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More Articles by Michael Bissell
A shoebox vs. an online backup
Cave Man Distribution Networks
Dressing for Work
The team that hates itself -- Visionaries, Managers and Technicians
iBooks -- Creative Epicenter or Gatekeeper?
The Failure of Success
The Economy is Going to Get Worse, but that's okay
Time lost on Twitter
Common Sense of the New Economy
Twitter's back alleys and dark places
Social Media is NOT Advertising
On censorship
Microsoft Courier
Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
Bad Restroom Health Sign
PDXBOOM -- The power of social media and the portland pipe bomb
China and Apple -- Different organizations, same management
The volume of screens
Logorama
Sleeping through miracles
Who needs an URL anyhow?
Transmedia
That magical little tablet
The complications of making coffee
How your website can be in two places at once
Masterpieces created by sheer volume
Suing over lack of originality
A Primer on Internet Fame -- dancing babies, hamsters, numa numa, and more...
The Lawsuit Lottery
Checking my messages
Another Random Night of Arts in Portland
Rules are made to be broken -- in a reasoned, systematic way
So many accounts, so few passwords
The Dali Lama of Hillsdale
Who really uses Twitter? 60% of Twitter's traffic isn't on Twitter
Riding the commute route on Saturday
Not everyone is like you
The Web is a Jerry Rigged Kludge
Portland Bike Plan: Too Expensive or Playing with numbers?
Twitter: Asleep at the Mouse Wheel
Where regulation is good: Google Voice and Vonage
How Facebook is (unintentionally) forcing programmers to piss off users
The Twit Cleaner
Perfect Secretary's pitch for @Adbroad (and the Youtube API)
The Emotions of Text
The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam
Google Analytics, the cloud and missing numbers #fail
Helen Klein Ross & Michael Bissell Interview at Adweek's Social Media Strategies Conference
The Internet is the New 60's
Getting back in the saddle (bicycle saddle, that is)
Ranting about Portland Drivers
Cougars from New Zealand (and I don't mean big cats)
Adding facts together, or why you can't charge your cell phone from wifi
Social Media and the Destruction of the World
Rabid Fans vs Passive Viewers -- The Coco vs Leno saga
How to tell someone to retweet (without using up your 140 characters)
You can't buy social media
A book unopened is but a block of paper
Building the LOST: The Final Season Sweepstakes
Holiday SPAM (or the lack thereof)
Archiving Twitter
Too Many Toolbars
Random Censorship with Google Adwords
Accessibility and Shopping Online
"Upgrading" my flight
Twisted path to customer service
Flash: Shiny objects blinding your audience
Twollow and other gold rush scripts
Arthur Miller's All My Sons
GPS in a Laptop computer
Thinking outside the box... There was a box?
Twitter was designed for Text Messaging
It's not the corporations, damnit
Entrepreneur or Dreamer?
Adweek Social Media Twitter for Brands Presentation
Socializing is more than Social Media
Generational Marketing is a Myth (or Who's your Daddy?)
Social Media is Just the Way We Use the Internet
Twitter Followers Don't Matter (ask the porn sites)
The Internet is Gooder than Books
Sometimes you don't want your campaign to go viral
Best Twitter Branding Campaign
A Good Explosive Recipe and other found knowledge online
Like flies to crap, Spammy Twitter Followers don't really go away
Video Projectors for your phone
iPhone SMS Security Hole
How Flipmytweet works
Cell Phones as Microscopes
Markie's Birthday
Digg is not the Hijacker -- You Are
Steve Ballmer -- the walking dead?
Twitter as an open mic poetry reading
Automatic Social [un]Awareness
New York, New York
First splash for United Against Malaria
New Media/Old Media and the CLIO Awards
Interview at SXSW: Mad Men Twitter And Tracking
Saturday Yard Work
We've got an App for that -- it's called the Web
Made it to SXSW in Austin
What is Conquent?
The trouble with Wordpress and other templates
Wayward Words with Baggage
Speaking at SXSW March 17th
The fleeting Memory of the Internet
It's okay to say 'I don't know'
Good Morning America, now Go Fight Traffic
More surreality in Portland
Nike Takes Over Conquent
Facebook owns this title
Excuses, excuses
A little on Social Media
Feeding on Content
Attack of the Bots
Irish Music in Oregon City
Landing on an Aircraft Carrier
Got Curry? And some bizarre art?
Web 1.0
Random Music and Random Life in Portland
To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump
Flight Simulator
Cold night, hot fire, happy cat
Net Neutrality
Walking to work in the snow
A window into Moreland of the Past
Getting clever with data feeds
Big and Little Beirut
The Other Credit Crisis
The Broadband Inauguration
T-Mobile owns Magenta and Other Patent Stories
The Risk-takers, Doers and Makers of Things
The noise of 20,000+ Twitter Followers
Reflections on my DC Trip
Born Again American
30,000 feet, 500 MPH Suburban Strip Mall
Cellphones, toilets and the Inauguration
The wall of pissing
National Treasure/National Archives
My trip to DC so far
Everyone is insane
Getting ready for DC
The End of Days (of song): Microsoft Songsmith Example
The Very Model of a Modern Major General
Browser Bigotry
The Death of your Soul: Microsoft Songsmith
Creative Development or Developing Creatively?
Race to Witch Mountain
The Myth of Wikipedia (or the Wiki-1400)
Online/Offline Sales -- is it really that bad?
