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Googlezon Lives
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EPIC

Matt and I had planned to build a full-blown website around a souped-up version of our Googlezon presentation (you know, the one that masquerades as a transmission from the Museum of Media History circa 2014).

Buuut it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon, so we decided to just go ahead and release our eight-minute Flash opus into the world.

Not ideal, as it’s basically without context and therefore somewhat weird, but hey! Let’s see how it fares in the howling chaos of the web.

Here it is: the Googly future of news. (Note: updated link… file has moved as EPIC madness washes over the Internet in a great flood of dread and wonder.)

Watch it spread on Technorati.

34 comments

I *adore* it.

I noticed the Creative Commons’ CC at the end. Which licence, exactly?

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…the kind you get in 2014, of course!

Yeah, funny thing, we didn’t actually CC-license it. We should. I’ll get on that.

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I can’t get it to load up on my machine — it sticks at “Part 1 of 3” and never loads any images. Suggestions?

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Anne says…

At long last, I see the fruit of your labors! The use of high contrast in the images is way hot. P.S. Robin Sloan, you owe me an e-mail.

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You try the new link, Tim?

Anne, you are so right.

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you’ve been metafiltered!

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/37142

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Cool! A lot of interesting reactions in that thread. Although I am tempted to jump in and be like, “Dudes, no, it’s satire! And yet… not at all,” it is probably better to simply let it speak for itself.

Plus I don’t have a MeFi account anyway. Suckas.

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Matt says…

Whoo-hoo! (More Snark from me soon, and by the way, credit where it’s due: All the Flash was done by Flashmaster Robin, concept, storyboard, timeline, scripts, etc. by Robin and I, and music by Aaron, although I could have sworn that Robin said that somewhere.) Umm, I’m just back from Orlando and hella tired, so I’m not saying anything to MeFi, even though I do have an account. This is the first time anything of mine has been FPPed on MeFi, but I should mention, it’s Robin’s second.

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Wow. Very cool, very well done, and very scary. Food for thought.

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vicki says…

so i’m stuck in the bottom of mississippi (the state that makes florida stats look good!) and i stumble across epic. well, most of it. the nieces, nephews and boys of all ages were thrilled–for what we could see of it. can’t wait until i get back to the land of broadband to absorb its full vision.

happy turkey day, my friends!11

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Happy Thanksgiving, Vicki! Hurrah!

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tienle says…

Please read this thread to see what people in the Alternate Reality Game universe (can anyone say ilovebees?) want to see happen with this brilliant concept.

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8162

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EPIC linkage roundup here, if yer interested.

Thanks for that link, tienle. Fascinating!

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Well, you’ve certainly gotten some prfoessional journalists talking about his brilliantly-produced anim

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Matt says…

My favorite EPIC discussion yet has to be this one, just ’cause it’s so darn random. (Best comment? “E eeeee ee e eee ee e eeee e ee e eeeeeeee.”)

Actually, OK, clearly my favorite post is “Who is it who was the narrator, cause god-DAMN he had a sexy voice.” Thanks, talondarkx.

Reading others’ reactions to this is like giving our first presentations of it over and over. Denial. Bargaining. Anger. Ummm, a little more anger. Despair Acceptance. And of course, Dutch.

It’s funny to see where the super-old-school thinking and the super-new-school thinking bend back around and meet up. (And crash, and lie inert, secure in the knowledge that this exact future will never come to pass.) When we presented this to the editors, it was always, “Oh, no, nothing like this would ever happen. The sensible citizens of America are far too enamored of our beautiful agate type to ever pay much attention to those dreadful noisy light-emitting contraptions.” And some of the most thought-out responses from the technopagan crowd have been along the lines of, “Come on, this is nothing like the future. This doesn’t even take into account last year’s Quantum Fluthinger API, which outcalculates Google’s Helsinki7 algorithm by a factor of 10^23.”

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Matt says…

Props to everyone for not pointing out that Google has only one month remaining in which to purchase TiVo, however.

