Making The 'Significant Objects' Project... Even More Significant

from the recycling-for-profit dept

Back in July, we commented on the Significant Objects project where 100 authors are writing up 100 stories involving 100 various trinkets -- and then selling those stories along with the associated items on eBay for a tidy profit. (The project originally struck me as an experiment to see if the one red paperclip stunt could be mass produced in some way as a sustainable publishing business.) Now, just a few months later, Slate has teamed up with the Significant Objects folks with a contest for Slate readers to submit their own 500-word stories about a cheap tchotchke -- a BBQ sauce jar bought at a thrift store for $0.75. The contest attracted over 600 stories to be judged by Slate and the Significant Objects founders, and the winner gets the honor of being picked as well as the proceeds from its eBay auction -- which has a current bid (and profit) of about $20.

This contest is brilliant in that it not only highlights the concept that every product is a bundle of scarce and infinite goods, but it also demonstrates that content can be used to engage with an audience as a form of entertaining advertising. For the price of a bauble and some editorial judging, Slate connected with its fans and gathered a bit of demographic information on its readers who sent in a story (submissions had to be accompanied by an email address and location). Imagine if Slate had instead put a banner ad on its website with a form to fill out for personal information, the response rate for that would likely be much much lower. But with this contest, the cost of the BBQ jar was negligible, and Slate editors spent their time reading stories and got a peek into the creative minds of its readership. Okay, the drawback is that the submission judging process is actually not a trivial task, especially when there are more than a handful of entries (and more than a couple judges). Even Google hasn't exactly figured out how to judge its own Project 10¹⁰⁰ contest. However, the search giant opened up the judging to let anyone vote on winners to help narrow down the selection. (And there are other examples of crowdsourced judging processes like Threadless's tshirt designs.) So I envision the next generation of advertising contests reaching out to audiences, calling upon more volunteers, and trying more and more creative campaigns to produce scarce goods out of thin air.

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Slate Realizes It Has A Valuable Community

from the take-a-hint dept

What will be the defining picture of today's economic crisis? The '30s had bread lines and the '70s had gas lines, but as Slate points out, "in many ways this economic crisis, despite its deepening severity, has been less visible than previous ones. You can't take a photograph of a collateralized debt obligation." So, like any smart media company these days, Slate is turning to the community for help capturing that iconic moment.

To do so, Slate has created a Flickr pool entitled Shoot the Recession that currently has more than 100 user-contributed photos in it. NPR's Planet Money has been doing this, too, but because Slate is more visual, it would seem that more people would be motivated. This is a smart move - it lowers the expense for Slate to report on the crisis and recognizes that people are motivated by things other than money (reputation being the big one here). But it is also smart because instead of reinventing the wheel, Slate loosely joins together another small piece of the web - Flickr. Though there is still a lot more Slate and its peers can do, this is a step in the right direction.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Did Slate Violate Copyright Law?

from the nobody-knows dept

Slate has a clever video comparing Hillary Clinton to Tracy Flick of the movie Election:

This isn't a blog about politics, so I won't venture an opinion on whether this is fair to Sen. Clinton or not, but the video has sparked some interesting discussion about copyright law. First, Cynthia Brumfield points out that this is precisely the kind of video that Hollywood (specifically, NBC's Rick Cotton) would disallow under the fair use doctrine. Cotton argues that "the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works" shouldn't counted as fair use, but that there should be "something more" to qualify. This is quite vague, but it seems pretty likely that the above video, which is basically just 45 seconds of movie footage interspersed with footage of Sens. Clinton and Obama, wouldn't qualify under his test. But Chris Soghoian points out an even more obvious way that Slate may have broken the law: the most likely source of the video clips in question would likely be from a DVD. As Soghoian points out, the video is too crisp and clear to have come from a VHS tape. It's conceivable that it was taped from a cable TV broadcast, but I think he's right that the most obvious source would likely have been a DVD. If that's the case, then the video editor in question almost certainly broke the law, because DVD-ripping tools like Handbrake are illegal "circumvention devices" under the DMCA. Of course, it's not likely Election distributor Paramount will actually sue Slate, which is owned by the influential Washington Post Company. But I think it illustrates the extent to which the letter of the law is diverging from everyday practice. In a sane world, there would be no question that videos like this one would be legal. But in the world we actually live in, no one is sure what the law is, and people developing these kinds of creative works need to be constantly worrying about possible legal problems.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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