Who's been linking to our stuff?
1 Horribly good internet plot to kill off TV
2 At home with the Doggs
3 Murdoch to launch Indian TV stations
4 Nancy banks-Smith on last night's TV
5 Watch Nike's Liverpool v Arsenal 1989 title decider ad
Photo by pinknblack73 on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Buffy creator Joss Whedon, for starters. He linked to the piece by the Observer's David Smith explaining Whedon's new project Doctor Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, which has become something of an internet summer sensation by launching a superhero for the online age. We have the Hollywood writers' strike to thank for Whedon's inspired project.
It is a TV show that has never been shown on TV, an internet video that looks nothing like an internet video. It was made for the fun of it, not for ratings or profit, and put on the web in the hope that someone would notice. The fact that they did, in their millions, has delivered a shock to the Hollywood system, raising the spectre of writers, directors and actors bypassing major producers and selling directly to audiences online.
'I was told several times that it's impossible,' Whedon, speaking from Los Angeles, told The Observer. 'But you can to an extent write your own rules. I realised there was nothing I wanted to do more, and the only person going to finance something as strange as this was me.'
Republican-inclined US political blog Politico.com linked to last week's piece (actually the piece is from April, which makes this even more curious) on Snoop Dogg's reality TV show. Politico's Ben Smith was clearly having a more relaxed moment as part of his 'frivilous Sunday reading' list. He picked up on Snoop's more extravagant claims that Barack Obama took funding from the KKK: "We all know all presidents lie to get into fucking office. That's they job."
Our mystical friend Jeff Rense again picked up on several of our stories, sending a chunk of traffic through to our piece on Rupert Murdoch expanding into Indian TV, with a $100m investment in six new regional channels.
None other than the veritable Richard Dawkins sent a wave of traffic to Nancy Banks-Smiths' column on Monday night's TV, which opened with the very 'fiery-eyed Atheist' Richard Dawkins introducing the Genius of Charles Darwin.
He showed us Darwin's piano and marked out the history of life on the keyboard.... "The whole of human history would occupy a space of less than half a piano string right at the top of the keyboard."
Man's only enemy are those bugs that took up so much of Darwin's keyboard. In Africa Dawkins met the evocatively named Salome, a middle-aged prostitute, who has evolved an extraordinary resistance to the Aids virus, an immunity she should be able to pass on to her children. He asked her how she accounted for this. Salome said God had been good to her. That must have really got up Dawkins' nose.And Nike's viral marketing campaign continues apace under the 'Become Legends' banner.
101 Great Goals rather liked our preview of the ad for the new Arsenal away kit, which shows three players (Paul Merson, Alan Smith and Michael Thomas) discussing the Liverpool v Arsenal 1989 decider.
Arsenal, BarackObama, CharesDarwin, DrHorible, Jeffense, JossWhedon, Nike, Politico.com, RichardDawkins, RupertMurdoch, SnoopDogg
