Announcing Transmedia, Hollywood:S/Telling the Story

Conference Overview: 

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today’s entertainment industries. The event brings together top creators, producers, and executives from the entertainment industry and places their critical perspectives in dialogue with scholars pursuing the most current academic research on transmedia studies.

Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field’s most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics, which will be held this year in Los Angeles from March 17 to 21, 2010.

By coinciding with SCMS, Transmedia, Hollywood hopes to reach the widest possible scholarly audience and thus create a lasting impact in the field. It will give cinema and media scholars from around the world unprecedented access to top industry professionals and insight into their thinking and practices.

Location:

USC Cinematic Arts Complex, Los Angeles

Conference Summary:

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story

As audiences followed stories as diverse as Heroes, Lost, Harry Potter, and Matrix, from one format to another—from traditional television series or films into comics, the Web, alternate reality or video games, toys and other merchandise—Hollywood quickly adopted the academic term “transmedia” and began plastering it above office doors to describe this latest cultural phenomenon. This is not to say that convergent culture and transmedia storytelling are new concepts; instead, the emergence of convergence can be traced to the 19th century when a Barnum and Bailey-style mode of entertainment first took hold, maturing in the mid-1950s with Walt Disney’s visionary multi-platform, cross-promotional, merchandising extravaganza known as Disneyland.

Since then, Hollywood has created countless new transmedia titles, everything from Batman to Star Wars - an evolution only accelerated by the advent of digital convergence. While transmedia, in one way, vindicates the logic of the integrated media conglomerate and activates the synergies long hoped for by the captains of industry in charge of Hollywood’s six big media groups, it may also prove to be more than they bargained for. Engaged, “lean-forward” consumers—coveted by advertisers and entertainers alike—are not content simply to watch traditional media but rather, they produce their own videos, remix other people’s work, seek out those who share their interests, forging concordances and wiki’s, fan fiction, and various forms of interactivity that are still in their infancy and that corporate Hollywood is just beginning to explore. Copyright law, guild rules, and the conventions of audience quantification are frequently operating at cross-purposes with these new, expansive sets of cultural-industrial practices. As the demise of the music industry shows, active audiences and technological advances can create an explosive combination, powerful enough to bring down an entire industry. The entertainment industry wants to embrace this new, active consumer while ensuring its own survival by seeking to recreate familiar rules of what is considered “valuable” and “entertainment” within traditional business models.

Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.

Conference Panels

Topic: Reconfiguring Entertainment
Henry Jenkins, USC, Moderator

The recent news that Disney is buying Marvel Comics has sent shock waves through the entertainment industries as two companies, which have built their fortunes on transmedia experiences but for very different groups of consumers, are being brought together under single ownership. What implications does this merger have for the kinds of entertainment experiences we will be consuming in the next decade? This panel brings together visionaries, people who think deeply about our experiences of play, fun, and entertainment, people whose expertise is rooted in a range of media (games, comics, film, television) to think about the future of entertainment as a concept. Transmedia designers often use the term, “mythologies,” to describe the kinds of information rich environment they seek to build up around media franchise and deploy the term, “Bibles,” to describe the accumulated plans for the unfolding of that serial narrative. Both of these terms link contemporary entertainment back to a much older tradition. So, are we simply talking about a largely timeless practice of storytelling as it gets relayed through new channels and platforms? Or are we seeing the emergence of new modes of expression, new kinds of experiences, which are only possible within a converged media landscape? What does it mean to have “fun” in the early 21st century and will this concept mean something different a decade from now? In what ways will the desire to produce and consume such experiences reconfigure the entertainment industry or conversely, how will the consolidation of media ownership generate or constrain new forms of popular culture? What models of media production, distribution, and consumption are implied by these future visions of entertainment?