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Brent says…

Tracked this forum down after you cats got farked. Love your work, great stuff. Can’t wait to live in a world where I don’t have to see Jessica Simpson’s bloody sex life plastered everywhere I go to buy gum.

Keep it up!

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Holy crap!

Look at the Fark-forum discussion!

Thanks for the tip, Brent. That rules.

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Matt says…

I can’t believe I took 10 minutes of my life to read that whole stupid Fark thread. That thread could have been summarized in two paragraphs of written text and only wasted 15 seconds of my time.

GAY.

/meta

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Brent says…

np, np. I love reading fark links, as they brighten my day, but when it comes to discussions by the community there, well, they leave something to be desired. Unfortunately, you guys are fairly on the mark in terms of how people contribute to the online environment. 25% of them are full of shit, 70% of them quote the shit of the original 25%, and one in twenty has an insightful, interesting point. And I’m being very generous.

Then again, if you’ve been watching CNN or Fox News lately, it’s not like either network is going to give you a straight, propaganda-free answer based soundly on the truth either. I’d frankly rather take my chances online, where it’s a safer bet that at least 5% of my news comes somewhere vaguely close to the truth.

But good on you for initiating discussion. I actually work in media/advertising myself, and I certainly agree with many of your points.

Cheers.

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Mentioned in Malaysia too!

Jeff Ooi is arguably the most well-known Malaysian blogger and he linked you guys 🙂

(tho I personally found out from Mefi. And I’m kicking my dialup connection. :P)

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Love it!

Alex.

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Any chance of publishing the transcript?

Alex.

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The web’s done it for us! In English and in Spanish. Awesome.

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Matt says…

The ironic thing about the transcriptions is that all of them leave off the last few lines of the piece, the crucial lines about “but for most, it is shallow, trivial, mostly false, etc., etc. — was there another way?” They all end with EPIC as “deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything ever available before”. The transcripts are 100% pro-EPIC. The movie’s message was much more nuanced.

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Eiger says…

Howdy,

I loved it.

Just one problem, looks like Billys going to be buying TIVO.

I tried to post a tinyurl to the interview, but you can find it easy with the header,

“Gates touts TiVo deal at CES” at CNET.

Ive no doubt that in a few months time we will be hearing rumors of TIVOS financial woes, and possible buyers.

Maybe Bill, has seen Ep… No, Im going to go out on a limb and say Im certain hes watched Epic. lol

Anyway, just thought it was kind of funny when I read that Cnet interview from CES.

Well done on the EPIC.

Has anyone watched BRAZIL recently? If not you should.

Eiger

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I provided on my website(http://nextmedia.blogspot.com/2004/12/le-mie-previsioni-per-i-prossimi-10.html) an italian translation of the video transcript.

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They’re building the Google Grid, y’all!

I love this stuff.

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Don says…

Who do I need to contact to get permission to use this at a conference? I love this!

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E-mail robin at snarkmarket dot com, Don!

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Extract from personal blog:

Just found out that a news story – I produced and posted to Googlezon – got a 73% approval rating and that means we have the go-ahead for Indonesia.

Like most charities now – our income is highly dependent on our impact on the online mediascape. Thousands of individual supporters donate as the result of my article meaning we now have match funding for a project developing the communications infrastructure to track environmental degradation in a remote community in Indonesia.

Samia – charity worker, 2013.

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Yeah I find Epic really inspiring. I saw EPIC a month or so ago on ZeD tv. I really could see the possiblity of Epic happening. I spoke of Epic in my research project, my topic was Forsaken Future: New in the Age of Technology, blah, blah.I am in no way a professional on the subject but it’s what interests me.

Yes also is there a way to get a copy of the film.?

~>Vanixx

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Please check out my praise for, and commentary on the legal applications of, EPIC:

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hilden/20050524.html

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They didn’t buy Tivo in time for your timeline, but they did launch Google Video and now snapped up YouTube. Next up: deals with channels to bring TV content to Google?

By the way, Amazon AWS is probably worth more to Google than Amazon’s customer information. It could be a cash cow next to advertising.

Filip.

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