Yancey rounded up our SXSW appearances over at the Kickstarter blog, but I thought I should mention it here...

On Saturday night, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and SoundCloud welcome you to F*CK YEAH! SXSW, a party with music/visuals by Eclectic Method sponsored by the nice folks at ThePlanet. It's at Emo's on Saturday night, from 6:30pm until late.

On Sunday 11am, I'm doing a solo talk about a mish-mash of my interests, focused around metagames — both games about games, and games built on games. Quite possibly the only talk at SXSW to mention Mechanical Turk, Desert Bus, Barack Obama, VVVVVV, and Metafilter.

Also in amazing panels, Kickstarter's own Perry Chen (Monday w/Robin Sloan), Yancey Strickler (Wednesday w/Allison Weiss), and Fred Benenson. You should go to every one. More details here.

See you in Austin!

I'm a huge fan of both indie comics and indie journalism, so I was thrilled to see Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist Ted Rall start a Kickstarter project last month to fund his return to Afghanistan. I may not always agree with his politics, but I've found his long-form foreign reporting to be unique and thought-provoking.

He graciously agreed to an interview over Skype, which we posted late last week as the second episode of the Kickstarter Podcast. I thought it came out well, though I clearly still need to work on my audio mixing skillz (sounds better on headphones!) and perfecting my NPR voice.

Listen/subscribe on iTunes or you can stream and download the MP3.

• Kickstarter Podcast #2 - Interview with Ted Rall

Rall's a controversial figure, especially reviled among political conservatives, even though he's leveled some of his toughest criticisms at the Obama administration. While most attention's focused on his syndicated cartoons, he's also written six non-fiction books, half of those focused on his travels across the 'Stans -- Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In 2002, he published To Afghanistan and Back, a mix of written dispatches, cartoons, and a graphic novella documenting his experiences on the ground during the U.S. invasion after 9/11.

All of Ted Rall's previous trips were funded by news organizations, but with budgets for foreign correspondents slashed, he's turned to his fans to fund his return trip. We talk about the changing media landscape, his previous books, and what it's like being a NYC cartoonist in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

The more things change...

"... Anyone who wants to can see a list of all the events you are planning on attending? It's like a stalker's delight."

— Comment about Upcoming.org from September 23, 2003, six days after launch

"It's bad enough we're using real names and telling people where we've been. Now it's like prepping someone for the best times to try robbing your apartment."

— Comment from June 2005

Further back, from the Montreal Gazette, September 1983...

From 1977, don't list your weddings or funerals in the paper, unless you want to get robbed...

While digging through some books, I stumbled on this DEN.net press packet from November 1999, six months before the notorious video startup's collapse.

The packet's a nice little time capsule of their dot-com excess, with promo materials, a breathless press release about their relaunch ("Youth Culture Network Creates Groundbreaking Content That Revolutionizes The Interactive Entertainment Experience"), and copies of articles from the New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.

They took the site down for three full days to launch their redesign, something you don't see often these days. "DEN is here and we're changing the face of entertainment for Gen Y audiences, bringing this age group an interactive experience unlike anything they've known," said then-CEO, Jim Ritts. (He was ousted three months later after their IPO was shelved.)

For me, the highlight is an included copy of "The 4th Annual P.O.V. 100 Best Web Sites," where they appeared at #4. Published by the short-lived P.O.V. magazine, which itself shuttered a month before DEN declared bankruptcy, it's a nice artifact of the era.

All the usual suspects are there — Broadcast.com, hot off their $5.7B acquisition by Yahoo!, Third Voice, and Six Degrees, alongside webzines like Feed, Word, and Brunching Shuttlecocks and proto-blogs like Cardhouse, Obscure Store, and Jeffrey Zeldman Presents. Debuting on the list at #93, a new search engine named Google that "really works, scouring billions of links for junk-free matches — and it does so quickly." #100 is Joshua Schachter's Memepool, "an ever-expanding set of links from smart folks who exist only in cyberspace."

I was going to scan it in, but managed to find a PDF created by the author himself. With his permission, I've mirrored it locally:

Surprisingly, DEN.net is still online, an archive of some old videos and documents, with the intriguing tagline "We're back..." But since it's stayed exactly the same since August 2007, I wouldn't hold my breath for a relaunch.

Avast, ye scurvy dogs! The Oscar nominees were announced yesterday, which means it's time again to revisit the eternal war between the MPAA and Internet movie pirates.

