Fascinating new blog find (via Christy) – the Extratextuals, a group blog defined as the following:

This is a blog about the media. However, with other blogs on television, film, and the media in general, we wanted to carve out a specific niche. So our blog will focus primarily on the extratextuals that surround the media. By this, we mean everything but the show itself: previews, merchandising, industry buzz, branding, interviews, posters, spatial context, temporal context, related websites, ARGs, spinoffs, spoilers, schedules, bonus materials, transmedia extras, games, YouTube clips, etc. But we’re interested in these things not to be arcane or eccentric; rather, we believe that the extratextuals often make the show what it is. Hence this blog is about the mediation of media.

In hunting for the term extratextual I also came across a wonderful study by Marianne Cantwell, all about fan knowledge and participation in the extratextual.

Australian YouTube star TheHill88 and Channel 7 television program Today Tonight do something together to do with Australian tourism… not quite sure what – but here is Caitlin’s YouTube version.  Stay tuned for the TV version when hopefully all will be revealed. I like the koala hug!

Back in March I blogged about My Second Life, a documentary-fiction style machinima. Episode 1 was quite interesting – some gorgeous visuals, nice editing, and quite good writing though a little cliched. I only mentioned it in passing at the time – I thought it was fun but …

HBO just paid a 6 figure sum for the rights to the series and is promoting it as an Oscar nominee!

So, if you’re like me and just gave it a cursory glance at the time, you’d better go back and have another look!

Yesterday when I added Andy Piper as a friend on Facebook, I flippantly said “now we’re friends everywhere” – since I knew him on Second Life, on Facebook, on twitter, on flickr, on his blog, and through his comments on my blog.

He paused for a while, then replied with a wide ASCII grin:

“friends *everywhere*? see http://onxiam.com/people/andypiper“ 

I clicked the link, and my jaw literally dropped in astonishment at the number of tracks Andy makes across the web.  How the HECK can any one person do so much?!?!

Right now I feel pretty overwhelmed by the number of social media spaces I seem to exist in: 3 blogs, 3 or 4 roleplaying forums, a fan forum, a zine, flickr, linkedin, twitter, facebook, Second Life (plus an alt), 2 youtube accounts, gmail, work mail, skype, google chat. People keep inviting me to new things but I just don’t have the time!  And each one of these has channels or groups or threads – I am in 63 flickr groups, 19 facebook groups, subscribe to numerous blog feeds, several podcasts and a number of youtube channels.  I’m part of 2 high traffic email lists (Association of Internet Researchers and Second Life Education), and about 10 low to medium traffic ones.

My solution at handling them all is to concentrate on two or three at a time.  The amount of reading and writing and uploading and downloading and viewing and clicking I do every day is becoming ridiculous.  I am a terrible commenter on friend’s blogs, I only blog once every day or two, I barely post to email groups, and I only keep up with urgent emails.  If I tried to fully engage in everything I wouldn’t ever get any work done!
Andy wrote a post about his experiences called The Quicksand of Web 2.0, in which he debates some of the pros and cons of different applications and talks about addiction and his “off switch”.

Its all left me wondering about the kind of identity play we engage in across all of these different spaces we inhabit, and the type of narrative constructions other people are making about us as they make connections between our multiple cross-media selves.

And is it possible for people who read your work across these spaces to suddenly get turned off by a bad case of TMI (too much information)?  Or as one of my literary colleagues is wont to say, “that person just has too much narrative going on.”

But not you Andy

I thought the new Simpsons movie had done some great pre-release marketing but The Dark Knight (thanks Andy for the correct title!) tops all, complete with all sorts of teasers and even an ARG style game that occurred via whysoserious.com.

“John Howard pops up in cyberspace to prove that he has caught up the the 21st century” explains some news reporter on the News today.

Malcom Turnbull has a Facebook site and his friends seem to love this photo he posted:

Meanwhile Peter Garret from the Labour party argued back against the PM’s climate change policy with this:

and the party called him out with this:

I think we’re all waiting to see this though – when are our politicians going to really become twisted, repurposed, and memed all over the internet?

As said on one news report this evening, “we’ve got a long way to go if we want to use the same political tactics as the Americans!” – the Obama Girls:

We Are The Strange is a new indie movie being featured at the Sundance Film Festival. Described as “Mosters Inc. meets The Nightmare Before Christmas inside of a retro Japanese video game”, the film is sure to be a cult hit because it is truly… strange… from the snippets I have seen and the teasers on youtube. Here’s one of them:

Here is a review from one of the gaming bloggers, Onder Skall, who saw the movie in Second Life. There’s also some excellent critique of the movie at this site as well.

Here’s the official website.

Here’s the blog.

Here’s the myspace.

Here’s a review in Wired.

What I think is interesting is the mixed media filming techniques, described in Wired as:

a combination of 8-bit animation (think early Nintendo), Brothers Quay-style filmmaking (creepy, expressionless dolls) and the kind of 3-D landscapes gamers inhabit. Strange combined stop-motion techniques (working with dolls, clay and paper cutouts) with 3-D computer animation. He built 15 virtual sets in Cinema 4-D, using Adobe’s After Effects.

I don’t know if I could watch 88 minutes of it but I think the film making is very cool.

(image sourced from here)

Recently I’ve been working with a PhD student who is doing a fascinating study of blogging practices in China and how they are beginning to break down this firewall (or not, as the case may be). And in my efforts to find a few sources to support him, I came across this amazing post from Whats New Media?

China & New Media: guanxi, QQ, cyberwar preparations and the “Great Firewall”

This post has links to all sorts of discussions about Chinese culture, censorship and the internet.

I’m so excited to be able to watch this after missing out on it when it was shown in Second Life.  I love it!