Is PayPal Tacky?
Old School Web Design Still Works
Domain Squatting
Christmas Fire
Green Chri$tma$
QA 101
Portland Snow
Get some return on that web traffic
I think they have a backup...
I'd love to have that problem
The [un]importance of statistics
Don't be a tool of viral marketing
CAT Scan!
Follow up to the shoulder injury
Emails, discussions, blogs, wiki and web content
Ironic Injury
On the Santa Monica Pier
You Designed for Print First
You let someone else register your domain name
You figured .biz, .info, .us would work fine
What's after the Integrated Circuit?
Intelligent life is out there (but it's bugger all down here on earth)
Subject Matter Experts Talking Other Subject Matter
The Totalitarian Regime of Apple
Oversimplifying how people work
crowdSPRING
Traditional agencies vs. the 'new model'
Creative Services for the New World
Reverse Anthropomorphism
The End of Time
Oil prices and birdsong
Watching Starship Troopers AGAIN!
Better Living Through Twitter
Lessons Learned From Apple
It's the Brand, Baby
Business Architecture vs. Web Construction
On Truth
You can't build life
Accidentally Drunk in Portland
Al Gore the Winner
Intelligent life is out there (but it’s bugger all down here on earth)
Aussie Rules Football
Trip to Nostalgia Land
I am such an idiot
Long day of travel
Miami -- as far from Portland as you can go in the US
Inverse Peter Principle
Random Knowledge
I'm fascinated with modern plumbing
Leaving Seattle (or why you should keep your ticket close)
On the Rails
The Hive
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Transmedia
2010-03-09 17:11:13
Shortcut URL: http://t.conquent.com/FA00
Sometimes you need a new word, but most of the time there is a perfectly good word that you don't know or maybe just don't like. Corporate America loves new words, and I'm not sure why, after all, they don't treat the words they have particularly well...
Take this word: Transmedia. While it sounds like the transexual porn section of the video store, it's actually a marketing term that refers to storytelling, where "content becomes invasive and permeates fully the audience's lifestyle." (wiki).
Which means omnipresent storytelling, or cross-media, or just plain pervasive media.
Creating a word to describe your idea isn't new, but we used to call it "branding." You would come up with an idea for a new soft drink, coin a term, trademark it, and create Coca Cola. Eventually the word Coke means any soft drink. The generic word "soft drink" is still there, but the mainstream use of "Coke" only happens after the brand, and therefore the word, is established in popular culture.
The prevailing thought now is to create a word, and use it enough that you force it into popular culture. It almost never works, as seen with the broken trail of words and jargon.
The problem I have with making up words is based in one of my basic maxims: This stuff is complicated enough, we don't have to make it more complicated. The process of explaining your concept of pervasive storytelling is slowed down by creating a word that could be gay porn or a Soviet telegraph.
I'm not saying that "pervasive storytelling" isn't a mouthful, but if I look up the words on Dictionary.com or, lord help us, in a book, the words have meaning and I don't need a wiki or a jargon dictionary to figure out the concept on my own.
Now take your crazy talk and get off my lawn...
Sam: Re: Transmedia
2010-03-09 17:21:25
"Transmedia" was first coined in 2003. It became a bit Hollywood during some of the Battlestar Gallactica "cross platform" story initiatives and press (one of the Showrunners was very "transmedia" driven and used the phrase frequently). "Cross Platform" preceded "transmedia" but meant the same thing, without the pretense.
Regrettably, it's deeply misused by those who think that having "content" placed on a bunch of different platforms constitutes "transmedia." And, equally regrettably, it's good to use for certain Search results.
Actual "transmedia storytelling" is rare, where Users/Audience acquire storied content from different sources a bit like a puzzle. There are also "converged media" story telling applications, which more seamlessly blend storytelling across different delivery mediums but usually within a single content consumption experience (not disconnected by time/space).
Worse yet is the quest for making "social media" part of transmedia storytelling. Having a bunch of people shouting at a TV (in a bar, during a Game) does not extend the story to the Bar. The experience extends, but, not the story. A Twitter stream is no different. Subtle point, but, worth making.
What I'm getting at is that it's an old concept at this point, it's generally misused; it's still as pretentious as when first used. But, there is some meat in there that's worth delving into...it would just be nice if people said, "hey, like I'm telling my story in a bunch'a different places, cool, eh?"
Amanda Frech: Re: Transmedia
2010-03-15 15:12:36
I guess I'd also say that "This stuff is simple enough: we don't need to make it more complicated." Which new words inevitably do. I've done a good bit of work in university libraries, and you'd be amazed at the extent to which their propensity to give everything a digital new name *just because it's digital* confuses people who certainly do not need to be any more confused than they are already (cough: undergraduates).
For instance, when libraries started putting their card catalogs online, they started calling them OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogs). They did realize that their users couldn't be expected to parse that acronym, so what did they do? They gave their online catalogs cutesy names, names that were usually acronyms. Harvard has HOLLIS, the University of Virginia has VIRGO, and so on and so on. Every library used to just have "the catalog," so that if you learned what a "catalog" was at one library, you could apply that knowledge somewhere else.
tom: Re: Transmedia
2010-04-06 14:48:01
Today, the official "Transmedia Producer's Credit" was approved by Producer's Guild:
http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/
It's a word that's here to stay.
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