"No-one from the label is saying, look man, we like what you do, but could you include some trumpets. Or how about some dancing girls?"

Right, so there's this guy, TayZonday, and he put his song up on YouTube and it's called Black Rain and it makes it to the front page, and millions of people are watching it. And tho it's really simple the melody is quite catchy and this guy has a real deep voice like old school soul. And now each of his songs are getting millions of views and four stars ratings, and he doesn't just sing for free on YouTube he also lets you download MP3s of his work for free, and download Acapellas and remix his work, and re-record his work and do all the sorts of things creative people like to have done with their work.

And he's famous. And he has an audience - 11 million views of one his songs on the tube . And he's in charge of his destiny as a musician.

 The US Department of Justice has declared themselves against Network Neutrality. The background of this issue is  that ISPs and internet providers earn £15 and upwards a month for providing access to the Internet. But unlike similar subscription services such as Sky Movies and Virgin cable, they don't pay for the content on the Internet. They don't even cover the costs of your phone line. They just provide the means for you to get more data down your phone line than you normally would.

That said, no one really minds, they do a job that needs doing and they make up for the crummy deal with dependable access and decent telephone support (ahem). 

However, strangely, these telecoms companies, aren't satisified with the deal, and have decided that in future the costs of providing this more-data-down-your-phone-line-than-before service to customers is going to go up so much that they're going to need to start charging content producers to send data down that phone line. ie YouTube, the BBC and even you and me. 

Vito Rocco's Goodbye Cruel World, produced by the UK arm of Partizan (music video whizzes and creators of The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), has won 60% of the vote in the MyMoviesMashup contest. Rocco will go on to direct his feature Faintheart with a £1m budget and guaranteed distribution. While not strictly an amateur, as MySpace sister paper The Times describes him, it's a cracking short film. I won't forgive myself for not getting an interview with Oscar and Palme D'Or winner Andrea Arnold while editing Shooting People's Wideshot magazine, but James did, thankfully, interview Rocco after I saw this film - supported by Film London and Screen East - win the Kodak Shorts audience award in 2003.

This just in from David at the NPA - funding for NPA membership OR training. If it wasn't for attending their famed producer training I wouldn't have incorporated Netribution. If only I'd stayed to the end of the course, I might have not actually focussed on making features! Well recommended:

The Women in Digital Entertainment (WiDE) project and the Business and Digital Media Training Initiative (BDMTI) are joint funded by the European Social Fund and the University College for the Creative Arts and are designed to support people in the digital media industry and those wishing to enter the industry.

Beneficiaries of the projects are able to access up to £150 from an external training fund which could cover the cost of NPA membership or an NPA training course. For further information please look at the websites www.wide.ucreative.ac.uk or www.bdmti.ucreative.ac.uk or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it '; document.write( '' ); document.write( addy_text66353 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //--> This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (eligibility criteria applies).

'Stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you'

Ray Bradbury

Dear Tom,

It has been a while. I forget whose turn it is, but for sake of ease I shall both ask and answer my own question - a simple one.

Where am I?

It is a device, more than a question, to uncork my tongue as I sit here, in Paris's Gare De Lyon. Life shakes its stuff around me, and I shudder inside with the weariness of one who didn't sleep before he left, who has been travelling for 12 hours and is a good half a country away from where he should be right now, and a further city of soho-istas between him and a warm, if not comfy, bed.

You missed the man with the roses.

Do you know those moments where everything seems larger than life? Where the taste of baked beans rivals haute cuisine? Where the hazy sunlight and slow summer pace make you feel so much lighter you could have lost a stone in weight. It's as if the great post production supervisor in the sky has decided to apply a luminosity filter, upped the brightness and contrast, balanced the audio.

Those moments where you stop and look at something - the light from the bottom of a glass of water painting mad Kandinsky shapes on the walls around you, the butter running molten tracks down your baked potato like volcano lava, the bird song drowning out the sound of the traffic for the moment. And if you were in a cinema you might notice the beautiful shot, or remark on the sound editing or visual effects. And in front of a computer screen going through rushes you might mark it down as 'Definitely Use' and on set even you'd quickly dive behind a camera and put a lens between you and the magical accidental unpredictable life that decided to reveal herself at that very moment.

It is so easy to forget the human stories behind the daily news headlines. BoingBoing has pointed to a couple of great films appearing this week. One from the BBC sees Rageh Omaar, who after a year of wrangling got to film freely inside Iran, and which shows a world a million miles away from the normal footage of angry people protesting. The other, more disturbing yet similarly touching series is Hometown Bagdhad, a new vodcast syndicated to Salon from some Iraqi filmmakers and Chat the Planet. Both focus on indefatigably human and likable people, and watching them online really hammered home that it's only geography and fate that stops these people from being next door neighbors, colleagues or friends.

Hometown Iraq - The Dentist

2006 was certainly a year of trailer mashups. To quote the Misshaken Pictures' Mashifesto:

"As our collective history burrows deeper into the digital coalface we begin to see it recombined, re-imagined, re-invented and e-rased. Heirachies of media code are becoming silly putty in the hands of the majority and the global mirror increases at an unprecedented rate, a miasma of Ideas, desires and models in humming iridescent hues."

Quite. Anyway, if Christmas telly and cold turkey is getting tiring, and you haven't yet seen them, here's a few favourites..

Just before lunch yesterday I read of a report by the WWF that the number of species on the planet has reduced by 31% in the last 35 years. If the planet continues at its current pace of using natural resource, by 2050 two earths would be needed to meet current demand, with an almost inevitable consequential environmental collapse.

Then while munching away on my fried eggs on toast, I read an article by Oliver James on Affluenza, his name for the 'social virus' whereby wealth, status, appearance, success and the like are perceived as ways of finding happiness.