Star Trek - World-of-Newave.info http://answers.world-of-newave.info/star-trek.htm Latest news and articles about Star Trek en-us Copyright (c)2004-2008.§/Newave SARL. All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:33:40 GMT Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:33:40 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {LITERATURE > RSS FEEDS} - Smith Praises Abrams' Trek http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/smith-praises-abrams-trek-20080855528.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/smith-praises-abrams-trek-20080855528.htm Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT Writer-director-actor Kevin Smith alluded in an interview with a Los Angeles-based morning radio show that he has seen J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek film and was impressed with what he saw, according to >a href="http://trekmovie.com/2008/08/22/kevin-smith-sort-of-reviews-star-trek/" target="outside">TrekMovie.com Scifi.Com Smith Praises Abrams' Trek {new window}   Www.Scifi.Com - Writer-director-actor Kevin Smith alluded in an interview with a Los Angeles-based morning radio show that he has seen J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek film and was impressed with what he saw, according to >a href="http://trekmovie.com/2008/08/22/kevin-smith-sort-of-reviews-star-trek/" target="outside">TrekMovie.com
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]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/meet-leland-chee-the-star-wars-franchise-continuity-2008089619.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/meet-leland-chee-the-star-wars-franchise-continuity-2008089619.htm Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:55:00 GMT On the wall behind Leland Chee's desk is a portrait of an Ithorian, an alien with a hammer-shaped head that you glimpse briefly in the famous Star Wars cantina scene. In its leathery, foot-long fingers, the Ithorian holds a cube decorated with elaborate metallic tracings, a device known as a holocron. Think of it as a Force-powered hard drive, capable of storing an enormous quantity of information. "It's a piece of Jedi technology," Chee says. "It tells you ... everything." To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics. Keepin' it canonical: Leland Chee, continuity database administrator at Lucas Licensing, maintains the Holocron — a vast FileMaker database that's consulted to make sure that any new elements added to the Star Wars franchise fit within the existing mythology. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Of course, Chee's Holocron isn't a Force-sensitive crystal. It's a FileMaker database, a searchable repository of more than 30,000 entries covering almost every character, planet, and weapon mentioned, however fleetingly, in the vast array of Star Wars titles and products. The Holocron isn't just for fun—when Lucas Licensing inks a deal with a toy company or a T-shirt designer, it vets those ancillary products to ensure they conform to the spirit and letter of the continuity that has come before and will continue afterward. In the past 31 years, Star Wars movies have grossed in excess of $4 billion worldwide. But retail sales of merchandise stand at $15 billion, and 20 percent of that has been earned since 2006, the year after the final film was released. Careful nurture of the Star Wars canon—thousands of years of story time, running through all the bits and pieces of merchandise—has kept the franchise popular for decades. So Chee spends three-quarters of his typical workday consulting or updating the Holocron. He also approves packaging designs, scans novels for errors, and creates Talmudic charts and documents addressing such issues as which Jedi were still alive during the Clone Wars and how long it takes a spaceship to get from Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker, to Luke's homeworld of Tatooine. The Keeper of the Holocron takes this very seriously: "Someone has to be able to say, 'Luke Skywalker would not have that color of lightsaber.'" The screening room at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, Lucasfilm's sprawling facility in San Francisco's Presidio District, is as opulent as you would expect—plush seats, wood panels, crystal-clear projection, and a perfect sound system. So when that classic John Williams fanfare begins and the Star Wars logo appears onscreen in that distinctive font, in that distinctive yellow, it quickens the pulse. It's also when Chee, sitting next to me, tells me that in an early version of what we're watching—a new LucasArts videogame called The Force Unleashed, due out in September—the logo was slightly wrong. "It was off by only a few pixels, but someone in Licensing spotted it and submitted a report." I grab an Xbox 360 controller and soon I'm striding through the corridors of a satellite that orbits the smugglers' moon of Nar Shaddaa, destroying everyone in my path. My character, Starkiller, is the secret apprentice of Darth Vader, sent here to eliminate a Jedi elder ... and leave no witnesses. I deflect laser blasts from militia troops with my lightsaber and then use the Force to hurl a chunk of metal through a window behind them. The glass shatters, and several foes are sucked into the vacuum of space before a safety wall snaps shut. I'm beginning to understand the power of the Dark Side. On the scale of badassedness, obliterating legions of good guys with the Force ranks right up there with leaping Snake River Canyon in a monster truck that can transform into a robot. And it's true that the game's sophisticated physics, combined with clever AI software for characters, means that when you Force-throw a Wookiee into a tree on its home planet, Kashyyyk, the Wookiee writhes realistically and the tree explodes in a botanically accurate cloud of splinters. But that's not what has fans most excited about The Force Unleashed. It's the stuff that happens between the interactive killing sprees: brief cinematic interludes that add new details—new plot points—to the saga. "The game is set between episodes III and IV," says Haden Blackman, who led the development team. Translation: Play it and you'll learn what happened before the original Star Wars film trilogy and after the prequels, two decades that have been shrouded in mystery. Over the course of the game, players will learn the details of the internecine feud between Darth Vader and his mentor, Emperor Palpatine, and the way these two unwittingly created the very rebellion that brought them down. The game has yielded a bountiful crop of tie-ins: a book, a graphic novel, a tabletop role-playing game supplement, and several lines of toys. With no more live-action Star Wars films forthcoming (or so we are told), games from the subsidiary division LucasArts are becoming ever more important in expanding the universe—and perpetuating the story-product ecology. And with every narrative beat and plot point, Chee and his dozens of colleagues with Holocron access are there. "Licensing approves everything," he says. "Text, dialog, art ... It all comes through our office." This is where the work of hundreds of writers and artists gets woven into a vast, internally consistent continuum. The power of the Dark Side: LucasArts' Haden Blackman discusses the story and the technology behind the upcoming game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. In his 1932 book Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction, T. S. Blakeney used the term canonicity in reference to the mystery novels and short fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes enthusiasts treat Doyle's work as if the great detective inhabits a coherent and logically consistent universe. Some of the stories written by Doyle were canonical—genuine events in that alternate universe—while others had to be considered apocryphal. (It should come as no surprise that fans would appropriate theological terms. The ecstasy of true fandom can, after all, approximate religion.) Today, canon and its serial-fiction cousin, continuity, are integral to genres like mystery, fantasy, and sci-fi. The giants of the field are known as world-builders as much as writers. J. R. R. Tolkien supplemented his Lord of the Rings series with hundreds of pages of appendices, genealogical charts, even pronunciation and usage guides for the languages he invented. Yet in the multiverse of fictional realities, Holmes's London, Frodo's Middle-earth, Buffy's Sunnydale, and Batman's Gotham are mere planetary systems compared with the grand galactic enterprise of Star Trek. When the original series—known to devout fans as The Original Series—went off the air in 1969, acolytes kept the flame alive. They extended the stories with their own fiction. They created technical manuals. Eventually, the series became a movie, and then another, and then another TV series, and a few more after that. Each new iteration produced more canonical information. Spock's death, Kirk's son, Picard's adventures as a cadet ... eventually, the writers' room on a Trek show became a minefield. "Someone would tell you that a Voyager episode last year mentioned a bit of backstory with the Romulans, and now you can't do this over here," says Ron Moore, a writer and producer on several Star Trek shows who went on to create the new Battlestar Galactica. "You'd argue the validity of that, but they'd be, like, 'No, now it's established.'" Lucas Licensing oversees billions of dollars in merchandise—from pillows to Pez dispensers. Photo: Jeff Minton But the many strata of Star Trek books, games, comics, and cartoons haven't been well tended. Some events in the movies and even later TV shows contradict preexisting lore. (A backward change like that is called a retcon, short for "retroactive continuity.") Gene Roddenberry himself, creator of Star Trek, was known to second-guess his own pronouncements about what was and was not canonical. After a while, the retcons and inconsistencies can become off-putting to fans and render once-beloved universes impenetrable to newcomers. One solution: a reboot. Start from scratch, like Moore did with Galactica. Clever preservation of original story elements retains the old fans, and streamlining and modernizing lets newbies spend their hard-earned quatloos, too. To Chee, the orderliness of the Star Wars canon is what sets it apart, what makes it feel more real than all those other franchises. "Look at James Bond," he says. "What's real in the James Bond world? What year does it take place in? It's not grounded in a real timeline." The Star Wars chronology, on the other hand, marks time from the Battle of Yavin, the assault on the Death Star at the end of the original Star Wars. Luke Skywalker was born in the year 19 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin). It says so in the Holocron. Back in his office, Chee asks his database what else it has on young Skywalker. The result contains scores of fields covering lineage, favorite vehicles, the planet he's from, how to write his name in the Aurebesh alphabet. "Oops," Chee says, blocking the screen with his body until he has minimized the window. "There are things in the Holocron that aren't public knowledge, stuff coming down the pike two or three years from now." He won't say whether those secrets relate to upcoming books, movies, games, or toys. Probably all of them. Merch and more merch: Movies, games, comics, and novels are the tip of the iceberg. Leland Chee shows off more Star Wars goods, like Yoda skateboards, Wookiee slippers, and Darth Tater. Beware the Jar Jar lollipop! Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Lucasfilm has to plan ahead and think long term. "We don't reboot. We don't start from scratch," Chee says. "When Chewbacca died, he died." (Poor Chewie yowled his last yowl in 25 ABY, when he was stuck on the planet Sernpidal as it collided with its moon, Dobido, in the novel Vector Prime, the first book in the New Jedi Order series. His death is now canon.) "The thing about Star Wars is that there's one universe," Chee says. "Everyone wants to know stuff, like, where did Mace Windu get that purple lightsaber? We want to establish that there's one and only one answer." Star Wars was the number two toy brand aimed at boys last year, behind only Transformers. But toys account for less than half of the revenue for licensed merchandise. The Lucas Licensing office is positively drowning in other merch. Bedspreads, window blinds, pillowcases, wastebaskets, guitars, chairs, baseball caps, beach balls, jewelry, lunch boxes, cookie jars, and kites all added up to $3 billion in retail sales in 2006 and 2007. That figure includes big-ticket items aimed at adults. An R2-D2 DVD projector. A stormtrooper golf bag. A high-end fashion line created with superstar designer Marc Ecko, including $300 Star Wars jeans and a replica of the poncho Han Solo wore on the ice planet Hoth. There was even a $3,000 suit of Darth Vader-style samurai armor. "We realize that our fans have different levels of disposable income," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, who joined the company a week after the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. "The kids who played with the toys have grown up." Leland Chee strolls the San Francisco campus of Lucasfilm. Photo: Jeff Minton There have been some egregious missteps, like the Jar Jar lollipop. It looks like a plastic bust of the hated character, but push a button and it opens its mouth and sticks out a hideous candy tongue for children to suck on. "The tongue had bumps on it," Chee says, wrinkling his nose. Chee's sense of what is correct in the Star Wars universe has been a lifetime in development. He saw the original movie at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco at age 6. He got his first plastic Star Wars action figures—R2-D2 and that lame C-3P0 look-alike, Death Star Droid—for his seventh birthday and from there steadily enlarged his collection, storing them all in a case shaped like Darth Vader's head (which he still has). Chee even kept the cardboard they were mounted on. "The packaging had great visuals, plus, like, a paragraph of backstory on the character," he says. It's easy to forget that before Star Wars, licensed merchandise was a different, less profitable business. All the big toymakers turned down the rights to make Star Wars action figures; upstart Kenner didn't sign on until a month before the film's release. The earliest product tie-ins were novels and comics—Marvel published an adaptation of the movie a month after it hit theaters, then continued with its own stories. Soon Marvel had smugglers Solo and Chewbacca teaming up with questionable characters like Jaxxon, a furry green creature with big floppy ears who wisecracked like Bugs Bunny. "The idea of continuity was alien at the time," Roffman says. "We let Marvel Comics do the stories they wanted as long as it didn't interfere with the upcoming movies, and they went in some bizarre directions." The first Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, was published in 1978, before anyone knew that sequels would be filmed, much less that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia would later turn out to be siblings. "Luke and Leia get ... affectionate," Chee allows. "It's very wrong." The success of the movies led to more products: TV specials, a Saturday morning cartoon show, newspaper comics, a board game, a D&D-style tabletop role-playing game, simple arcade and console videogames. Young Chee bought as much as he could, including the sheet music for the iconic theme song, which he played at his first organ recital. After the release of Return of the Jedi, in 1983, Lucasfilm assumed that interest would wane. But the merch kept selling. And then, Chee remembers, the novel Heir to the Empire was published. "Wait, was it 1990?" he says, tapping a search into the Holocron. "I need to get this date right." It was actually 1991 when Hugo Award-winning writer Timothy Zahn released the novel, set five years after Return of the Jedi. The book spent 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and proved to Lucasfilm that even without new movies, it still had a market. "I was in college at UC Davis by then, but that book brought me back into Star Wars," Chee says. Without movies at the core, though, Lucas Licensing couldn't afford to be lackadaisical—no more Jaxxons, no more incestuous flirtations. "We set parameters," Roffman says. "It had to be an important extension of the continuity, and it had to have an internal integrity with the events portrayed in the films." Closely tending the canon was paying off with fans. Essentially, all the new comic books, novels, and games were prequels and sequels of one another. If you wanted to know the whole story, you had to buy them all. Neither Lucasfilm nor its licensees will divulge just how much money Lucasfilm gets for each item; suffice it to say the percentage is substantial. Chee applied for a job as a software tester at LucasArts shortly before Star Wars: Special Edition was rereleased in 1997. The film was an updated version of the 1977 original, with new visual effects and added scenes. (The special edition proved that the canon is vulnerable to retcons. In the most egregious example, an f/x tweak now has alien errand boy Greedo, not Han Solo, shooting first in the cantina duel. This made Solo a more simplistic character.) Chee scoffed at the fanboys who waited in line for three days outside the Coronet to see a movie they already owned on VHS. He had the self-restraint to wait until 5 am on the day of the release to queue up. When Chee got home from the movie, there was a message on his answering machine. He had the gig. "That was the last time I had to wait in line to see a Star Wars movie," he says. At first, his job entailed identifying and logging game bugs. His uncanny command of Star Wars lore and his organizational skills allowed him to rise quickly to the role of lead tester, which eventually led him to work on the 1998 title Behind the Magic. Magic wasn't so much a game as an interactive CD-ROM of Star Wars trivia, a treasure trove of data for überfans that included a timeline, a searchable glossary, scripts, and deleted scenes. Assembling it revealed inconsistencies in the canon. "There were differences in the layout of the Millennium Falcon between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back," says Blackman, who, in addition to being project lead on The Force Unleashed, also wrote and did research for Magic. "The continuity fix is that Han Solo made some modifications to the ship's interior." Around 2000, Chee moved from LucasArts to Lucas Licensing, where he was tasked with creating an even more detailed version of Magic for internal use. "We had several game-design teams, several comic book writers, and dozens of novelists," Roffman says. "We needed a reference for everyone who was playing in our sandbox." Chee was the perfect person for the job. "I've been amassing Star Wars knowledge my whole life," he says. "My friends were always like, what the heck are you ever going to do with all of that?" Chee's answer: Create a FileMaker doc similar to the ones he had used to track game bugs. He started transferring information from Magic, from binders, and from the stream of new novels and comics. "You don't know how much you don't know until you get here," he says. "Like, I'd never heard the radio dramas." In a forum on StarWars.com, PiccoloKenobi poses a question that we've all wondered about at one time or another: Are the Low Altitude Assault Transport gunships used by the Grand Army of the Republic spaceworthy, or are they limited to traveling within a planet's atmosphere? "LAATs can be sealed to operate in the vacuum of space," Chee decrees in a response post. "But the standard LAAT is not equipped for long-distance space travel." In the world of continuity maintenance, Chee is something of an anomaly. Most geek-friendly franchises rely on volunteerism—while Chee was building the Holocron, fans of other canons were working outside official imprimatur. Babylon 5 has a fan-created database. The Buffyverse has several. In fact, the best source for Star Wars information on the older stuff that Chee hasn't logged yet is an online database created and maintained by a community of fans that Chee views with wary respect. It's called, inevitably, the Wookieepedia. Naturally, some fans chafe at the Lucasfilm pronouncement-from-on-high approach. Take Curtis Saxton, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK. Beginning in 1995, he released a series of amateur technical commentaries on TheForce.net, a Star Wars omnibus site, that sent shock waves through the fan community. A fan-made video critiquing Curtis Saxton's theory of the Endor Holocaust. Video: The Endor Holocaust Saxton wasn't writing fan fiction—it was more like fan physics. He started out by estimating the size and power of various Star Wars vehicles and weapons, including the Death Star's planet-destroying superlaser (2.4 x 1032 joules to blow up the planet Alderaan). His numbers didn't jibe with those in the Lucas Licensing-approved tech manuals. But he persisted. And that's what led to the Endor Holocaust. At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Death Star II explodes while orbiting a forested moon called Endor, populated by cuddly creatures called Ewoks. Saxton considered the Death Star's orbit, the power output of its hypermatter power source, and the sheer tonnage of debris its destruction would have generated, then concluded that the climactic battle must have rained death and nuclear winter onto the teddy-bear tribe. He wrote: "The mass-extinction event at Endor is an inevitable physical consequence of the circumstances at the end of Return of the Jedi. As such, it indirectly enjoys canonical status, even though it was not clearly portrayed in the film." In other words, science says the Ewoks are dead. You can't posit the genocide of the Ewoks without igniting a backlash. In the forums, debates raged between self-described Saxtonites and their foes. This willingness of some obsessives to go deeper into the fictional world than its original creators did is a mainstay of fandom. "It goes back to Hugo Gernsback, the father of modern science fiction, who encouraged readers to dig into his stories, expand on them, and critique the science," says Henry Jenkins, a sci-fi fan and MIT media-studies professor. Despite Saxton's heretical notions, he later worked on four official technical manuals. And the notion of an Endor Holocaust has been incorporated into several comics—as foul propaganda spread by Imperial loyalists. But the fact that official Star Wars products even addressed the idea shows how influential writing like Saxton's can be. It's called fanon—fan-generated canon—and it's still a controversial notion to the priesthood at Lucasfilm. "I don't like the term," Chee says. "There's no such thing as fan continuity." Yet even within the Holocron, not all reality is created equal. Chee coded a pulldown menu that lets him categorize entries. S, for example, stands for secondary continuity—early unvetted works, such as The Star Wars Holiday Special. Sure, it introduced fan-favorite character Boba Fett to the continuity. But it also featured Princess Leia singing a carol to celebrate the Wookiee ceremony of Life Day, and Harvey Korman in drag playing a cooking instructor making Bantha Surprise. Princess Leia serenades Wookiees on their homeworld Kashyyyk. From the quasi-canonical Star Wars Holiday Special. Video: Star Wars Holiday Special - Leia sings And then there's the very top level of canon, the inviolable, infallible level of Truth, marked GWL—George Walton Lucas. It's the divine word of the Creator who stands outside his universe and is not subject to the rules that govern it. Lucas approves every important addition to the canon. The ambitious story beats contained in the new game The Force Unleashed were permitted only after he signed off—and spent hours talking to the developers about the relationship between Darth Vader and the Emperor. Yes, he'll accept outside ideas. The novel Heir to the Empire introduced the planet of Coruscant, capital of the Old Republic, which Lucas later incorporated into the prequels. But he also used those prequels to retcon the hell out of Chee's otherwise well-integrated universe. Anakin Skywalker built C-3P0? GWL. Yoda knows Chewbacca? GWL. "George's view of the universe is his view," Chee says with a slightly grudging tone. "He's not beholden to what's gone before." The careful tending of the Star Wars continuity has yielded great wealth, but the key to a productive farm is to leave some fields fallow. A complete Holocron would leave little room for fantasy—for fans who, as Jenkins says, "love unmapped nooks and crannies, the dark shadows we can fill in with our imagination." That's something that GWL understands. For instance, the origins of the Jedi master Yoda, his species, and his home planet are off-limits. The backstory isn't even in the Holocron. "It doesn't exist, except maybe in George's mind," Chee says. "He feels like, 'You don't have to explain everything all the time. Let's keep some mystery.'" But ... what about the Holocron? "We work around him," Chee says. Senior editor Chris Baker (chris_baker@wired.com) wrote about the return of Futurama in issue 15.12. Wired.Com Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - On the wall behind Leland Chee's desk is a portrait of an Ithorian, an alien with a hammer-shaped head that you glimpse briefly in the famous Star Wars cantina scene. In its leathery, foot-long fingers, the Ithorian holds a cube decorated with elaborate metallic tracings, a device known as a holocron. Think of it as a Force-powered hard drive, capable of storing an enormous quantity of information. "It's a piece of Jedi technology," Chee says. "It tells you ... everything." To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics. Keepin' it canonical: Leland Chee, continuity database administrator at Lucas Licensing, maintains the Holocron — a vast FileMaker database that's consulted to make sure that any new elements added to the Star Wars franchise fit within the existing mythology. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Of course, Chee's Holocron isn't a Force-sensitive crystal. It's a FileMaker database, a searchable repository of more than 30,000 entries covering almost every character, planet, and weapon mentioned, however fleetingly, in the vast array of Star Wars titles and products. The Holocron isn't just for fun—when Lucas Licensing inks a deal with a toy company or a T-shirt designer, it vets those ancillary products to ensure they conform to the spirit and letter of the continuity that has come before and will continue afterward. In the past 31 years, Star Wars movies have grossed in excess of $4 billion worldwide. But retail sales of merchandise stand at $15 billion, and 20 percent of that has been earned since 2006, the year after the final film was released. Careful nurture of the Star Wars canon—thousands of years of story time, running through all the bits and pieces of merchandise—has kept the franchise popular for decades. So Chee spends three-quarters of his typical workday consulting or updating the Holocron. He also approves packaging designs, scans novels for errors, and creates Talmudic charts and documents addressing such issues as which Jedi were still alive during the Clone Wars and how long it takes a spaceship to get from Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker, to Luke's homeworld of Tatooine. The Keeper of the Holocron takes this very seriously: "Someone has to be able to say, 'Luke Skywalker would not have that color of lightsaber.'" The screening room at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, Lucasfilm's sprawling facility in San Francisco's Presidio District, is as opulent as you would expect—plush seats, wood panels, crystal-clear projection, and a perfect sound system. So when that classic John Williams fanfare begins and the Star Wars logo appears onscreen in that distinctive font, in that distinctive yellow, it quickens the pulse. It's also when Chee, sitting next to me, tells me that in an early version of what we're watching—a new LucasArts videogame called The Force Unleashed, due out in September—the logo was slightly wrong. "It was off by only a few pixels, but someone in Licensing spotted it and submitted a report." I grab an Xbox 360 controller and soon I'm striding through the corridors of a satellite that orbits the smugglers' moon of Nar Shaddaa, destroying everyone in my path. My character, Starkiller, is the secret apprentice of Darth Vader, sent here to eliminate a Jedi elder ... and leave no witnesses. I deflect laser blasts from militia troops with my lightsaber and then use the Force to hurl a chunk of metal through a window behind them. The glass shatters, and several foes are sucked into the vacuum of space before a safety wall snaps shut. I'm beginning to understand the power of the Dark Side. On the scale of badassedness, obliterating legions of good guys with the Force ranks right up there with leaping Snake River Canyon in a monster truck that can transform into a robot. And it's true that the game's sophisticated physics, combined with clever AI software for characters, means that when you Force-throw a Wookiee into a tree on its home planet, Kashyyyk, the Wookiee writhes realistically and the tree explodes in a botanically accurate cloud of splinters. But that's not what has fans most excited about The Force Unleashed. It's the stuff that happens between the interactive killing sprees: brief cinematic interludes that add new details—new plot points—to the saga. "The game is set between episodes III and IV," says Haden Blackman, who led the development team. Translation: Play it and you'll learn what happened before the original Star Wars film trilogy and after the prequels, two decades that have been shrouded in mystery. Over the course of the game, players will learn the details of the internecine feud between Darth Vader and his mentor, Emperor Palpatine, and the way these two unwittingly created the very rebellion that brought them down. The game has yielded a bountiful crop of tie-ins: a book, a graphic novel, a tabletop role-playing game supplement, and several lines of toys. With no more live-action Star Wars films forthcoming (or so we are told), games from the subsidiary division LucasArts are becoming ever more important in expanding the universe—and perpetuating the story-product ecology. And with every narrative beat and plot point, Chee and his dozens of colleagues with Holocron access are there. "Licensing approves everything," he says. "Text, dialog, art ... It all comes through our office." This is where the work of hundreds of writers and artists gets woven into a vast, internally consistent continuum. The power of the Dark Side: LucasArts' Haden Blackman discusses the story and the technology behind the upcoming game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. In his 1932 book Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction, T. S. Blakeney used the term canonicity in reference to the mystery novels and short fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes enthusiasts treat Doyle's work as if the great detective inhabits a coherent and logically consistent universe. Some of the stories written by Doyle were canonical—genuine events in that alternate universe—while others had to be considered apocryphal. (It should come as no surprise that fans would appropriate theological terms. The ecstasy of true fandom can, after all, approximate religion.) Today, canon and its serial-fiction cousin, continuity, are integral to genres like mystery, fantasy, and sci-fi. The giants of the field are known as world-builders as much as writers. J. R. R. Tolkien supplemented his Lord of the Rings series with hundreds of pages of appendices, genealogical charts, even pronunciation and usage guides for the languages he invented. Yet in the multiverse of fictional realities, Holmes's London, Frodo's Middle-earth, Buffy's Sunnydale, and Batman's Gotham are mere planetary systems compared with the grand galactic enterprise of Star Trek. When the original series—known to devout fans as The Original Series—went off the air in 1969, acolytes kept the flame alive. They extended the stories with their own fiction. They created technical manuals. Eventually, the series became a movie, and then another, and then another TV series, and a few more after that. Each new iteration produced more canonical information. Spock's death, Kirk's son, Picard's adventures as a cadet ... eventually, the writers' room on a Trek show became a minefield. "Someone would tell you that a Voyager episode last year mentioned a bit of backstory with the Romulans, and now you can't do this over here," says Ron Moore, a writer and producer on several Star Trek shows who went on to create the new Battlestar Galactica. "You'd argue the validity of that, but they'd be, like, 'No, now it's established.'" Lucas Licensing oversees billions of dollars in merchandise—from pillows to Pez dispensers. Photo: Jeff Minton But the many strata of Star Trek books, games, comics, and cartoons haven't been well tended. Some events in the movies and even later TV shows contradict preexisting lore. (A backward change like that is called a retcon, short for "retroactive continuity.") Gene Roddenberry himself, creator of Star Trek, was known to second-guess his own pronouncements about what was and was not canonical. After a while, the retcons and inconsistencies can become off-putting to fans and render once-beloved universes impenetrable to newcomers. One solution: a reboot. Start from scratch, like Moore did with Galactica. Clever preservation of original story elements retains the old fans, and streamlining and modernizing lets newbies spend their hard-earned quatloos, too. To Chee, the orderliness of the Star Wars canon is what sets it apart, what makes it feel more real than all those other franchises. "Look at James Bond," he says. "What's real in the James Bond world? What year does it take place in? It's not grounded in a real timeline." The Star Wars chronology, on the other hand, marks time from the Battle of Yavin, the assault on the Death Star at the end of the original Star Wars. Luke Skywalker was born in the year 19 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin). It says so in the Holocron. Back in his office, Chee asks his database what else it has on young Skywalker. The result contains scores of fields covering lineage, favorite vehicles, the planet he's from, how to write his name in the Aurebesh alphabet. "Oops," Chee says, blocking the screen with his body until he has minimized the window. "There are things in the Holocron that aren't public knowledge, stuff coming down the pike two or three years from now." He won't say whether those secrets relate to upcoming books, movies, games, or toys. Probably all of them. Merch and more merch: Movies, games, comics, and novels are the tip of the iceberg. Leland Chee shows off more Star Wars goods, like Yoda skateboards, Wookiee slippers, and Darth Tater. Beware the Jar Jar lollipop! Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Lucasfilm has to plan ahead and think long term. "We don't reboot. We don't start from scratch," Chee says. "When Chewbacca died, he died." (Poor Chewie yowled his last yowl in 25 ABY, when he was stuck on the planet Sernpidal as it collided with its moon, Dobido, in the novel Vector Prime, the first book in the New Jedi Order series. His death is now canon.) "The thing about Star Wars is that there's one universe," Chee says. "Everyone wants to know stuff, like, where did Mace Windu get that purple lightsaber? We want to establish that there's one and only one answer." Star Wars was the number two toy brand aimed at boys last year, behind only Transformers. But toys account for less than half of the revenue for licensed merchandise. The Lucas Licensing office is positively drowning in other merch. Bedspreads, window blinds, pillowcases, wastebaskets, guitars, chairs, baseball caps, beach balls, jewelry, lunch boxes, cookie jars, and kites all added up to $3 billion in retail sales in 2006 and 2007. That figure includes big-ticket items aimed at adults. An R2-D2 DVD projector. A stormtrooper golf bag. A high-end fashion line created with superstar designer Marc Ecko, including $300 Star Wars jeans and a replica of the poncho Han Solo wore on the ice planet Hoth. There was even a $3,000 suit of Darth Vader-style samurai armor. "We realize that our fans have different levels of disposable income," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, who joined the company a week after the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. "The kids who played with the toys have grown up." Leland Chee strolls the San Francisco campus of Lucasfilm. Photo: Jeff Minton There have been some egregious missteps, like the Jar Jar lollipop. It looks like a plastic bust of the hated character, but push a button and it opens its mouth and sticks out a hideous candy tongue for children to suck on. "The tongue had bumps on it," Chee says, wrinkling his nose. Chee's sense of what is correct in the Star Wars universe has been a lifetime in development. He saw the original movie at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco at age 6. He got his first plastic Star Wars action figures—R2-D2 and that lame C-3P0 look-alike, Death Star Droid—for his seventh birthday and from there steadily enlarged his collection, storing them all in a case shaped like Darth Vader's head (which he still has). Chee even kept the cardboard they were mounted on. "The packaging had great visuals, plus, like, a paragraph of backstory on the character," he says. It's easy to forget that before Star Wars, licensed merchandise was a different, less profitable business. All the big toymakers turned down the rights to make Star Wars action figures; upstart Kenner didn't sign on until a month before the film's release. The earliest product tie-ins were novels and comics—Marvel published an adaptation of the movie a month after it hit theaters, then continued with its own stories. Soon Marvel had smugglers Solo and Chewbacca teaming up with questionable characters like Jaxxon, a furry green creature with big floppy ears who wisecracked like Bugs Bunny. "The idea of continuity was alien at the time," Roffman says. "We let Marvel Comics do the stories they wanted as long as it didn't interfere with the upcoming movies, and they went in some bizarre directions." The first Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, was published in 1978, before anyone knew that sequels would be filmed, much less that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia would later turn out to be siblings. "Luke and Leia get ... affectionate," Chee allows. "It's very wrong." The success of the movies led to more products: TV specials, a Saturday morning cartoon show, newspaper comics, a board game, a D&D-style tabletop role-playing game, simple arcade and console videogames. Young Chee bought as much as he could, including the sheet music for the iconic theme song, which he played at his first organ recital. After the release of Return of the Jedi, in 1983, Lucasfilm assumed that interest would wane. But the merch kept selling. And then, Chee remembers, the novel Heir to the Empire was published. "Wait, was it 1990?" he says, tapping a search into the Holocron. "I need to get this date right." It was actually 1991 when Hugo Award-winning writer Timothy Zahn released the novel, set five years after Return of the Jedi. The book spent 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and proved to Lucasfilm that even without new movies, it still had a market. "I was in college at UC Davis by then, but that book brought me back into Star Wars," Chee says. Without movies at the core, though, Lucas Licensing couldn't afford to be lackadaisical—no more Jaxxons, no more incestuous flirtations. "We set parameters," Roffman says. "It had to be an important extension of the continuity, and it had to have an internal integrity with the events portrayed in the films." Closely tending the canon was paying off with fans. Essentially, all the new comic books, novels, and games were prequels and sequels of one another. If you wanted to know the whole story, you had to buy them all. Neither Lucasfilm nor its licensees will divulge just how much money Lucasfilm gets for each item; suffice it to say the percentage is substantial. Chee applied for a job as a software tester at LucasArts shortly before Star Wars: Special Edition was rereleased in 1997. The film was an updated version of the 1977 original, with new visual effects and added scenes. (The special edition proved that the canon is vulnerable to retcons. In the most egregious example, an f/x tweak now has alien errand boy Greedo, not Han Solo, shooting first in the cantina duel. This made Solo a more simplistic character.) Chee scoffed at the fanboys who waited in line for three days outside the Coronet to see a movie they already owned on VHS. He had the self-restraint to wait until 5 am on the day of the release to queue up. When Chee got home from the movie, there was a message on his answering machine. He had the gig. "That was the last time I had to wait in line to see a Star Wars movie," he says. At first, his job entailed identifying and logging game bugs. His uncanny command of Star Wars lore and his organizational skills allowed him to rise quickly to the role of lead tester, which eventually led him to work on the 1998 title Behind the Magic. Magic wasn't so much a game as an interactive CD-ROM of Star Wars trivia, a treasure trove of data for überfans that included a timeline, a searchable glossary, scripts, and deleted scenes. Assembling it revealed inconsistencies in the canon. "There were differences in the layout of the Millennium Falcon between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back," says Blackman, who, in addition to being project lead on The Force Unleashed, also wrote and did research for Magic. "The continuity fix is that Han Solo made some modifications to the ship's interior." Around 2000, Chee moved from LucasArts to Lucas Licensing, where he was tasked with creating an even more detailed version of Magic for internal use. "We had several game-design teams, several comic book writers, and dozens of novelists," Roffman says. "We needed a reference for everyone who was playing in our sandbox." Chee was the perfect person for the job. "I've been amassing Star Wars knowledge my whole life," he says. "My friends were always like, what the heck are you ever going to do with all of that?" Chee's answer: Create a FileMaker doc similar to the ones he had used to track game bugs. He started transferring information from Magic, from binders, and from the stream of new novels and comics. "You don't know how much you don't know until you get here," he says. "Like, I'd never heard the radio dramas." In a forum on StarWars.com, PiccoloKenobi poses a question that we've all wondered about at one time or another: Are the Low Altitude Assault Transport gunships used by the Grand Army of the Republic spaceworthy, or are they limited to traveling within a planet's atmosphere? "LAATs can be sealed to operate in the vacuum of space," Chee decrees in a response post. "But the standard LAAT is not equipped for long-distance space travel." In the world of continuity maintenance, Chee is something of an anomaly. Most geek-friendly franchises rely on volunteerism—while Chee was building the Holocron, fans of other canons were working outside official imprimatur. Babylon 5 has a fan-created database. The Buffyverse has several. In fact, the best source for Star Wars information on the older stuff that Chee hasn't logged yet is an online database created and maintained by a community of fans that Chee views with wary respect. It's called, inevitably, the Wookieepedia. Naturally, some fans chafe at the Lucasfilm pronouncement-from-on-high approach. Take Curtis Saxton, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK. Beginning in 1995, he released a series of amateur technical commentaries on TheForce.net, a Star Wars omnibus site, that sent shock waves through the fan community. A fan-made video critiquing Curtis Saxton's theory of the Endor Holocaust. Video: The Endor Holocaust Saxton wasn't writing fan fiction—it was more like fan physics. He started out by estimating the size and power of various Star Wars vehicles and weapons, including the Death Star's planet-destroying superlaser (2.4 x 1032 joules to blow up the planet Alderaan). His numbers didn't jibe with those in the Lucas Licensing-approved tech manuals. But he persisted. And that's what led to the Endor Holocaust. At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Death Star II explodes while orbiting a forested moon called Endor, populated by cuddly creatures called Ewoks. Saxton considered the Death Star's orbit, the power output of its hypermatter power source, and the sheer tonnage of debris its destruction would have generated, then concluded that the climactic battle must have rained death and nuclear winter onto the teddy-bear tribe. He wrote: "The mass-extinction event at Endor is an inevitable physical consequence of the circumstances at the end of Return of the Jedi. As such, it indirectly enjoys canonical status, even though it was not clearly portrayed in the film." In other words, science says the Ewoks are dead. You can't posit the genocide of the Ewoks without igniting a backlash. In the forums, debates raged between self-described Saxtonites and their foes. This willingness of some obsessives to go deeper into the fictional world than its original creators did is a mainstay of fandom. "It goes back to Hugo Gernsback, the father of modern science fiction, who encouraged readers to dig into his stories, expand on them, and critique the science," says Henry Jenkins, a sci-fi fan and MIT media-studies professor. Despite Saxton's heretical notions, he later worked on four official technical manuals. And the notion of an Endor Holocaust has been incorporated into several comics—as foul propaganda spread by Imperial loyalists. But the fact that official Star Wars products even addressed the idea shows how influential writing like Saxton's can be. It's called fanon—fan-generated canon—and it's still a controversial notion to the priesthood at Lucasfilm. "I don't like the term," Chee says. "There's no such thing as fan continuity." Yet even within the Holocron, not all reality is created equal. Chee coded a pulldown menu that lets him categorize entries. S, for example, stands for secondary continuity—early unvetted works, such as The Star Wars Holiday Special. Sure, it introduced fan-favorite character Boba Fett to the continuity. But it also featured Princess Leia singing a carol to celebrate the Wookiee ceremony of Life Day, and Harvey Korman in drag playing a cooking instructor making Bantha Surprise. Princess Leia serenades Wookiees on their homeworld Kashyyyk. From the quasi-canonical Star Wars Holiday Special. Video: Star Wars Holiday Special - Leia sings And then there's the very top level of canon, the inviolable, infallible level of Truth, marked GWL—George Walton Lucas. It's the divine word of the Creator who stands outside his universe and is not subject to the rules that govern it. Lucas approves every important addition to the canon. The ambitious story beats contained in the new game The Force Unleashed were permitted only after he signed off—and spent hours talking to the developers about the relationship between Darth Vader and the Emperor. Yes, he'll accept outside ideas. The novel Heir to the Empire introduced the planet of Coruscant, capital of the Old Republic, which Lucas later incorporated into the prequels. But he also used those prequels to retcon the hell out of Chee's otherwise well-integrated universe. Anakin Skywalker built C-3P0? GWL. Yoda knows Chewbacca? GWL. "George's view of the universe is his view," Chee says with a slightly grudging tone. "He's not beholden to what's gone before." The careful tending of the Star Wars continuity has yielded great wealth, but the key to a productive farm is to leave some fields fallow. A complete Holocron would leave little room for fantasy—for fans who, as Jenkins says, "love unmapped nooks and crannies, the dark shadows we can fill in with our imagination." That's something that GWL understands. For instance, the origins of the Jedi master Yoda, his species, and his home planet are off-limits. The backstory isn't even in the Holocron. "It doesn't exist, except maybe in George's mind," Chee says. "He feels like, 'You don't have to explain everything all the time. Let's keep some mystery.'" But ... what about the Holocron? "We work around him," Chee says. Senior editor Chris Baker (chris_baker@wired.com) wrote about the return of Futurama in issue 15.12.