Topic: ARG: This is Not a Game…. But is it Always a Promotion?
Denise Mann (UCLA) moderator

Using a collective intelligence model disguised as play, Alternate reality games, or ARGs, give any individual with a computer a means of problem-solving anything from global warming to the true meaning of the Dharma Institute conspiracy. ARGs also give instant “geek cred” to marketers from stuffy firms like Microsoft and McDonalds tasked with selling consumer goods to the Millennials. Are these elaborate scavenger hunts, which send players down an endless series of rabbit-holes in search of clues, teaching them how to think collectively or are they simply the latest in a long series of promotional tools designed to sell products to tech-savvy consumers? Unlike regular computer games, ARGS engage a multitude of players using a multitude of new technologies and social media formats—sending clues via Web sites, email, or just as likely, by means of an old-fashioned phone booth in some dusty, small town in Texas. For ARG creators, the new entertainment format represents rich, new storytelling opportunities, according to Joe DiNunzio, CEO of 42 Entertainment (AI, Halo 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest). However, for the big six media groups, the primary purpose of ARGs is promotional—a new-fangled way of selling Spielberg’s AI (The Beast), WB’s Dark Knight, Microsoft’s Halo 2 (ilovebee’s), or ABC’s Lost (The Lost Experience). In other words, are ARGs simply a novel new way for the big six media groups to prompt several million avid fans to start beating the promotional drum on behalf of their favorite movie, TV series, or computer game or do they represent a new way of harnessing revolutionary thinking? In this panel, ARG creators, entertainment think-tank consultants, and media scholars will debate the social vs. commercial utilities associated with this latest form of social engagement.

Topic: Designing Transmedia Worlds
Henry Jenkins (USC) moderator

Transmedia entertainment relies as much on world-building as it does on traditional storytelling. Transmedia practices use the audience’s fascination with exploring its richly detailed world (and its attendant mythology) to motivate their activities as they seek out and engage with content which has been dispersed across the media landscape. Recent projects, such as Cloverfield, True Blood, and District 9, have relied on transmedia strategies to generate audience interest in previously unknown fictional universes, often combining promotional and expositional functions. Derek Johnson has argued that these fictional worlds are “over-designed,” involving much greater details in their conceptual phase than can be exploited through a single film or television series. This “overdesign” emergences through new kinds of collaborations between artists working both for the “mother ship,” the primary franchise, and those working on media extensions, whether games, websites, “viral” videos, even park benches. In this new system, art directors and script writers end up working together in new ways as they build up credible worlds and manage complex continuities of information. What does it mean to talk about fictional worlds? How has this altered the processes behind conceptualizing, producing, and promoting media texts? What new skills are emerging as production people learn to introduce, refine, and expand these worlds through each installment of serial media texts? And how do they manage audience expectations that they will continue to learn something more about the world in each new text they consume? What does each media platform contribute to the exploration and elaboration of such worlds?

Topic: Who Let the Fans In?: “Next-Gen Digi-Marketing”
Moderator: Denise Mann (UCLA)

Most Hollywood marketing campaigns remain overly reliant on expensive broadcast television commercials to reach a large cross-section of the audience despite growing evidence that avid fans are capable of generating powerful word of mouth. In the decade since The Blair Witch Project’s website became a model for engaging a core audience by creating awareness online, a new generation of marketing executives has emerged, challenging the effectiveness of top-down strategies and advocating “bottom-up,” social media marketing. By fusing storytelling and marketing—ranging from ABC’s low-tech, user-generated aesthetic in “Lost Untangled” to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky’s polished, eye-candy approach to selling Sprite in its “sublymonal advertising” campaign—this next generation of web marketers has upended previous notions about where content ends and the ad begins. Having grown up reading Watchman comics, playing Sims, and surfing the Web for like-minded members of their consumer tribe, these new media professionals come armed with the knowledge of what it means to be a fan; as a result, they are refashioning the processes and structures that inform the relationship between audience members and the culture industry—forcing today’s media conglomerates to adapt to the new realities of the cultural-industrial complex while also ensuring their own survival. Gen-Y consumers’ sophisticated understanding of, but less contentious relationship with brand marketing, invites today’s media marketers to embrace a revolutionary mode of selling that may impact copyright law, guild agreements, professional standards, and the global labor market. What is the future of entertainment? Will the Internet be run by top-down mid-media corporate owners or bottom-up Web-bloggers or some yet to be realized combination of both?

