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Ze Frank

Ze Frank

http://www.zefrank.com/

Ze has been exploring online collaborative creativity for several years. It began in March 2001 when he sent an online invitation to his birthday party, asking people to send it on to others. Within days it had been viewed thousands of times. How to Dance Properly.

In 2006 Ze became (one of) the first vloggers, uploading an episode of The Show every day for a year. Many more familiar vloggers regard him as their inspiration: see A Brief History of Ze Frank.

One episode featured an audio file sent as a MySpace message, that Ze and his audience turned into a series of remixes: read the story here http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/whipass/ . The original audio file is track 28 on https://soundcloud.com/zefrank/sets/whipass_remixes, where you can also hear the remixes.

He is now president of Buzzfeed Motion Pictures. Its products receive billions of views a year.

He has delivered a number of TED talks and other presentations on what is happening with online media / consumption / creativity:









How is Ze Frank relevant to our topic of Media in the Online Age?

His first TED talk discusses what people do when online. Does what he described there and what you did when let loose on his site demonstrate that we do distract / entertain ourselves with online activities when we are meant to be working and in our leisure time? That those online activities do not come from the traditional media institutions? That maybe some of us do it a lot? That we maybe do this sort of stuff when previously we may have been engaging with mass media in traditional ways?

How do his collaborative online activities (which ones) support Henry Jenkins's ideas about participatory culture?

How do they support David Gauntlett's ideas about creativity in the online age?

How do they support Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory if we think about what people do when they are online and where we find our entertainment? Ze Frank's participating audience is just a niche, but does all the activity in all such creative niches (all those fandoms, all those tribute videos on YouTube...) in the long tail of online activity add up to as much as the tall head of online activity consumption of mass media products?

And perhaps most importantly - VLOGGING. A phenomenon of the online age. Coinciding with the emergence of social media / video hosting sites, the availability of low-cost videoing technologies has enabled a form of media that could not have existed before. Henry Jenkins discusses people's creation of low-cost printed media products in the past, but there was no way they could reach such large audiences as today's vloggers. Ze was a pioneer with The Show.

... See vlogging post ...


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