It's a new year, and the C3 team is back on the ground to start off 2008 with several new changes. You may have seen that the site was down for some of the holiday break, as we were in the process of changing server space and hopefully eliminating some of the load time problems readers have informed us about in the past few months.
Our team is hard at work on its YouTube and viral media projects for what MIT calls the "Independent Activities Period," or IAP, in which students at the Institute spend time working on independent projects, taking short classes, and partaking in other projects outside of the normal class schedule, which resumes at the beginning of February. In the meantime, I wanted to point out to the blog readers a few interesting stories and publications from and about the Consortium regarding the digital race, FoE2, soap operas, and qualitative research.
First, at the end of December, I collaborated with Steve Cody of Peppercom for an article that appeared in The Christian Science Monitor. The article has also appeared in syndication with several other papers, including The Tri-City Herald, The Bellingham Herald, The News & Observer, The Island Packet, The Sacramento Bee, The Fresno Bee, The Anchorage Daily News, and The Press of Atlantic City. Thanks to Harold Maass of The Week for naming the article, entitled "What Businesses Learned in 2007 About the Digital Race," atop his "Best Columns of the Day" list for last Friday.
Meanwhile, Chris Dahlen has a new column related to Futures of Entertainment 2 up on GameSetWatch, dealing particularly with toys and games.
I'm teaching a class this spring on soap operas here at MIT. See recent articles on the class from Amy Mistretta at Soaps.com and Linda Marshall-Smith at Soapdom, and thanks also for the notes about the class on Snark Weighs In and We Love Soaps.
Also, thanks to the folks at Procter & Gamble Productions for mentioning my thesis work recently on PGP Classic Soaps. And thanks to Tristan Rogers for recommending his MySpace readers look at my thesis. Tristan is quite eloquent about the current state and future of soaps. Trsitan's alter ego, Robert Scorpio, has been one of the most loved characters in General Hospital history.
C3's Research Manager Joshua Green is also co-teaching a course during the IAP period with C3 Consulting Researcher Grant McCracken, on qualitative research methods. For more information, see Grant's post on the class from back in November.
Hey, Sam Ford. Have you noticed that the scabs are taking over Y&R? Maria Arena Bell and Josh Griffith.
Stay tuned with Soap Opera Network "Directors and Writers Thread".
Hey Jill. Thanks for stopping by! Regular C3 reader and fellow soaps fan Andrew Metzler had written to tell me about the interesting interim Y&R writing team. Andrew is writing a piece for our upcoming collection on soaps about the writer's strike, and he had actually seen some of the episodes by Griffith and Bell. I had also seen something about it on Snark Weighs In.
What do you think about it?
I'm going to check out the SON thread. Thanks for the heads up!