Speakers include:

Ivan Askwith, Senior Content Strategist, Big Spaceship (recent projects include work for NBC, A&E, HBO, EPIX, Second Life and Wrigley).

Danny Bilson, THQ (The Rocketeer, Medal of Honor, The Flash, The Sentinel)

Emmanuelle Borde, Senior Vice-President, Digital Marketing, Sony Imageworks Interactive (her award-winning team of marketers, designers, producers and technologists have developed thousands of websites and digital campaigns for Sony Worldwide products, including Spider-man, 2012, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon, etc.)

David Bisbin, Art Director/Production Designer (Twilight, New Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Drug Store Cowboy)

Will Brooker, Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK. (selected publications: Star Wars [2009]; Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture [2005]; The Bladerunner Experience [2006];Using the Force [2003]; Batman Unmasked [2001]

John Caldwell, Professor, UCLA Department of Film, TV, Digital Media (selected publications: Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Film/Television Work Worlds [ 2009]; Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television [2008]; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, [ 2003]; Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, (1995)

Alan Friel, Partner, Wildman Harrold & Associates

John Hegeman, Chief Marketing Office, New Regency Productions (spearheaded marketing campaigns for: Saw 1 & 2, Crash at Lionsgate; The Blair Witch Project at Artisan, etc.)

Mimi Ito, Associate Researcher, University of California Humanities Research Institute (Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software; Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media; Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life)

Derek Johnson, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

Laeta Kalogridis, Screenwriter (Shutter Island, Night Watch, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Battle Angel; Executive Producer, Birds of Prey and Bionic Woman)

Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer, Naughty Dog Software (Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune; Uncharted 2: Among Thieves)

R. Eric Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, Atomic Comics; Director of Development, Fox Atomic (Jennifer’s Body; I Love You Beth Cooper; 28 Weeks Later)

Marti Noxon, Producer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Prison Break; Gray’s Anatomy; Mad Men)

Roberta Pearson, Professor, University of Nottingham (selected publications: Reading Lost [2009]; Cult Television [2004]; The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches [1991], etc.)

Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, Founding Partners, No Mimes Media (recent credits include: Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Nine Inch Nails, Pirates of the Caribbean II)

Nils Peyron, Executive Vice President and Managing Partner, Blind Winks Productions

Louisa Stein, Head of TV/Film Critical Studies Program, San Diego State University (Limits: New Media, Genre and Fan Texts; Watching Teen TV: Text and Culture)

Jonathon Taplin, Professor, Annenberg School For Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; CEO, Intertainer.

John Underkoffler , Oblong, G-Speak (technical advisor for Iron Man, Aeon Flux, Hulk, “Taken”, and Minority Report).

Jordan Weisman, Founder, Smith & Tinker (Credits include: The Beast, I Love Bees, Year Zero)

Admission is free to Students and Academics, $25 for general public.

Register now at: http://www2.tft.ucla.edu/RSVP/

via henryjenkins.org

Inexpensive one-day opportunity for an immersive look at transmedia.

MIT Comparative Media Studies: Booklife Podcast

Podcast: “Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion”

Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but another intriguing new narrative is also emerging: the rise of “artifacts” that, although they support a writer’s career, have their own intrinsic creative value. What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer’s life caused by new media and a proliferation of “open channels”? What protective measures must a writer take to preserve his or her “self” in this environment? In addition to the guerilla tactics implicit in storytelling through social media and other unconventional platforms, in what ways is a writer’s life now itself a story irrespective of intentional fictive storytelling? Examining these issues leads naturally to a discussion on the tension and cross-pollination between the private and public lives of writers in our transmedia age, including the strategies and tactics that best serve those who want to survive and flourish in this new environment. What are we losing in the emerging new paradigm, and what do we stand to gain?

A writer for the New York Times Book Review, Huffington Post, and Washington Post, Jeff VanderMeer is also the award-winning author of the metafictional City of Saints & Madmen, the noir fantasy Finch, and Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for 21st-Century Writers. His website can be found at jeffvandermeer.com.

Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books) which was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fast Company and on National Public Radio. He lives in San Francisco, blogs for the Huffington Post and at kevinsmokler.com, and is the CEO of BookTour.com.

Presented in conjunction with Futures of Entertainment 4

Download Here!

via cms.mit.edu

All the talk about e-books, e-readers and Apple’s rumored tablet (known until it is finally released as The Tablet) made me think about this podcast from last November. The lecture was part of the Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference. It touches on what it takes to be a writer in an age of e-readers, twitter, facebook and the web.

Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 -- A Syllabus

Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0

Speaking at South by Southwest several years ago, I joked that “Web 2.0 was fandom without the stigma.” By this, I meant that sites like YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, and Wikipedia have made visible a set of cultural practices and logics that had been taking root within fandom over the past hundred-plus years, expanding their cultural influence by broadening and diversifying participation. In many ways, these practices have been encoded into the business models shaping so-called Web 2.0 companies, which have in turn made them far more mainstream, have increased their visibility, and have incorporated them into commercial production and marketing practices. The result has been a blurring between the grassroots practices I call participatory culture and the commercial practices being called Web 2.0.

Fans have become some of the sharpest critics of Web 2.0, asking a series of important questions about how these companies operate, how they generate value for their participants, and what expectations participants should have around the content they provide and the social networks they entrust to these companies. Given this trajectory, a familiarity with fandom may provide an important key for understanding many new forms of cultural production and participation and, more generally, the logic through which social networks operate.

So, to define our three terms, at least provisionally, fandom refers to the social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media properties; participatory culture refers more broadly to any kind of cultural production which starts at the grassroots level and which is open to broad participation; and Web 2.0 is a business model that sustains many web-based projects that rely on principles such as user-creation and moderation, social networking, and “crowdsourcing.”

That said, the debates about Web 2.0 are only the most recent set of issues in cultural and media studies which have been shaped by the emergence of a field of research focused on fans and fandom. Fan studies:

• emerged from the Birmingham School’s investigations of subcultures and resistance


• became quickly entwined with debates in Third Wave Feminism and queer studies


• has been a key space for understanding how taste and cultural discrimination operates


• has increasingly been a site of investigation for researchers trying to understand informal learning or emergent conceptions of the citizen/consumer


• has shaped legal discussions around appropriation, transformative work, and remix culture


• has become a useful window for understanding how globalization is reshaping our everyday lives.
  
  
  • trace the history of fandom from the amateur press associations of the 19th Century to its modern manifestations
  
  
  • describe the evolution of fan studies from the Birmingham School work on subcultures and media audiences to contemporary work on digital media
  
  
  • discuss a range of theoretical framing and methodologies which have been used to explain the cultural, social, political, legal, and economic impact of fandom
  
  
  • arbitrate the most common critiques surrounding the Web 2.0 business model
  
  
  • situate fan practices in relation to broader trends toward social networks, online communities, and remix culture
  
  
  • develop their own distinctive contribution to the field of fan studies, one which reflects their own theoretical and methodological commitments



This course will be structured around an investigation of the contribution of fan studies to cultural theory, framing each class session around a key debate and mixing writing explicitly about fans with other work asking questions about cultural change and the politics of everyday life.

via henryjenkins.org

Henry Jenkins’ syllabus. Must read books for anyone interested in the evolution of digital media. Visit Professor Jenkin’s blog for the full text.

The Requisite End-Of-Year Lists Continued

Continuing the end-of-year, end-of-decade list compilation started here, interspersed with some of the best creative work of the year. 

• The Awesome Brain Pickings Best Of 2009. 

•  Discovered in the Arjan Writes music blog, here is MPHO:
 

• The Big Picture, Christmas 2009.

• The Decade In Words.

• The New York Times The Year In Culture Slideshow.

• Inception Trailer:
 

• Wired’s The 15 Most Influential Games Of The Decade: Portal is still my favorite.

• BBH Labs’ A Quick Glance At 10 Of Their Best Blog Posts. 

• Milton Glaser’s Ten Things I’ve Learned: From 2001 but still relevant. 

