Do-it-yourself media

Yes, I am seriously committed to exploring the possibilities of do-it-yourself media.

Yes, I believe that digital tools and delivery channels offer powerful low-cost content generation and distribution.

Yes, conversational entertainment will boom when projects 'bundle' components to provide elements of the entire experience on a wide variety of different platforms. The strongly branded show may be essentially a videoblog, or is it a Flickr stream, supported perhaps by clips on GoogleVideo? Is it maybe a podcast, with the text later re-purposed as an eBook? Download the poster, buy the teeshirt via CaféPress.

I believe DIY media will thrive on hybridization. And if the above imaginings only include a single physical component (the tee-shirt) I don't think such projects will be limited to digital and virtual manifestations.

On the contrary, I think there could be wonderfully 'live' extensions of a conversational entertainment project.

How many men of a much earlier generation associated the pleasures of smoking with the smile of the sexy cigarette girl in their favourite nightclub? Now fast-forward to tomorrow...

She's into do-it-yourself media... She drops into the places where the in-crowd hangs out (although they're probably imposing a 'no smoking' policy)... She smiles at you...

You're hooked. But those are not packets of Marlboro in the tray she carries... Her latest hybridized effort at conversational entertainment has one of its iterations as a file on the USB drives she's selling...

Far fetched? I think not.