I've updated my spreadsheet with all the current available data, eight years of data tracking the online distribution of every Oscar-nominated film since 2003. I've added this year's 34 nominated films to the list, a total of 245 films. (Read about my methodology at the end of the entry.)

View or download all the data below, including a second sheet with some interesting aggregate statistics. As always, I'll keep it updated until the Oscar broadcast. (And let me know if you find any mistakes.)

View full-size on Google Spreadsheets.

Download: Excel (with formulas) or CSV

Findings

Since 2003, I've tracked the online distribution of Oscar screeners, and every year, the piracy scene manages to release nearly every film by nomination day. Last year, all but three films were leaked in DVD quality by nomination day.

The tide may be turning. There's still a month out before the Academy Awards, but so far, fewer Oscar screeners leaked online this year — only 14 out of 34 nominated films, the lowest percentage ever. And they're taking twice as long to leak — a median 21 days after theatrical release, up from 11 days the previous year.

It's not limited to screeners, either. Camcorder and telesync releases dropped this year. Even the percentage of retail DVD rips has dropped, though this will likely shift before the broadcast. In the chart below, you can see the percentage of films that were released in each format. (For example, 21% of this year's films had a cam release and 44% had a retail DVD leak.)

And the R5 DVD releases that dominated previous year's Oscars is now mostly dead. I'm guessing the studios are moving away from the early distribution of R5 DVDs entirely.

But why the shift this year? Are studios doing a better job protecting screeners and intimidating Academy members? Or was this year's crop of films too boring for pirates to bother with? I can't tell if this is a scene-wide trend or localized to the Oscars only. If you have access to historical data tracking scene releases, get in touch.

And if you have any theories or inside information, leave a comment.

Other fun facts:

• Academy members received screeners for 30 of the 34 nominated films.
• The Avatar screener was the last to be received by Academy members (Ken Rudolph received his on January 15). Amazingly, it hasn't leaked online yet. February 4: It leaked today.
• The Hurt Locker and The Young Victoria were both leaked online in DVD format over six months before their theatrical release.
• As far as I can tell, The Secret of Kells is the first film since I started tracking to be nominated without a U.S. theatrical release. It's currently slated to come out in March.

Methodology

As usual, I included the feature films in every category except documentary and foreign films (even makeup and costume design). I used Yahoo! Movies for US release dates, always using the first available date, even if it was a limited release. Cam, telesync, R5, and screener leak dates were taken from VCD Quality. I used the first leak date, with the exception of unviewable or incomplete nuked releases. Finally, the official screener dates came from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who lists the date he receives every screener on his personal homepage. Thanks again, Ken!

For previous years, see 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 (part 1 and part 2), and 2009.

While digging through Usenet, I stumbled on these three unidentified tracks that pick apart three of the Beatles' original multitrack masters, isolating and highlighting pieces from "She's Leaving Home," "A Day in the Life," and "Come Together." It's an astounding, and very listenable, glimpse into their recording process.

• Multitrack Analysis of She's Leaving Home
• Multitrack Analysis of A Day In the Life
• Multitrack Analysis of Come Together

Unfortunately, I don't have any information about the source. In the "Come Together" one, they mention one of the narrators is named "Steve." Beyond that, I haven't had any luck finding where they came from. Can anyone identify them? I'd love, love, love to hear more.

Update: It's a BBC Radio 6 program called Record Producers: The Extended Cut, hosted by Richard Allinson and Steve Levine, that aired last month. Unfortunately, the original BBC broadcast is no longer available on their site.

I'm happy to announce that Kind of Bloop is now officially on sale to everyone, $5 for high-quality digital downloads in MP3 or FLAC format. Buy it now with Amazon Payments.

Working with these guys was an absolute dream. Their creativity and dedication transcends the original concept, creating something that pays tribute to Miles' seminal work while pushing the boundaries of the genre.

I know there are jazz purists out there that hate the idea of anyone interpreting a jazz masterpiece in this way, but to them, I'd only ask that you listen to it first before making a judgment. Virt responded to one naysayer in the comments on my original post:

Way I see it, chiptunes can either be a punishingly difficult artistic medium we happened to grow up with, or a tired retro fashion statement. Our goal was to stick to the former, pushing the limitations hard, building on our capacity for expression using the most basic sounds. There could be no better challenge, Andy thought, than one of the most expressive jazz albums of all time, one that has inspired us all.