• DJ Earworm’s United States Of Pop 2009: Amazing. Do you recognize all the references?
 

• Ten Gadgets That Defined The Decade.

• LA Times’ Top 10 Moments In Social Media In 2009.

• The Impossible Cool: A fantastic blog curating incredible images that are the essence of the impossibly cool.

• The Dieline: Another gorgeous blog curating the best in package design.

• Netflix’s Top Ten Most Rented Movies.

• The Year In Picture Shows.

• Vimeo’s 25 Favorite Videos Of 2009: Including this. 
 

• Fuel Your Creativity’s Best of 2009 In The Creative Industry.

• Danger Room’s Top Ten Stories From A World Gone Nuts.

• Epitaphs For Our Favorite Folded Magazines Of 2009.

• Honda’s Everything Ad: Let’s celebrate the brilliance of good editors.
 

• The Decade In Communications Technology.

• Charles Isherwood’s Best of 2009 Theater.

• Slate’s Troy Patterson Selects 26 Cultural Moments Of The Decade: From A to Z.

• Macworld’s Top Ten Tech Stories Of The Decade.

• Picturing The Past 10 Years. 

• 2009 NYC Holiday Window Displays.

• New Scientist’s Favorite Picture Galleries: Featuring a gallery of snapshots from an imploding star.

• Macworld’s 2009 Game Hall Of Fame.

• The Pogie Awards For The Year’s Best Tech Ideas.

• Top 10 Documentaries of 2009.

• Best Of The Decade’s Architecture.

• Fimoculous’ Year In Review: A mega list of eccentric lists, including a list of the worst renderings.

• Top Ten Book Cover Designs.

• The Decades 14 Biggest Design Moments.

• Ads We Hate, The Year’s Worst Commercials. 

• The Year For Creatives.

• The Best of Open Culture 2009.

• Flicker’s Your Best Shots of 2009, The Seasons.

• KCRW’s The Business: The Hollywood Year That Was [Podcast, iTunes Link]


And the predictions:

• JWT’s 100 To Watch in 2010.

• 50 Trends For 2010.

• 32 Of Our Most Anticipated 2010 Entertainments.


And lastly:

• Ringing The New Year With A Drink For Each Time Zone.


 

The Requisite End-Of-Year Lists

And not just end-of-year but also end-of-decade. Here are some of the most interesting lists I’ve seen, interspersed with some of the best work I’ve discovered this year and some suggestions for creative gifts.  


• Pixar’s Up: It delivered what is perhaps the most poignant animated sequence ever created. This heartwarming video shows the evolution of Carl and Ellie’s relationship from the first concept sketches to the final shots of the movie.

• Foreign Policy’s Top Ten Stories You Missed: Do you know about the hotline for China and India?

• The New York Times Year In Ideas 

• Pop Culture’s Finest Moments Of 2009 

• Newsweek’s The Decade In 7 Minutes:
 

• Amazon.com: Best Books Of 2009 

• The Best And Worse Tech Of The Decade 

• Milton Glaser Draws And Lectures:

• Creative Review Gunne Report 2009 And 2009 Epica Winners Featuring:  
 

 

• PaperSpecs Top Ten Tips Of 2009: For my fellow printing producers.

• Open Culture Compilation Of Free Audiobooks 

• 50 Of The World’s Best Design Blogs 

• Slings & Arrows is a brilliant comedy series about what it takes to run a Shakespeare festival. And what it takes to be creative. 
 

• The Buzzwords Of 2009: My favorite “crash blossom.” 

• The Best Films Of 2009 By Roger Ebert: You have not seen it yet, but you must watch The Hurt Locker.
  

• The Decade In Culture 

• Google Wave continues to confound most everyone. And then you see this:
 

• GE Plug Into The Smart Grid: This is the first example I encountered of Augmented Reality actually implemented. A whole creative department stood huddled around a computer, mouths open, uttering small cries of disbelief.