Read about the latest Entertainment News on Wired.com, including art, technology, films, animation, music, web video, tv, podcasts, and blogs. {...}
Published: August 21, 2008, 9:55 pm - Indexed: August 24, 2008, 10:10 am - Page Size: 53KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News {COMICS > P} - News: Efficiency http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/comics/comic-strips-and-panels/p/news-efficiency-20080888211.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/comics/comic-strips-and-panels/p/news-efficiency-20080888211.htm Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:00:00 GMT Tycho : The FAQ was a nice start, but when you try to map Star Trek lore onto MMO tropes you run into trouble quick. BingeGamer collates information as it's discovered in a legible way here, which I found useful. I still feel like I'm starving. I'm not sure any volume of loose, approved factoids would be satisfactory at this point. I didn't know that I was going to be excited for a Star Trek Online, but I am. For fluff addicts, being able to generate an entirely custom race (!!!) is an inspired maneuver. As established above, I don't know how ... Penny-arcade.Com News: Efficiency {new window}   Www.Penny-arcade.Com - Tycho : The FAQ was a nice start, but when you try to map Star Trek lore onto MMO tropes you run into trouble quick. BingeGamer collates information as it's discovered in a legible way here, which I found useful. I still feel like I'm starving. I'm not sure any volume of loose, approved factoids would be satisfactory at this point. I didn't know that I was going to be excited for a Star Trek Online, but I am. For fluff addicts, being able to generate an entirely custom race (!!!) is an inspired maneuver. As established above, I don't know how ...
Penny Arcade! - Efficiency {...} Equal parts comics and commentary, Penny Arcade features Tycho and Gabe, the alter egos of creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Read about the antics and thoughts of the Penny Arcade crew, updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. {...}
Published: August 13, 2008, 8:00 am - Indexed: August 14, 2008, 8:15 pm - Page Size: 13KB
Category: Arts > Comics > Comic Strips and Panels > P

]]> Arts > Comics > Comic Strips and Panels > P {ENTERTAINMENT > PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA} - Abrams to produce disaster film http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/abrams-to-produce-disaster-film-2008086508.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/abrams-to-produce-disaster-film-2008086508.htm Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:20:32 GMT Mission: Impossible and Star Trek director JJ Abrams signs up to produce a new disaster movie centered around an earthquake. News.Bbc.Co.Uk Abrams to produce disaster film {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - Mission: Impossible and Star Trek director JJ Abrams signs up to produce a new disaster movie centered around an earthquake.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Abrams to produce disaster film {...} The maker of Cloverfield JJ Abrams has signed up to produce a new disaster film. {...}
Published: August 12, 2008, 3:20 pm - Indexed: August 13, 2008, 2:25 pm - Page Size: 42KB
Category: Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media

]]> Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media {LITERATURE > RSS FEEDS} - Abrams Shakes Up Quake Film http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/abrams-shakes-up-quake-film-20080842214.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/abrams-shakes-up-quake-film-20080842214.htm Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT Producer/director J.J. Abrams (Star Trek) and David Seltzer, the screenwriter of the original Omen, are working together to develop an earthquake-themed movie for Universal Pictures, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Scifi.Com Abrams Shakes Up Quake Film {new window}   Www.Scifi.Com - Producer/director J.J. Abrams (Star Trek) and David Seltzer, the screenwriter of the original Omen, are working together to develop an earthquake-themed movie for Universal Pictures, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Published: August 12, 2008, 6:00 am - Indexed: August 13, 2008, 1:15 pm - Page Size: 40KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds {RESOURCES > NEWS AND MEDIA} - 15th Anniversary: Why J. J. Abrams, Joe Trippi and Hilary Rosen Remain Wired Heroes * http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/resources/news-and-media/15th-anniversary-why-j-j-abrams-joe-trippi-and-hilary-20080875616.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/resources/news-and-media/15th-anniversary-why-j-j-abrams-joe-trippi-and-hilary-20080875616.htm Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:00:00 GMT Years after they first appeared in Wired, these three VIPs remain in the spotlight. J. J. Abrams Since upgrading TV with that confounding isle, he's taken on 2009's Star Trek prequel. Why he does it "It's cool to bring something to life, whether it's a song or a video. But to do it and have it embraced by millions ... like Lost, that's insane." Hilary Rosen Once a foe (she helped shut down Napster), the ex-RIAA chief made a heroic comeback by penning a love letter to Creative Commons in Wired. She now heads lesbian social network OurChart. Why she does it "I worked hardest to bring the tech and content communities together. It is happening." Joe Trippi Howard Dean's campaign manager pioneered the Web-centric bottom-up politics that has propelled Obama's run. Why he does it "I got the chance to put Washington and Silicon Valley together. We are seeing an Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now." * Dead to us: Sonic the Hedgehog, Terry Semel, the Wachowski Siblings, Hans Reiser Q&A with Hilary Rosen Wired: With OurChart you used one platform (the television show The L Word) to launch another (a social network). How did you hook up with Ilene Chaiken, and when/how did the "aha" moment happen? Were you convinced from the outset that OurChart would be a success, and why? Rosen: OurChart was Ilene's idea. We are old friends. She and Kara Swisher (AllthingsD.com) came to me and said that they thought "TheChart" from the show, which was literally a chart on the wall of one of the main character's living room that connected who slept with whom, should go online as a social network — broadening, of course, the purpose beyond sex! The L Word has long served as kind of an analog social networking vehicle for the lesbian community. People watch it at bars and at parties. We created a business plan that would incorporate what people liked about the show, which meant providing original lesbian and fan-centered entertainment content and combined that with traditional SN features. Showtime and CBS were very supportive. Wired: Only a few other social networks have launched via television shows, but none has replicated the success of OurChart. Why do you think the L Word's audience took so well to a new online community? Rosen: Lesbians are a hugely underserved market. This is a community with some $300 billion in annual consumer spending. Marketers and advertisers have started paying attention to the gay market over the last few years, but mostly that has been to target gay men. Surveys show that lesbian households have as much disposable income as gay male households. We knew if we built it they would come — both users and advertisers. Wired: What other projects are on the horizon for you? Rosen: I am now concentrating on some projects in Washington. I work for a few great companies like XM Radio and Viacom. The brilliant Jay Berman and I have a partnership that helps companies like Facebook navigate the IP world. Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna [Huffington] is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature. Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature. Wired: You've noted the "chilling effect" the RIAA's actions had on legitimate uses/users. Knowing what you know now, would you still file the same suit against Napster? Rosen: We had no choice but to sue Napster. I tried to avoid it because I thought the service was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. But they weren't knowledgeable enough to be interested in talking at the beginning. It was the first big program, and the precedent needed to be set. Wired: Do you think the Big Five should have accepted the licensing agreement that was on the table during the Napster 1.0 days? (i.e., $1 billion over five years). Had they accepted the offer, how might the landscape of online music and the industry itself be entirely different from where we are today? Rosen: I don't know if that particular deal is the one that should have been done, but I do firmly believe that the record companies should have made a deal. At the time, no amount of money that Napster put on the table seemed large enough because it was virtually impossible to compare the then current revenues from sales to the proposed digital revenues. The record companies weren't willing to jump off the cliff and take a chance. That was a mistake which can never be undone. P2P took over, and we had no technology or consumer allies, which we might have had if we had a deal. Having said that, the Napster management was difficult to deal with because the players kept changing. I understand the interest that people have in wanting to know how this fantastic industry with so much potential for growth has now shrunk so dramatically. The fact is that there are so many reasons. And I can only scratch the surface here. Maybe someday I'll write a book. In the record industry there were problems with the retail distribution, with advertising and marketing strategies, with demographics focusing too much on the young hit maker and not serving the older buyer, with artist relations, with international piracy, and so many other areas. Technology and the piracy it facilitated (and continues to facilitate) was a major reason as well, of course. And this is the issue that got the most play. Senior executives at the record industry were often trapped in the same short-term thinking that a lot of business executives get trapped into — which is making the current quarter revenues as high as possible and hoping that the next quarter works out. It is also fair to say that the most influential record executives were more music men and not businessmen (yes, all men), and therefore there was no problem that a great "hit" wouldn't fix. But it is so wrong to blame the record companies alone. The music publishers wouldn't license, the retailers threatened the labels with retaliation if they distributed online at a cheaper rate than they sold physical products, and the artists wouldn't reduce advance requests to try and experiment more online. In short, it required the entire music community to see the future in the same way and commit to working together — a very difficult scenario to pull off. And exacerbating the problems within the music business was a very real arrogance in the technology community that valued technological innovation above all. Their disdain for the music community was palpable and irritating to many of my colleagues. After all, artists worked as hard to create their music as software developers worked to create their technology. ISPs were making more money when piracy was a driver to upgrade to high-speed; hardware makers were incorporating CD-Rs and increasing prices. Once MP3 distribution was rampant, the tech industry didn't think it needed the legitimate music industry because their consumers were being served with the unauthorized music. Most of the best innovators in the field didn't want the music industry to succeed because too many of them believed that it was a zero-sum game. Well, that needed to change. I wasn't going to be able to undo 30 years of mistrust within the music community since that was in others' control. So I worked hardest to try to bring the technology and content communities together to see their common interests in upgrading the consumer experience with legitimate