More updates on the Lonelygirl15 story:
- A new video clip. Bree's grounded, but the wicker girl, er, ceremony is going ahead. Notice the patch on her arm?
- One site broke the identity of the acress playing Bree.
- Big media caught on: the LA Times and the New York Times. The latter continues its theme of geek-bashing, with a snide note about the actress preferring parties over Richard Feynmann.
So this has developed into a fine example of Web 2.0 storytelling. We have microcontent in the form of video clips, primarily. But there's also the growing social content in the form of comments, fora, blog posts, and so on. And it's in perpetual release, between the serial release of microcontent chunks, and the overall development of content on the fly, in interaction with the audience.
[creator] Beckett hatched the idea of creating a mystery story online, one that could roll out small mock-confessional bites in real time.
"Our goal was to tell a very realistic fictional story in this medium," Beckett said. He dreamed of using the various technologies of the Web, from comment boards to social networking sites, to both build a rich identity for a character and to let fans influence the story's direction....
The intent was to allow fan response posted in the comment section of lonelygirl15's YouTube and MySpace pages to determine the direction of each subsequent episode.
As an example of the fans' influence over the story line, what the team calls "collaborative storytelling," they pointed to an episode in which Daniel reveals his romantic feelings to Bree. "In the 'Hiking' video," Beckett said, "where Daniel filmed her, there were a ton of comments saying, 'Daniel likes you. It's obvious that the cameraman was completely in love with you.' We saw the comments and said this is the perfect opportunity to address this."
The NYTimes catches the social content aspect:
When Mr. Steinfeld’s dummy site, which had been set up before the first Lonelygirl15 video was even posted, struck users as suspicious and unsupervised — Mr. Steinfeld says he grew tired of running it, and dropped out of the project — fans set up their own site devoted to Lonelygirl15, which soon attracted more than a thousand members.
Both sites drew contributions from novelists, journalists, academics, day traders, lawyers, bloggers, filmmakers, video game designers, students, housewives, bored youngsters and experts on religion and botany. In the cacophony of conjecture, analysis, close-readings, jokes, insults, and distractions, good information sometimes surfaced.
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