The story, which we wrote together, was born from our combined love of Mad Men and initial investigation I’d made into the Twitter channel that compliments the show (I first wrote about it here). It was great to take something from this blog and grow it to an article for the mag, we even managed to get a few words from January Jones on the topic of her character, Betty Draper, coming to life on Twitter via fans.

The Lives of Others
Well-written characters leave viewers wanting more. And whilst the clever social media strategies behind AMC and Lionsgate hit Mad Men are giving them just that, even they can’t keep up with the user-generated fervour, as Ben Cooper and Rachael Turk discover.

Hit US series Mad Men has created a stir within the sanctioned space of television – both within the show itself and its extended TV life in the likes of the skit ‘Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women’ (viewable in US only) that aired on Saturday Night Live in late October. But online is another world again. All the main characters of the series – Don Draper, Joan, Paul, Pete, Peggy and Sal – exist in the world of social media, short-message service Twitter. On this platform, characters interact and converse in character, with one another and with direct messages from other users. This both extends the story and builds the audience.

The use of Twitter is not in itself new: in online promotion of its series Drive, Fox last year created a Twitterer out of actor Nathan Fillion (Desperate Housewives) – except that it was, in fact, director Greg Yaitanes making the posts, using a Drive publicity photo of Fillion as an avatar. The Wall Street Journal has reported that NBC, CBS, ABC Family and MTV are among several networks playing with the marketing possibilities of Twitter.

Mad Men took a more proactive approach. When a user “tweets” about the series, he might be surprised to find Betty Draper suddenly following him on the platform [though he’s not the only one: she’s following over 6,000 8,540 people with almost as many following her, and has written almost 1,500 updates]. Though being proactive on Twitter isn’t hard – by using Twitter Search to query keywords about a particular topic or subject, the conversations and authors can be easily identified. Mad Men targeted individuals in advertising and marketing and instances of the show being mentioned to build intrigue and engagement.

One blogger, mediaphyter, criticises the fact that Man Men Twitter profiles link directly to the show website of cable network AMC TV instead of continuing the alter reality by going to a Sterling Cooper agency website. However, in our case, the Betty Draper who is currently following does have a LinkedIn profile – confused?

The reason for this becomes apparent when, a day after the first contact is made by the online Betty Draper, another Betty Draper starts following. The first was, in fact, an imposter, a clone. Some users – in their enthusiasm for the show have created their own (and in this case, quicker and more comprehensive) profiles, so much so that they’re doing a better job than the AMC marketing initiative. At last count there were over 75 dedicated profiles acting out and talking about Mad Men. Thus unfolds a parallel, white picket-fence universe. Not to mention a lot of free advertising. It is, at the same time, a relinquishing of control. AMC didn’t take to kindly to Mad Men clones and took the legal high ground, requesting that Twitter remove the profiles. As might be imagined, the web went into a not unwarranted frenzy. Yet within a matter of days it seems that AMC relaxed its stance and the profiles were reactivated.

It’s understandable that AMC wanted to protect the shows assets but by stepping into a social media channel such as Twitter they were naïve to expect the community to abide by their rules. AMC’s online character extensions were smart, even if they didn’t realise it, in the sense that they were so well thought through that, in order to be convincing, clones needed to behave equally as well. The creators of Mad Men bravely stepped into a community of frenzied conversation, stumbled a bit, but ultimately helped enhance the integrity of their characters in a parallel yet complimentary new channel.

Whether you “get” Twitter or not, what matters is that people are talking – about you, your work or something that relates to it. And by taking the time to listen you may find you have something to contribute. As for the “real” Betty Draper, lead actor January Jones says,

“I don’t find out what Betty does until I receive the script a day or two before each shoot, so if someone’s out there planning her day without me maybe they can share their wisdom!”

Of course the whole concept is anachronistic – the series being set in the ‘60s – but the very current desire of fans to interact with these superbly written characters and exist in their world allows the series creators this licence. And if Betty Draper had Twitter back then, we can imagine she and her friends might well have been using it instead of walking to the back fence.

And Pete Campbell would almost certainly have a LinkedIn profile.

Searchable Video

Online video, whether it resides on Meta Cafe, Vimeo, Revver, MySpace, Current TV, or the goliath of YouTube, needs to be able to be discovered.

To put it into perspective, from a search query on YouTube in April, 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels were returned. It’s estimated that last year, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet in 2000, and now around 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

Primarily our social connections help us to navigate and find content that we like. That could be via the friendly “check this out” emailed link, or a mixture of looking up favourites, or following and exploring related clips within the video channel itself.

But as the content grows exponentially in line with broadband uptake, lowering costs of equipment, knowledge of video editing and so on, a prized film could easily be lost in the noise of everyone else’s efforts. Despite the need to be illustrative in describing visual content – with informative titles, word tags and descriptions to help search engines – that very same search engine needs to come of age too.

In September, Google made headway in this area with the re-launch of Picasa, its online photo-sharing product – now with facial recognition technology thanks to its acquisition of Neven Vision, a company that specialises in matching facial detail with images on a centralised database. Picasa’s facial recognition technology works in much the same way. Users teach the database who’s who within a photograph and, over time, it will begin to suggest who is in an uploaded photo.

This isn’t moving image, but you can see how this technology could start to identify actors within a piece of footage, the scene they’re acting out and the film in which they’re starring. Apply this technology to voice-recognition software and you start to get the picture.

It’s early days and, even with photography, the technology works best when a person is facing the camera (it’ll have trouble identifying them if they’re not).

We still need to teach computers to understand faces and features, images and scenes. This is no small task – but can be made far simpler if it’s distributed among millions of web users.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is one such service that divvies up human intelligence tasks among thousands of people. It creates a crowd-sourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of humans to perform tasks that computers can’t – such as identifying emotions within photographs, a happy dog versus an angry one, or writing a description about an image. Users of the site can select from a number of different tasks and actually earn micro-payments from completing them.

A newly launched search tool named co5TARS is the latest in an emerging generation of content browsers that seek to address the increasing complexity of the web by visualising it. Unlike other solutions, co5TARS has been purpose-built to tell a particular story. Using the open data freely available from Freebase.com, it tells the stories behind the people in movies.

In a way co5TARS is a social network of film, depicting the roles and relationships of movie professionals as they change over time, offering unique views of this ever-changing network of actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors and producers, and using movie posters and iconography as a visual shorthand to navigate and explore.

Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, is a web browser plugin that provides interactive full-screen slideshows of online visual content. The plugin, once installed, provides a rich ocular interface to explore content visually. Searching is done as you would with any content browser, by keywords, but the results are entirely visual and are displayed in a simulated three-dimensional interface for exploration.

It’s apparent that we’re ready for intelligent ways to find what we’re looking for. This evolution is being dubbed the semantic web – it’s the way in which information and services on the web are defined in a semi-automatic way, making it possible for the web to comprehend and satisfy the requests of people looking for content. The semantic web is the vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited for inventing the World Wide Web, as a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange. It’s also our want to have a smarter relationship with the web, so that when we search for Paris, the results are smart enough to know that probably we mean Paris France not Paris Hilton because it understands our previous behaviour as a traveller and not a celebrity gossip monger.

Users don’t care how the information sought is delivered. But for content creators it pays dividends to identify and be descriptive about the content being made and published online.