Brain Assassin

Unbe­liev­able! I almost missed this one, can you imag­ine? Any­way, first things first. I already wrote about FarScape a while back. The execs from SciFi canned the show and left the fans hang­ing in the air with a major cliffhanger. Even though it had good rat­ings. And now they’re gonna bring it back? At least sort of, we’re talk­ing webisodes here. Well, that’s a mys­tery to me but who am I to judge. Any FarScape is way bet­ter than no FarScape. And that’s it, as far as I’m concerned.

Still, let’s take a closer look. Over at Gateworld.net I found the first piece of infor­ma­tion which sent me into the depths of the inter­net, look­ing for more infor­ma­tion I could get my hands on. So, SciFi announced that there will be 10 webisodes of FarScape, set to be released on SCIFI.com. At Comic Con 07 Brian Hen­son him­self told the audi­ence that there will be “at least 10 webisodes of Next Gen­er­a­tion Farscape”. In addi­tion, they were talk­ing spin-​​offs or movies but there has only been some devel­op­ment as far as the webisodes are con­cerned. Finally, SciFi has whipped up a site where you can “be first to get news about the web series”.

Sounds good? Well, take it with a grain of salt: Each episode is antic­i­pated to run for 3 to 6 min­utes. “The char­ac­ters, crea­tures, pas­sions, con­flicts and barely con­tained lunacy of the ‘Farscape’ uni­verse have never stopped. We just haven’t had a win­dow into that uni­verse lately to see what’s cur­rently hap­pen­ing there. Well now we do. And it ain’t calm, and it ain’t pretty, and it ain’t like any­thing any­one is going to expect. But it is totally ‘Farscape,’” promised O’Bannon, exec­u­tive pro­ducer. Accord­ing to his words, the webisodes should stay true to the orig­i­nal and be dif­fer­ent on the same time!

I don’t know what to think. The peo­ple in the SciFi forums are quite excited about all this. Even though I feel quite enthu­si­as­tic about the “come­back” it sounds a lit­tle shal­low to me. And who knows what they mean when they talk about it not being “like any­thing any­one is going to expect”? To my mind, SciFi is try­ing to see where the new trend of webisodes is going. Change isn’t going to slow down and you has to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, dig­i­tal con­tent, and, of course, new mar­ket­ing vehi­cles. Let’s hope they don’t screw it up.

Jakob Nielsen pro­vides yet another valu­able insight for your home­page design. He writes that the usabil­ity of a home­page was com­pro­mised because of fancy for­mat­ting and fancy words. Users ignored a key area because it resem­bled a pro­mo­tion. They looked at the right parts of the page but they didn’t see the essen­tial information.

It’s inter­est­ing how peo­ple ignore things they don’t want to see. I too mostly ignore adver­tise­ments, mainly because I’m not inter­ested in it. Since most sites try too hard sell­ing you some­thing it’s not won­der, I guess. Obvi­ously, less def­i­nitely is more. In order to get the most out of your online pres­ence you should check out Nielsen’s Top Ten Guide­lines for Home­page Design. Even though these guide­lines are clearly aimed at com­pa­nies they are quite use­ful for the aver­age Joe.

What do we have here? A war of some sort? Not quite likely but accord­ing to Danah Boyd there is a rift. Amer­i­can teenagers are flock­ing to MySpace and Face­book and accord­ing to her essay, which go where have some­thing to do with socio-​​economic class. Danah has been try­ing to fig­ure out how to put this divi­sion into some kinda for­mula. Since she hasn’t suc­ceeded yet we can enjoy her obser­va­tions over at her blog. I have to admit, there’s a cer­tain truth to be found in this paper.

In short, Miss Boyd has observed that hege­monic Amer­i­can teens are all on or switch­ing to Face­book. Non-​​hegemonic teens are drawn to MySpace. She thinks that a class divi­sion has emerged which is under­lined by adver­tis­ing or pol­icy deci­sions, for exam­ple. Well, con­sid­er­ing the ori­gin of each site, I find myself agree­ing to her line of thought. But I have to ask myself why any­body should even bother? It’s all just a mat­ter of pre­sen­ta­tion and news. Both social net­work­ing sites embrace dif­fer­ent poli­cies, encour­age dif­fer­ent actions. Is it really safe to assume that MS and FB are the prime indi­ca­tors of class division?

Do you need a hot look­ing “friend” to enhance your page with pho­tographs and com­ments? There’s a site called FakeY­our­Space that allows you to hire attrac­tive mod­els for 99 cents a month. For that fee you can pick your friends and even spec­ify exactly what com­ments they should post. You’ll get two posts a week and each addi­tional pur­chase of the same model sim­ply dou­bles the amount of com­ments you’ll get in a week.

I should’ve come up with this idea. Turn­ing cyber-​​losers into social net­work­ing mag­nets, that’d be some­thing to brag about. Well, I for one don’t like this kind of social net­work rep­u­ta­tion hack. It’s bad enough that peo­ple start to think of the cyber­space as some kind of real-​​world replace­ment. You never know for sure if some­body tells you fic­ti­tious sto­ries or plain truth. That reminds me of this famous car­toon which is still some­thing to laugh about. Well, nowa­days even more so.

Per­son­ally, I think that’s dis­gust­ing. What’s the use in pre­tend­ing to be some­one you really aren’t? Sooner or later you’ll be exposed and every­thing you lied so hard for is gone. What’s next? Start­ing a new secret iden­tity, book­ing other mod­els to bring some con­tent to your blog/​page? If that’s the case it’s a sad world we live in.

The folks over at Shack­news have pub­lished an inter­est­ing arti­cle on dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion. I tried myself on its mer­its here. They begin by focus­ing on the per­ils of this type of dis­tri­b­u­tion. Refer­ring to a recent exam­ple they show that par­tic­u­lar ser­vices may cease to exist. Indeed, that poses quite a prob­lem if it hap­pens quickly and unex­pect­edly. Frankly, I was in a rush writ­ing about its ben­e­fits lest I for­get some­thing, thus, I didn’t even think on that. Can’t be helped now, the rem­edy is over at Shacknews.

How­ever, they con­tinue with the Steam ser­vice which has become quite pop­u­lar ever since it has been estab­lished as a means of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion. Now, even big pub­lish­ers like Activi­sion are going to come on board which clearly shows a con­tin­u­ally grow­ing sup­port for Steam. I don’t think Steam will pre­vail, though, at least it can’t in it’s cur­rent shape. There should be oth­ers pro­vid­ing such ser­vices rather than the devel­oper itself. As always, com­pe­ti­tion is healthy and helps shap­ing the mar­ket. Obvi­ously, con­sumers do have lotta ben­e­fits result­ing from a strong competition.