We Live in Public – most impactful movie of 2009

Everyone reading this blog post MUST go see this movie.

If you live in NYC you can see it as the closing film at the New Directors/New Films festival at MOMA on April 5th.

While at SXSW this year (2009) I had the very great good fortune to catch a screening of the documentary We Live in Public.

(photo from the We Live in Public website, I hope they don’t mind that I’m using it here)

I left and was in a bit of a daze (and no, it wasn’t from sitting near The Dude though he was indeed just a few rows over) rather it was from just how impactful the movie is for any of us who are now, ourselves, living in public. I have been active online since 1991. I started this blog many years ago and deep in my archives you can find a great deal of highly personal stuff, my musings over time about life, relationships and more. Since 2007 I have been using twitter actively and have posted more than 9000 times, often inviting anyone who gets my messages to join me for coffee, lunch or as I did just minutes ago here at the Web 2.0 Expo invite anyone to join me for dinner. 

I live in public.

My friends, people such as Jason Calacanis, who are featured throughout We Live In Public have also been living their lives in public. The movie is, however, not Jason’s story but is:

 … the story of the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of,” visionary Josh Harris.  Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.

I will be pondering this movie for months, likely years to come. Weeks after I viewed it, I still feel the impact. It is a fun movie at times, a difficult movie throughout, and I’m certain my personal connection to many of the participants definitely shaped the impact which the film had on me as I viewed it. 

However if you are reading this post, if you follow me on Twitter, if you Tweet yourself, if you video blog, post status updates to Facebook, you too are starting to live in public, in ways which Josh Harris explored a decade ago. His story highlights the many impacts this life can have on us, the impact that pervasive surveillance can have on all of us. 

We Live in Public won the Sundance Grand Jury prize for Documentaries this year for a very good reason. 

 

Advertising in Applications – a workshop series

As you may know if you have met me recently and/or have been reading my blog regularly, I am in the midst of starting a new company, Nearness Function, which is an ad network focused on placing commercial messeges, especially branding messages, inside of applications. We take an expansive view of what an application is – so we will work with web applications using AJAX, widgets, Flash applications, desktop applications (which connect back to the web), mobile applications. We are also exploring helping publishers of certain types of rich content such as podcasters and video bloggers – we’ll definitely work with media players which might play such content and as rapidly as we can build out the infrastructure we will expand the ad formats we can serve to include video ads which have had great success as an ad unit in many applications already.

As I speak with publishers (in our case mostly software companies) and with advertising agencies, media buyers and direct advertisers I have been struck by the range of experiences and questions around how to best place ads inside of dynamic applications. These questions range from debates about the formats that work to questions about what metrics and pricing models can be used to sell and track these ads. In our role as a network we have to provide solutions to the technical issues of getting the right, targeted ads in front of the individuals who use a given application, we also have to address the business needs and goals of both the media buyers, ad agencies, advertisers and publishers – all while also remaining focused on the experience of those individual users whose actions and reactions form the basis for the value of the advertising.

So, starting at the end of January and continuing on a regular basis we are starting a workshop series on Ads in Applications. This will be a long lunch to start with the first event to be held here in San Francisco at the end of January. Future events will include more lunch workshops and, I hope, some open to the public events in the evenings which will have a more traditional speaker format.

The first lunch workshop will be by invitation only. If you are reading this and would like an invitation contact me directly – please include a note about why you are interested in participating which includes your current role & company (or companies). The workshops are intended for senior people from application companies (often founders) and senior folks from the ad buying side. Select investors who have a portfolio of firms in the application space will also be welcome to participate – though they are encouraged to invite representatives from their portfolio firms. For the workshops press, including bloggers, are specifically not invited – these will be off the record, working discussions. My hope is that from these closed events we will also organize some open to the public events and/or come up with some public proposals – either for standards or as suggestions to standards efforts at organizations such as the IAB.

For the first workshop the format will be highly collaborative discussion, we will be a relatively small group and will all have a chance to both talk, listen and ask many questions. My hope is that in a few hours we can cover a range of ongoing questions and issues – including formats, metrics, measurements, definitions of “targeting”, acceptable pricing models (which both drive metrics and are in turn driven by what can be measured), how to define success, and various best practices around the integration and targeting of ads. I hope also that we have some discussion about how to disclose commercial content inside of a variety of types of dynamic applications – in many small widgets and in many types of other content what is an “ad” can not always be fully obvious.

Watch this blog for more details about the workshop and contact me directly (and/or leave a comment here) if you would be interested in attending, hosting, or helping organize these workshops.