• YouTube, The Most Searched, The Most Viewed

• Life’s Pictures Of The Year

• MoMA’s Tim Burton Exhibition Website, and The Making Of

• The Hollywood Reporter: Top Ten Techs Tormenting Hollywood

• Johnnie Walker’s Walk: Perfectly produced, it is an astonishing blend of branding, filmmaking, performance, advertising and above all storytelling.


• Amelia: If you love dance this piece will make you reconsider what dance can be. It is ballet mashed up with urban in the matrix. Gorgeous.
 

• Brand New’s The Best And Worst Of Identities 2009: Have you seen the new AOL logo? What do you think?

• Tarsem’s The Fall: For the visual artist in you. Produced by David Fincher and Spike Jones. Incredibly rich visuals used to tell a simple, universal story. Exquisite. 
 

• Top 60 Japanese Phrases/Words Of 2009 

• Chanel No. 5’s Night Train: Staring Audrey Tautou. Watch the full length video. Even the behind the scenes is beautiful.  

• Ataque de Pánico! recently got Fede Alvarez, the director and animator, a big budget Hollywood deal, which reminds me of…


• …Alive in Joburg, which led Neill Blomkamp to direct District 9. Which in turn gave us the innovative transmedia marketing campaign for the movie. Here Henry Jenkins discusses the “Humans Only” campaign. 


• And speaking of Henry Jenkins, his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide is a must read.

• Google Zeitgeist 2009

• Digg Labs 365

• The Year In Media Errors And Corrections: The internet never forgets.

• I love dance. I watch this on tv and realize that I may be witnessing the evolution of the dance form:
 
And then I learn there is more.

• The LXD is launching an online, episodic series, with hints of graphic novel myth-making all told through dance. This is a creative endeavor that is practically custom made for me.


• The 50 Most Interesting Articles In Wikipedia

• The Best Films Of The Decade By AV Club

• UNESCO and Google partner to deliver virtual access to World Heritage sites.
 

• The Noughtie List, the 00’s in Review. A comprehensive list of lists by kottke.org. 

• Rolling Stone’s Best Of The Decade

• Top Ten China Myths Of 2009

• In The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession Chandler Burr renders the complex science of fragrances into compelling poetry.

• The Top 10 Flash Mobs Of 2009: If we are ever together in a crowded public space and music starts playing, people start dancing, there is a very big possibility I’ll be joining in.

• Time Magazine’s The Top 10 Of Everything 2009

• Vaporware 2009: Inhale the Fail: Technologies unfulfilled promises.

• The Big Picture, The Decade In News Photographs: These reiterate how challenging this decade has been. 

• The Big Picture, The Year In Pictures: What a crazy year it has been.

• The Major Works Of Counterintuitive Thought Of The Past Decade 

• Paloma Faith is the latest eclectic British singer to do the soul thing. A former magician’s assistant, she delivers a great record that feels a bit like the anti Amy Winehouse’s Rehab. Do You Want the Truth Or Something Beautiful


• National Geographic Visions of Earth 2009: Marvel at the variety of images and experiences that our planet creates.

• See Puerto Rico: Yes, I am biased, but the new tourism campaign for Puerto Rico is rich in history and beauty.  

• The Ten Best Films You Won’t See This Year 

• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson will inspire you.

• The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads 

• Top 40 iPhone Apps Of 2009 

• 50 Most Influential Bloggers Of 2009: Have you met Gary Vaynerchuk?

• Adweek Media Best Of The 2000s: Gawker is the blog of the decade?

• Jill Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight recounts a neuroscientist’s experience with a stroke and her recovery. It is an inspiring exploration of human consciousness.

• Best New Blogs Of 2009 

• 50 Ultimate Travel Experiences 

• The Best TV Series Of The 00’s

• 40 Things That Were Popular At The Beginning Of The Decade That Are Not Popular Now: Remember Pepsi Twist? Exactly.

• The Millions: A Year in Reading

And of course, the predictions:

• Trendsspotting’s 2010 Social Media Predictions In 140 Characters

• CNN Tech’s 10 Web Trends For 2010

• Trendwatching’s 10 Crucial Consumer Trends Of 2010


Lastly, 

• 100 Ways To Live A Better Life