higher-quality music and artist participation in the extra content that fans wanted. Much of my time in my last few years at RIAA was in that behind-the-scenes shuttle diplomacy, urging the experimentation with business models and facilitating licensing systems. While the language and orientations are still different between content and technology, there is at least some great understanding now. And though there is still a great amount of unauthorized stuff online now, consumers have some great choices and lots of companies are working hand in glove with the music industry to make the offerings even better. It has taken so much longer than any of us would have liked or even predicted, but it is happening. Wired: Since stepping down from the RIAA, you've consulted for companies like XM Radio. Some would say you've switched teams. Is that a fair assessment? Rosen: No, I haven't switched teams. I am inherently a proponent of intellectual property protection and its critical role in the creation of art and the commercial support of artists. But I do call them as I see them. And sometimes that means that I disagree with some of my former employers. Not that anyone cares, including me, but I've turned down fortunes to go against them because I just couldn't reconcile the work with either my beliefs or my loyalty. Wired: You helped found Rock the Vote and work with a number of nonprofits. Do you ever worry people will instead remember you more for the turbulent times you spent at the RIAA? Rosen: Geez, I haven't turned 50 yet! I hope the epitaph isn't written. Having said that, I do think I have had a great and varied career as a business executive, a television commentator, a lobbyist, and an activist, and all the time working on issues that I really like. Hopefully that will continue. I definitely have another act or two in me. Wired: Did that period sour you to music, music fans, the music business at all? Rosen: No, RIAA didn't sour me on music at all. I originally took the job because I was such a music fan, I loved almost every minute of it, and I am still a music fan. But it is nice now to listen to an artist or a new song and not worry about whether they get along with their record company, who's getting paid on what, whether the release was leaked online before its release, and whether it is meeting its sales targets! Wired: And if you had your way, what would you most want to be remembered for above all else? Rosen: Who knows?! Who cares?! I guess I just want my kids to be happy and do good in the world. Q&A with Joe Trippi Wired: In 2004 you pointed to the fences and declared that the 2008 race would be the "first national contest waged and won primarily online." The first point is irrefutable. Based on what we've seen thus far in 2008, why is the battle being waged online really more vital than, say, 30-second TV spots or door-to-door stumping? Trippi: The important differences can be seen between the Clinton old "top-down" campaign and the Obama "bottom-up" Internet-savvy campaign. Hillary Clinton was dependent on $2,300 checks — and could not replicate them — having to loan herself millions just to keep up with Obama's online small donors who were able to contribute repeatedly. Obama's volunteers who signed up online organized his caucus victories for free while contributing to pay for the professional, paid Obama organizers they worked with. Clinton did not have enough of these online activists to keep up with Obama in the caucus states — so she lost almost all of them. TV took people out of the process — the Internet and technology are putting people back into the process. Politicians, government officials, CEOs, and others who fail to understand that this changes everything are going to be shocked at what happens to them as their competitors "get it." Wired: During the ?04 election, at one point, John Kerry had raised roughly 37 percent of his campaign funds from his Web site. Today, $45 of the $55 million Barack Obama raised in February alone streamed in from the Web. Did you expect the shift toward Web-based fund-raising to accelerate this much in only four years time? Will we see even more impressive numbers before November? Trippi: In my book, [The Revolution Will Not Be Televised], I said that the $100 revolution was just around the corner — that a candidate in the 2008 cycle would be able to mobilize millions to contribute small contributions of $100 or less. Before this campaign started, I believed and still believe that a candidate (probably Barack Obama) will raise a half-billion dollars just in the general election. The math is simple: 5 million Americans giving $100 each. We are still scratching the surface of what's possible as more Americans get involved in their democracy. Fifty-seven million voted for John Kerry, 60 million or so voted for George Bush — you cannot tell me that 10 percent of the Kerry voters would not have given him $100. The real trigger will be a candidate who limits General Election contributions to a small amount like $250 or less, and millions of Americans realize they can block the special interests and change our politics with a small contribution or helping in some other way. This is going to happen this year. I am sure of it. And BTW, in 2012 or 2016 it will be even bigger. It's the network, stupid. And the network is growing. Wired: If 2004 is remembered as the year of micro-targeting and online campaigning, what will the legacy of 2008? Also, Obama's campaign has sparked a wave of Web-based creativity — from T-shirts to viral sites like barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com. Had John Edwards stayed in the race, what might your strategy have been to compete, diffuse, or work around all the buzz? Trippi: I think that the creativity unleashed by sites like YouTube.com will be the hallmark of this cycle. In 2004 we created DeanTV, a 24/7 broadband channel where anyone could upload a video, a mashup of a Dean speech, or anything they wanted — about 200,000 people used it. Turns out we had created our own YouTube before YouTube created YouTube. The important thing to understand is that TV and Internet campaigning are still intertwined. Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball on MSNBC to confront Anne Coulter and created an online firestorm. The problem for the Edwards campaign was that no matter what we did, the media focused on Clinton vs. Obama. And the more coverage Obama got, the more his online buzz grew. This wasn't new to me — we benefited from this same kind of media focus in the Dean campaign. Our strategy in the Edwards campaign was to build a strong online presence and then beat both Obama and Clinton in Iowa. We felt if we could do that the media would focus on us and that our Internet presence would combine to dramatically shoot us into contention. We took second — and close never matters in politics. Wired: I understand you kept a 90-day calendar, color-coded to track traffic to JohnEdwards.com. What was the most common cause for the larger spikes? Trippi: The larger spikes were almost always caused by something related to Elizabeth Edwards, she gets bottom up politics and the Internet better than anyone ? candidate or spouse I have ever worked with. She connects with people and she is authentic and those two things created a lot of the spikes in sign-ups or contributions to our campaign. Wired: Keeping tabs on what's happening online is beyond a full-time job. What's your best advice for, say, a small-town politician running on a lean budget and staff? Trippi: This isn't hard or expensive. Start a blog, a Twitter account, and a FriendFeed. Ten minutes a day with just these three tools can make a huge difference. But let's look into the future for a second. Somewhere today there is someone who is oblivious to these tools who is running for city council and is dialing for dollars. There is someone else running for city council who is dialing for dollars but also is collecting emails and growing followers on Twitter. Ten years from now they will both be running against each other for Congress — any guesses at who is going to kick whose? Wired: Can these tools that are used for campaigning also be used to govern? Trippi: John F. Kennedy heralded in the age of the television presidency. It changed everything — a president at his inaugural could rally the nation. In January 2009, the next president of the United States will herald in the age of the networked presidency. The inaugural will be live-blogged and mashed up. The new president will outline the agenda for the first 100 days of his administration, and online communities will rally to the cause of passing health care and other agenda items like never before. It will only be the beginning, just as JFK was only the beginning of how television changed governing — but we are about to witness and be part of the most sweeping change in government and people's participation in our government since the revolution of 1776, and it will change more than how we are governed — it will (just as television did) change everything. Wired: Why does it really matter if your video gets, say, 75,000 more hits on YouTube than the other candidate? And how does popularity online carry over to the voting booth, especially during an extended primary season? Trippi: The big difference is that if you hear something interesting on the radio, or see something that catches your attention on TV, you cannot interact with it instantly — you cannot respond by joining up or by putting it to music, and you can't send it on to every one of your friends shouting to the rooftops "Eureka! I found it!" Will.I.am's mashup of Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech was passed friend to friend by millions of Americans — most of us got it from a friend or someone we cared about. That is much more powerful than getting a message from a paid staffer, even if it comes from a candidate you support. Wired: After 2004, you vowed not to return to presidential politics. You didn't stay away for very long. What keeps you coming back for more? Trippi: I always wondered what changed people's lives more? Politics? Or Technology? I have spent the better part of 30 years trying to figure that out, straddling the worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington ever since Senator Ted Kennedy called me in San Jose and asked me to organize for him in 1979. I do it because I want to change things for the better. In 2004 I got the chance to put the two things I knew a lot about together and something amazing happened. I got it wrong, [and] I thought that was the end — but as 2008 neared, I realized it was just the beginning. I was proud to have been part of the Wright brothers of a new kind of politics in the Dean campaign of 2004. But damn — in four years the technology and sites have blown past Boeing, Mercury, and Gemini. We are seeing the Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now. But we are all still pioneers — still exploring where all of this will go and how to make it work to bring even more people into the process. Wired: According to your Twitter feed, you're at work on a Web strategy for Jim Slattery. What can we expect from that collaboration? Trippi: Jim Slattery believes that we have to get more people involved if we are really going to change things. He was a member of Congress through 1994, so he knows how Washington works. He really understands the importance of the new tools available to people to connect with each other and change the place so it works for us. He is after me every day to help him figure it out in Kansas and take on one of the real status quo players — US Senator Pat Roberts, who fittingly has held office in Washington since before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I love Twitter, but I have to be more careful about my Tweets. But keep an eye on the Slattery campaign. Wired.Com 15th Anniversary: Why J. J. Abrams, Joe Trippi and Hilary Rosen Remain Wired Heroes * {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - Years after they first appeared in Wired, these three VIPs remain in the spotlight. J. J. Abrams Since upgrading TV with that confounding isle, he's taken