So pleased to have some good news to report.  This is juicy and exciting and  is certainly getting very close to what us transmedia geeks have been squawking about.

  http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/web-series-tied-to-blade-runner-is-in-the-works/

It all started, innocently enough, the other day (6/4/09) in the NYT.  And was picked up by SciFi Wire and the Trades the next day.  Ridley and Tony’s company (Scott Free), including Ridley’s son, Luke, are partnering with a new company called Ag8 to create a web series called Purefold.  But wait, it gets better.  The series will be distributed under a Creative Commons license.  This is where the transmedia rubber hits the road.

For those of you who haven’t followed the Creative Commons issues, see Larry Lessig’s blog that is linked to from this blog.  This is all about who gets to contribute content to the content.  Rather than clamp down on the sanctity of their content (much as Warner Bros. famously did to a teenage Harry Potter fan site writer, as recounted in Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture), the Purefold team are saying that their content is not set in stone; that in fact altering the content is expected, intrinsic and desirable.

The creators of the series are maintaining their ownership of the material- just not it in the traditional way narrative content has been owned in the past.  They’re saying that, like open source software, e.g. Linux or the Apache server, users, i.e. “the audience” will be able to add content, write stories, characters etc. to fill out the world that is being built by this project.

So while it’s nice to see “A” talent jumping in with progressive content delivered on the transmedia paradigm, the visionary piece of it is the open license.

According to the report, “Purefold will harvest story input from its viewers, in conjunction with the social media site FriendFeed. 

The Ag8 site has a perfectly concise description of what this thing is:

http://www.ag8.com/purefold

Right.  So they’re using the cultural trope that is BladeRunner, getting Ridley & Co. to legitimize it by participating (no skin off their butts…) and then avoiding any sticky old-school rights issues by not actually using any protected content from the film or the underlying Phil Dick novel.  Very shrewd.

Oh, and they’re turning the name of Ridley & Tony’s company around to “Free Scott,” an appropriately and easily ironic twist that conjures up just the right jab at the tradition of protected content.  This project is “freeing the Scotts” and transforming the Scotts you used to have to pay for into Scotts that you can get for Free.  OK, yeah, I get it.

On the other side of this deal is the company Ag8, based on London.  As you can see from their site, they are very definitely a new order of content company, squarely positioning themselves in the transmedia space.  Co-founder Tom Himpe comes out of the branding world, and I think it is safe to say that his is the kind of mindset that is going to be required to strategize the future of monetizing the Net.  That gets into a whole separate blogpost, but if you stop to think about it, the old school approach to content was: “I’m a creator, not a distributor, not a marketer.  You go sell what I make.”  Today, with everything compressed together in this ontological transmedia bouillabaisse, content is branding is marketing.  Creator is marketer. 

I know, I know, it’s another blogpost, but think about it:  Dan Pink, in his exhortations for a whole new (right-brained) mind, also admonishes us that he is really advocating for a new integration of left brain with right brain.  Ag8 is this idea mad manifest, and it’s springing forward from this generation of storytellers in a very definitive way.  Yes, I can come up with a story, but I can also design it to a developing market, using developing technology.

And finally, here’s some info on the Creative Commons license that this is being created under.  Creative Commons is the non-profit sponsor/promulgator of a broader set of ways to view and work with copyrighted and copyrightable material (co-founded by the aforementioned Larry Lessig…) .  Click on their logo:

The specific flavor of license being used for the Purefold project allows users to “remix” the content as long at they attribute their work to the Purefold project. 

Quite a head-full of stuff here.  Next step will be to follow the project and see how successful it is at drawing viewership, scratch that, users.  ‘Cause this is about interaction and contribution.  And based on that, can the creators make any money at this?  It’s all well and good to talk about branding, and branded content, but let’s see if Mr Himpe and his team are able to work their magic here to good result, attracting paying brands to prey on the madly interacting Bladerunner freaks in their new playground.  Hmmm: will they have a booth at Comic-Con?.  Stay tuned.