So, you see, I'm not the least bit embarrassed by our work. In fact, I think you might be short-changing "the masters of jazz," who I believe would be grinning ear to ear right now. They were ALL ABOUT mastering unusual techniques and expressing within a framework. That's the whole point of Kind of Blue. The parallels to our own medium were dead obvious, and I got the same rush of perverse glee that the original ensemble must have felt 50 years ago, locking myself in a cell and playing between the metal bars.

I hope, if you still can't enjoy the sound of the album itself, you might at least be less quick to dismiss it, given this perspective. It's not a parade, it's a love letter in our own weird handwriting.

So, thanks for listening. (Oh, and bonus points to anyone who can identify all the quotes and references in the album.)

Last year, to commemorate the release of Firefox 3.0, I posted a heavily-annotated copy of Code Rush — the commercially-unavailable documentary from 2000 about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the beginning of the Mozilla project. Shortly afterwards, I interviewed Code Rush director David Winton about the film, who asked that I take the video offline while he decided what to do with it. Last week, he made a decision.

I'm happy to say that Code Rush is now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Winton and his colleague John Koten set up a dedicated homepage for the film, with links to stream or download the film in various formats.

They're encouraging everyone to use the documentary in new ways, remixing or reusing the footage for any non-commercial use. In particular, I'd imagine the Mozilla Foundation should be very happy that they can finally use this historic footage of their origins.

Thanks to the new license, I'm able to put my annotated version of the film back up on Viddler. I've embedded it below.

Best of all, David Winton's announced that they're planning on digitizing the original interview footage and making them available. "We are still working to get our hands on a digital Beta deck to digitize the original dailies, but hope to get up and running in a couple months." If you can help them out, get in touch.

Update (August 6): I just discovered that unreleased footage from the documentary is being added to Archive.org.

Some news: I'm proud to announce that I've taken the CTO role at Kickstarter, the Brooklyn-based crowdfunding startup I've mentioned here before. Yay!

I've been on the board for the last 10 months, helping find the development team and providing some guidance on tech, design, and community issues. And in the last year, watching the site evolve was an amazing experience, from an idea to a website with the potential to change the way things are made.

Since our launch ten weeks ago, over $250,000 has been pledged to make everything from books, magazines, albums (and album reissues), plays, films, art projects, zombie iPhone apps, and more. (Not to mention, my own Kind of Bloop album.) And keep in mind, the site's still invite-only!

Getting people to give you money is tricky, but I think we've hit on a formula for success:

• All-or-nothing. Projects are only successful if they reach the fundraising goal by the deadline, otherwise nobody pays. This limits risk for both backers and project creators, who don't have to worry about committing money and time to a failed project.
• Rewards. We strongly emphasize the importance of crafting good rewards, which makes Kickstarter more like commerce than altruism. We support multiple tiers of rewards from $1 to $10,000, limits for each, and tools for creators to contact each tier group independently.
• Publishing. A simple and powerful reward is access to exclusive updates during a project's funding and development, creating a powerful connection between the audience and project. As a result, we offer publishing tools for public or private updates, including hosted media and update notifications.

These mechanisms and constraints allow Kickstarter to not just fund projects, but test ideas, engage with an audience, and pre-sell your work without risk.

Earlier this month, I spoke at the Guardian Activate Summit in London about the power of play and applying game mechanics to non-games — difficult problems like environmental change, political activism, and fundraising. Kickstarter turns fundraising into a social game, where people have to work together within a time limit to reach a common goal. Already, we're seeing that projects develop their own viral momentum... Once a project hits 25% of its goal, success is almost guaranteed. (94% of projects that hit that mark eventually hit their goal.)

I look forward to pushing Kickstarter further in that direction, and build a platform flexible enough to do more than help artists raise money for themselves. I'd love to see more people use Kickstarter for commissioned works like Kind of Bloop, collecting the money to pay someone to make or do something you want to exist. Or anywhere you need to gauge market demand, like throwing parties without the risk of losing your shirt in ticket sales.

Soon, we'll be opening the site up to anyone who wants to make a project — and that's when things get really interesting. In the meantime, you can get an invite from an existing member, or sign up to get notified when Kickstarter opens to the public.

So I had this silly idea to isolate the backgrounds from famous Internet memes, removing all the subjects from every photo or video. I'm pretty happy with the results.

Like Jon Haddock's porn sans people, these photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something's amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history.

Can you name all 22 23? (Click any image for the answer.)