Ze Frank
Patrick Tullmann drew my attention to zefrank.com. I guess this is what happens when you live in China and your bandwith is not that great - you miss out on something where you thought, “hey, how come I’m just finding out about this now?”. I remember when the ideas starting coming in that I spent quite some time looking at Ze’s web site and thinking that ‘he’s got it’ - in fact, since then, his site is probably sitting in the back of my mind when we discuss, as a group, issues and questions about the future, such as “Will individuals will be able to make money from their blogs?”.
For those of you who are willing to watch, here’s a 20-minute, highly entertaining and very informative speech from Ze. It provides great background information about him and his accomplishments.
Pat was drawing my attention to The Show, Ze’s year-long experiment in video which ended earlier this year. A great description of the project can be found in the but to quote from the story:
{Ze} built his website (zefrank.com) into a playground for interactive Internet projects, while exploring these ideas as a speaker, university instructor and consultant. Curious to see if his ideas about online video held water, he enrolled himself in improv classes, and started The Show as a year-long experiment.
Pat elaborates on this idea further and how it might relate to The Economist.
Ze’s show accepts both content and direction from the users, but every show has a strong and clear direction provided by Ze (it is very clearly his show, even though viewers have provided intros, ideas, songs, video and stills). He posits ideas and directions, asks for input and material, and combines the results into something that is most likely not exactly what he expected, but generally something stronger and larger. But still imprinted with his style. Similarly, the strong and consistent presence of the current editorial board of the Economist and its journalists would provide the same consistent and open slant on the news that the Economist has always had.
There are some interesting things about The Show. This Business Week article points out that Ze had signed a deal with Rewer Video to have his videos hosted on their web site in return for revenue share. I’m not sure if he has changed partners to Blip but regardless, you won’t find The Show on . This means he can share ad revenue with Blip when people look at his archive of videos. What I also like is that he uses video to encourage experiments and generate ideas. He doesn’t create a page that might be a ‘call to action’. You don’t read a manifesto. You watch a video and then you act. And Ze’s sports racers have acted. You can see a list of completed projects on Ze’s wiki. You can also see current projects which are active on the ORG (need to register).
It would be great to use The Economist’s platform in a similar way to launch ‘experiments’. It would be great to have The Economist also think beyond print. As we discuss and debate some of the ideas which have come in and some that we had come to the table with already, we increasingly start to ask about how can we get The Economist’s audience more involved. While The Economist might not be designing our German kid a t-shirt, I could see Economist sports racers writing their own play.
