s target audience and advertise such things as internet and soft and alcoholic drinks.

[ In Detail ]

The Homepage is made up a number of features. The basic layout of the website is a static navigation banner at the top, with links to each different area of the website, and down the right hand side, there is a list of the less frequently visited links and also the featured links. On the left hand side running down most of the centre too is the main content of the website, with hooks and links to various articles and features.
NME, like Xfm has its own radio station and this is available online from the website, on top of that, the listeners can also view immediate full music videos on the radio’s playlist if they register with the site, thus helping NME’s online surveillance and vertically integrating the audience to NME, these are convenient and small files to allow faster downloads, faster satisfaction but less quality. This, coupled with the email newsletter is able to raise awareness of the site, and keep its audience coming back. Also along these lines is the RSS feed that the site has, which feeds information to the audience automatically. NME puts new media technology to its full use, when it holds awards and at many gigs, it is able to transmit these live via webcam [ webcam ] to viewers and listeners on the website.
Adding to the message boards, there is also a section where people can place word adverts free to advertise, usually for band members. This is an added incentive for new bands to align themselves with NME, and through this, vertical integration and a loyalty can grow between NME and bands in question, thus possibly granting NME sneak previews and other things in future.
The NME website is very intent on gaining loyalty with its demographic, and providing a comprehensive one-stop-shop website to cater for all their needs from lifestyle tips to music downloads, showing good use of vertical integration and online surveillance, whilst still keeping the basic interactivity must-haves onsite too.

[ 5. The Xfm Site | Richard Bacon ]

[ The Xfm Richard Bacon Section www.xfm.co.uk/bacon ]

Richard Bacon’s own section of the Xfm website is devoted to him and his narrowcasted drive-time radio show from 4-7pm. It is humorous and often the jokes are at Richard Bacon’s expense. His website acts as a support for his show and has archives of features that were aired previously, prizes, plus reviews, YouTube pick-of-the-day, interviews with special guests and Bacon Offcuts:

This where all the scrappy, chewy bits of indigestible radio left over from
Richard's show live. All the salty, unpalatable, leftover bits that don’t really
fit anywhere else get out here so you can peruse them at your leisure like a
tramp outside Subway after closing time.

As this shows, Bacon has no hang-ups about being the subject of humour and puns with his name, and this makes his site more appealing to the target audience.

[ In Detail ]
The site has the same layout as the rest of the Xfm site, with the same banners and borders. There are also many different sections inside Bacon’s site. The section named “The Catchphrase Gallery” allows listeners to email in a pictorial representation of any one of Bacon’s catchphrases, such as “At Ease”, “Yes, yes” or “Breasts”. The comic nature of this lightens the tone, and gives the audience a chance to have their picture displayed to everyone via this page, effectively the new technologies are allowing Bacon to entertain his listeners more and make the relationship a little more interactive, instead of him talking and playing music on his radio station, the listeners can also get in touch with him. Most of the features on his site allow the audience to get in touch with him via email, such as sending in their favourite YouTube video clip for the web page [ video clip ] for them to embed into the website or the 5 o’clock shuffle where listeners can request their 3 favourite songs to be played on air, or indeed the Feedback Track where listeners feed back on a newly released song played first on Xfm.
Bacon’s site does not use new media technology to its full potential, but it serves a great purpose, uses it for good benefit. However, it is a very good example of democratisation and interactivity.

[ First Post! ]

Hi dudes,

First post, just thought I'd see if this embed thing works and stuff...

And yes, the theme for today is red, so here are some songs that have something to do with red! Yays!

Cool stuff.

Byes!