on 2009's Star Trek prequel. Why he does it "It's cool to bring something to life, whether it's a song or a video. But to do it and have it embraced by millions ... like Lost, that's insane." Hilary Rosen Once a foe (she helped shut down Napster), the ex-RIAA chief made a heroic comeback by penning a love letter to Creative Commons in Wired. She now heads lesbian social network OurChart. Why she does it "I worked hardest to bring the tech and content communities together. It is happening." Joe Trippi Howard Dean's campaign manager pioneered the Web-centric bottom-up politics that has propelled Obama's run. Why he does it "I got the chance to put Washington and Silicon Valley together. We are seeing an Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now." * Dead to us: Sonic the Hedgehog, Terry Semel, the Wachowski Siblings, Hans Reiser Q&A with Hilary Rosen Wired: With OurChart you used one platform (the television show The L Word) to launch another (a social network). How did you hook up with Ilene Chaiken, and when/how did the "aha" moment happen? Were you convinced from the outset that OurChart would be a success, and why? Rosen: OurChart was Ilene's idea. We are old friends. She and Kara Swisher (AllthingsD.com) came to me and said that they thought "TheChart" from the show, which was literally a chart on the wall of one of the main character's living room that connected who slept with whom, should go online as a social network — broadening, of course, the purpose beyond sex! The L Word has long served as kind of an analog social networking vehicle for the lesbian community. People watch it at bars and at parties. We created a business plan that would incorporate what people liked about the show, which meant providing original lesbian and fan-centered entertainment content and combined that with traditional SN features. Showtime and CBS were very supportive. Wired: Only a few other social networks have launched via television shows, but none has replicated the success of OurChart. Why do you think the L Word's audience took so well to a new online community? Rosen: Lesbians are a hugely underserved market. This is a community with some $300 billion in annual consumer spending. Marketers and advertisers have started paying attention to the gay market over the last few years, but mostly that has been to target gay men. Surveys show that lesbian households have as much disposable income as gay male households. We knew if we built it they would come — both users and advertisers. Wired: What other projects are on the horizon for you? Rosen: I am now concentrating on some projects in Washington. I work for a few great companies like XM Radio and Viacom. The brilliant Jay Berman and I have a partnership that helps companies like Facebook navigate the IP world. Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna [Huffington] is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature. Politics has always been my hobby, and this year it is also my business. It is as important an election as we have ever had. I am on-air on MSNBC as one more talking head discussing the same things as everyone else, but I hope sometimes with a different angle. And I am excited about a new role I have taken with The HuffingtonPost.com as a political director and an at-large editor. The site's traffic is through the roof, and as the largest site for progressive voices, we are going to have a great impact on this election. Given my experience, I am also helping the team develop the business side as well. It is a great group of people, and Arianna is, as everyone knows, a fantastic force of nature. Wired: You've noted the "chilling effect" the RIAA's actions had on legitimate uses/users. Knowing what you know now, would you still file the same suit against Napster? Rosen: We had no choice but to sue Napster. I tried to avoid it because I thought the service was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. But they weren't knowledgeable enough to be interested in talking at the beginning. It was the first big program, and the precedent needed to be set. Wired: Do you think the Big Five should have accepted the licensing agreement that was on the table during the Napster 1.0 days? (i.e., $1 billion over five years). Had they accepted the offer, how might the landscape of online music and the industry itself be entirely different from where we are today? Rosen: I don't know if that particular deal is the one that should have been done, but I do firmly believe that the record companies should have made a deal. At the time, no amount of money that Napster put on the table seemed large enough because it was virtually impossible to compare the then current revenues from sales to the proposed digital revenues. The record companies weren't willing to jump off the cliff and take a chance. That was a mistake which can never be undone. P2P took over, and we had no technology or consumer allies, which we might have had if we had a deal. Having said that, the Napster management was difficult to deal with because the players kept changing. I understand the interest that people have in wanting to know how this fantastic industry with so much potential for growth has now shrunk so dramatically. The fact is that there are so many reasons. And I can only scratch the surface here. Maybe someday I'll write a book. In the record industry there were problems with the retail distribution, with advertising and marketing strategies, with demographics focusing too much on the young hit maker and not serving the older buyer, with artist relations, with international piracy, and so many other areas. Technology and the piracy it facilitated (and continues to facilitate) was a major reason as well, of course. And this is the issue that got the most play. Senior executives at the record industry were often trapped in the same short-term thinking that a lot of business executives get trapped into — which is making the current quarter revenues as high as possible and hoping that the next quarter works out. It is also fair to say that the most influential record executives were more music men and not businessmen (yes, all men), and therefore there was no problem that a great "hit" wouldn't fix. But it is so wrong to blame the record companies alone. The music publishers wouldn't license, the retailers threatened the labels with retaliation if they distributed online at a cheaper rate than they sold physical products, and the artists wouldn't reduce advance requests to try and experiment more online. In short, it required the entire music community to see the future in the same way and commit to working together — a very difficult scenario to pull off. And exacerbating the problems within the music business was a very real arrogance in the technology community that valued technological innovation above all. Their disdain for the music community was palpable and irritating to many of my colleagues. After all, artists worked as hard to create their music as software developers worked to create their technology. ISPs were making more money when piracy was a driver to upgrade to high-speed; hardware makers were incorporating CD-Rs and increasing prices. Once MP3 distribution was rampant, the tech industry didn't think it needed the legitimate music industry because their consumers were being served with the unauthorized music. Most of the best innovators in the field didn't want the music industry to succeed because too many of them believed that it was a zero-sum game. Well, that needed to change. I wasn't going to be able to undo 30 years of mistrust within the music community since that was in others' control. So I worked hardest to try to bring the technology and content communities together to see their common interests in upgrading the consumer experience with legitimate higher-quality music and artist participation in the extra content that fans wanted. Much of my time in my last few years at RIAA was in that behind-the-scenes shuttle diplomacy, urging the experimentation with business models and facilitating licensing systems. While the language and orientations are still different between content and technology, there is at least some great understanding now. And though there is still a great amount of unauthorized stuff online now, consumers have some great choices and lots of companies are working hand in glove with the music industry to make the offerings even better. It has taken so much longer than any of us would have liked or even predicted, but it is happening. Wired: Since stepping down from the RIAA, you've consulted for companies like XM Radio. Some would say you've switched teams. Is that a fair assessment? Rosen: No, I haven't switched teams. I am inherently a proponent of intellectual property protection and its critical role in the creation of art and the commercial support of artists. But I do call them as I see them. And sometimes that means that I disagree with some of my former employers. Not that anyone cares, including me, but I've turned down fortunes to go against them because I just couldn't reconcile the work with either my beliefs or my loyalty. Wired: You helped found Rock the Vote and work with a number of nonprofits. Do you ever worry people will instead remember you more for the turbulent times you spent at the RIAA? Rosen: Geez, I haven't turned 50 yet! I hope the epitaph isn't written. Having said that, I do think I have had a great and varied career as a business executive, a television commentator, a lobbyist, and an activist, and all the time working on issues that I really like. Hopefully that will continue. I definitely have another act or two in me. Wired: Did that period sour you to music, music fans, the music business at all? Rosen: No, RIAA didn't sour me on music at all. I originally took the job because I was such a music fan, I loved almost every minute of it, and I am still a music fan. But it is nice now to listen to an artist or a new song and not worry about whether they get along with their record company, who's getting paid on what, whether the release was leaked online before its release, and whether it is meeting its sales targets! Wired: And if you had your way, what would you most want to be remembered for above all else? Rosen: Who knows?! Who cares?! I guess I just want my kids to be happy and do good in the world. Q&A with Joe Trippi Wired: In 2004 you pointed to the fences and declared that the 2008 race would be the "first national contest waged and won primarily online." The first point is irrefutable. Based on what we've seen thus far in 2008, why is the battle being waged online really more vital than, say, 30-second TV spots or door-to-door stumping? Trippi: The important differences can be seen between the Clinton old "top-down" campaign and the Obama "bottom-up" Internet-savvy campaign. Hillary Clinton was dependent on $2,300 checks — and could not replicate them — having to loan herself millions just to keep up with Obama's online small donors who were able to contribute repeatedly. Obama's volunteers who signed up online organized his caucus victories for free while contributing to pay for the professional, paid Obama organizers they worked with. Clinton did not have enough of these online activists to keep up with Obama in the caucus states — so she lost almost all of them. TV took people out of the process — the Internet and technology are putting people back into the process. Politicians, government officials, CEOs, and others who fail to understand that this changes everything are going to be shocked at what happens to them as their competitors "get it." Wired: During the ?04 election, at one point, John Kerry had raised roughly 37 percent of his campaign funds from his Web site. Today, $45 of the $55 million Barack Obama raised in February alone streamed in from the Web. Did you expect the shift toward Web-based fund-raising to accelerate this much in only four years time? Will we see even more impressive numbers before November? Trippi: In my book, [The Revolution Will Not Be Televised], I said that the $100 revolution was just around the corner — that a candidate in the 2008 cycle would be able to mobilize millions to contribute small contributions of $100 or less. Before this campaign started, I believed and still believe that a candidate (probably Barack Obama) will raise a half-billion dollars just in the general election. The math is simple: 5 million Americans giving $100 each. We are still scratching the surface of what's possible as more Americans get involved in their democracy. Fifty-seven million voted for John Kerry, 60 million or so voted for George Bush — you cannot tell me that 10 percent of the Kerry voters would not have given him $100. The real trigger will be a candidate who limits General Election contributions to a small amount like $250 or less, and millions of Americans realize they can block the special interests and change our politics with a small contribution or helping in some other way. This is going to happen this year. I am sure of it. And BTW, in 2012 or 2016 it will be even bigger. It's the network, stupid. And the network is growing. Wired: If 2004 is remembered as the year of micro-targeting and online campaigning, what will the legacy of 2008? Also, Obama's campaign has sparked a wave of Web-based creativity — from T-shirts to viral sites like barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com. Had John Edwards stayed in the race, what might your strategy have been to compete, diffuse, or work around all the buzz? Trippi: I think that the creativity unleashed by sites like YouTube.com will be the hallmark of this cycle. In 2004 we created DeanTV, a 24/7 broadband channel where anyone could upload a video, a mashup of a Dean speech, or anything they wanted — about 200,000 people used it. Turns out we had created our own YouTube before YouTube created YouTube. The important thing to understand is that TV and Internet campaigning are still intertwined. Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball on MSNBC to confront Anne Coulter and created an online firestorm. The problem for the Edwards campaign was that no matter what we did, the media focused on Clinton vs. Obama. And the more coverage Obama got, the more his online buzz grew. This wasn't new to me — we benefited from this same kind of media focus in the Dean campaign. Our strategy in the Edwards campaign was to build a strong online presence and then beat both Obama and Clinton in Iowa. We felt if we could do that the media would focus on us and that our Internet presence would combine to dramatically shoot us into contention. We took second — and close never matters in politics. Wired: I understand you kept a 90-day calendar, color-coded to track traffic to JohnEdwards.com. What was the most common cause for the larger spikes? Trippi: The larger spikes were almost always caused by something related to Elizabeth Edwards, she gets bottom up politics and the Internet better than anyone ? candidate or spouse I have ever worked with. She connects with people and she is authentic and those two things created a lot of the spikes in sign-ups or contributions to our campaign. Wired: Keeping tabs on what's happening online is beyond a full-time job. What's your best advice for, say, a small-town politician running on a lean budget and staff? Trippi: This isn't hard or expensive. Start a blog, a Twitter account, and a FriendFeed. Ten minutes a day with just these three tools can make a huge difference. But let's look into the future for a second. Somewhere today there is someone who is oblivious to these tools who is running for city council and is dialing for dollars. There is someone else running for city council who is dialing for dollars but also is collecting emails and growing followers on Twitter. Ten years from now they will both be running against each other for Congress — any guesses at who is going to kick whose? Wired: Can these tools that are used for campaigning also be used to govern? Trippi: John F. Kennedy heralded in the age of the television presidency. It changed everything — a president at his inaugural could rally the nation. In January 2009, the next president of the United States will herald in the age of the networked presidency. The inaugural will be live-blogged and mashed up. The new president will outline the agenda for the first 100 days of his administration, and online communities will rally to the cause of passing health care and other agenda items like never before. It will only be the beginning, just as JFK was only the beginning of how television changed governing — but we are about to witness and be part of the most sweeping change in government and people's participation in our government since the revolution of 1776, and it will change more than how we are governed — it will (just as television did) change everything. Wired: Why does it really matter if your video gets, say, 75,000 more hits on YouTube than the other candidate? And how does popularity online carry over to the voting booth, especially during an extended primary season? Trippi: The big difference is that if you hear something interesting on the radio, or see something that catches your attention on TV, you cannot interact with it instantly — you cannot respond by joining up or by putting it to music, and you can't send it on to every one of your friends shouting to the rooftops "Eureka! I found it!" Will.I.am's mashup of Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech was passed friend to friend by millions of Americans — most of us got it from a friend or someone we cared about. That is much more powerful than getting a message from a paid staffer, even if it comes from a candidate you support. Wired: After 2004, you vowed not to return to presidential politics. You didn't stay away for very long. What keeps you coming back for more? Trippi: I always wondered what changed people's lives more? Politics? Or Technology? I have spent the better part of 30 years trying to figure that out, straddling the worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington ever since Senator Ted Kennedy called me in San Jose and asked me to organize for him in 1979. I do it because I want to change things for the better. In 2004 I got the chance to put the two things I knew a lot about together and something amazing happened. I got it wrong, [and] I thought that was the end — but as 2008 neared, I realized it was just the beginning. I was proud to have been part of the Wright brothers of a new kind of politics in the Dean campaign of 2004. But damn — in four years the technology and sites have blown past Boeing, Mercury, and Gemini. We are seeing the Apollo project of a new kind of politics being built right now. But we are all still pioneers — still exploring where all of this will go and how to make it work to bring even more people into the process. Wired: According to your Twitter feed, you're at work on a Web strategy for Jim Slattery. What can we expect from that collaboration? Trippi: Jim Slattery believes that we have to get more people involved if we are really going to change things. He was a member of Congress through 1994, so he knows how Washington works. He really understands the importance of the new tools available to people to connect with each other and change the place so it works for us. He is after me every day to help him figure it out in Kansas and take on one of the real status quo players — US Senator Pat Roberts, who fittingly has held office in Washington since before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I love Twitter, but I have to be more careful about my Tweets. But keep an eye on the Slattery campaign.
Get Wired's take on technology business news and the Silicon Valley scene including IT, media, mobility, broadband, video, design, security, software, networking and internet startups on Wired.com {...}
Published: August 12, 2008, 5:00 am - Indexed: August 17, 2008, 10:07 am - Page Size: 67KB
Category: Business > Resources > News and Media

]]> Business > Resources > News and Media {VIDEO GAMES > NEWS AND REVIEWS} - Star Trek Online Q&A - Overview, New Developer, Early Details http://articles.world-of-newave.info/games/video-games/computer-platforms/news-and-reviews/star-trek-online-q-a-overview-new-developer-early-20080811410.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/games/video-games/computer-platforms/news-and-reviews/star-trek-online-q-a-overview-new-developer-early-20080811410.htm Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT We sit down with developer Cryptic Studios to discuss this upcoming massively multiplayer online game based on the classic sci-fi universe. Gamespot.Com Star Trek Online Q&A - Overview, New Developer, Early Details {new window}   Www.Gamespot.Com - We sit down with developer Cryptic Studios to discuss this upcoming massively multiplayer online game based on the classic sci-fi universe.
Star Trek Online Q&A - Overview, New Developer, Early Details - PC News at GameSpot {...} Star Trek Online for PC News - GameSpot's PC Star Trek Online news offers the latest details, information, and updates. {...}
Published: August 10, 2008, 3:00 pm - Indexed: August 11, 2008, 12:24 am - Page Size: 76KB
Category: Games > Video Games > Computer Platforms > News and Reviews

]]> Games > Video Games > Computer Platforms > News and Reviews {VIDEO GAMES > G} - Star Trek Online Q&A - Overview, New Developer, Early Details http://articles.world-of-newave.info/games/video-games/news-and-reviews/g/star-trek-online-q-a-overview-new-developer-early-20080864610.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/games/video-games/news-and-reviews/g/star-trek-online-q-a-overview-new-developer-early-20080864610.htm Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT We sit down with developer Cryptic Studios to discuss this upcoming massively multiplayer online game based on the classic sci-fi universe. Gamespot.Com Star Trek Online Q&A - Overview, New Developer, Early Details {new window}   Www.Gamespot.Com - We sit down with developer Cryptic Studios to discuss this upcoming massively multiplayer online game based on the classic sci-fi universe.
Star Trek Online Q&A - Overview, New Developer, Early Details - PC News at GameSpot {...} Star Trek Online for PC News - GameSpot's PC Star Trek Online news offers the latest details, information, and updates. {...}
Published: August 10, 2008, 3:00 pm - Indexed: August 11, 2008, 1:15 pm - Page Size: 96KB
Category: Games > Video Games > News and Reviews > G

]]> Games > Video Games > News and Reviews > G {LITERATURE > RSS FEEDS} - Trek Online Game Developing http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/trek-online-game-developing-2008081438.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/science-fiction/rss-feeds/trek-online-game-developing-2008081438.htm Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT Star Trek Online, a massively multiplayer online game, is in active development, the Associated Press reported. Scifi.Com Trek Online Game Developing {new window}   Www.Scifi.Com - Star Trek Online, a massively multiplayer online game, is in active development, the Associated Press reported.
Published: August 8, 2008, 6:00 am - Indexed: August 9, 2008, 10:38 am - Page Size: 41KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Science Fiction > RSS Feeds {ENTERTAINMENT > PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA} - Scotty's ashes missing in crash http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/scotty-s-ashes-missing-in-crash-2008081363.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/scotty-s-ashes-missing-in-crash-2008081363.htm Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:16:42 GMT A portion of Star Trek actor James Doohan's ashes have been lost after a rocket containing them crashed. News.Bbc.Co.Uk Scotty's ashes missing in crash {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - A portion of Star Trek actor James Doohan's ashes have been lost after a rocket containing them crashed.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Scotty's ashes missing in crash {...}
Published: August 5, 2008, 6:16 pm - Indexed: August 6, 2008, 11:22 pm - Page Size: 42KB
Category: Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media

]]> Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media