TracyPeterson.com

Had some ninja craziness on GameSpot’s weekly show, “On The Spot”.  Thanks to our friends at Namco/Bandai who came and presented the newest Naruto fighter!  It looks great and seems to be a fan pleaser.

Let me begin by saying that I love Facebook applications. There are a TON of uses for these little doohickeys. You can make games, informational apps, hey, you can really capitalize on that original promise of Internet marketing, do you remember it? Create a Dialog between your brand, your customers and their friends. Simply pricless.

Barriers Schmarriers

What sucks is the cost of entry to publishing. The reason you get so many cheesy, crappy apps is because everyone with a computer can make one. While that is great for democracy, it’s not great for capitalism. With a larger cost to entry, such as an API fee or a license for the private keys used on the back end of the app, we could circumvent the chumps who think that making an application just to post a company logo on a customer’s page is relevant.

What An API License Would Buy The Rest Of Us

• The cost would drive away most dabblers who only half complete their idea before beginning coding.
• Developers would have more incentive to stick to the Facebook guidelines for developers, in fear that their app, paid for or not, would be banned and they could lose their license fees.
• Any idea that does not seem likely to have a profitability path would immediately be tabled.
• If the fee were a subscription, apps that didn’t take (users thought they sucked and didn’t join them) would simply disappear.

Democracy? More like Communism, Hippie.
So, in short, today’s idea is this: Facebook should charge a nominal fee for the right to use their application API or to get the private key needed to self publish. While this might annoy some of the college kids writing apps that suck, there are a lot more apps that would come from paid developers, who know what they are doing. No offense, hyper talented students, you are 1 in 100000 at least, remember that many of the apps are developed by people whom some chimps eclipse.

Democracy is about choice and right now, no developer is forced to make a choice based on the feedback seen from their users. That makes it far closer to communism, except a communism where resources aren’t scarce and instead of scarcity we have abundance, of crap. The lowest quality crap available. If there wasn’t so much noise, which an API fee could fix, the advertisers might actually be able to take advantage of this Web 2.0 miracle.

When I was a first time voter, there was a new campaign focused on the youth voters and that spoke to me directly. I had already been enlisted in the Army, so I knew the value of my vote, but finally, I felt like I mattered. My voice was important. This is a message that doesn’t get out to the youth of America often enough.

I was asked by an acquaintance to join them to Iowa where we witnessed history being made with the success of Obama’s campaign. We created a couple videos of our adventures for the rock the caucus website. Check them out!

The Day Before the Caucus

The Morning of the Caucus

Someone up there loves me, this I know is true, because people as talented as these guys know my heart true enough to really entertain me. It doesn’t flow super fast but what it does do is really good. I want to wish a merry xmas to all who watch this video and can relate to its story.

Note: This is not my work, I wish it were!

I went out to Bondage A Go Go for the first time in almost a year. I used to love that place and now I love to drop in to see how it hasn’t changed a bit in over 10 years. Nicely done, George. Well, there wasn’t an event planned for last wednesday so they grabbed their instruments and threw down some awesome covers of classic punk songs. I don’t know the name of this one, but I’ll post it as soon as I do.

A few weeks ago Rachel and I went to Disneyland to enjoy the last days of summer in CA and enjoy some childhood dreams again. I really respect and admire Walt Disney, his potentially controversial views on society aside, for being a visionary with a powerful enough will to bring his own dreams and may others’ into the world. It’s hard not to be a happy child again while walking around Disneyland.

The best part is seeing other kids, perhaps not as old as you are, experiencing Disneyland for the first time. It is hard for me to imagine that this whole place was designed and built in the 1950’s by an extremely conservative media mogul. It strikes me that no matter what your political stance is, a creative mind shares a common goal with all other creators in that you desire to initiate an emotional bond between your work and the one experiencing it. Even though Disney was a believer in a near fascist social science that was fashionable at the time which he designed several Disney projects around, he built Disneyland on the foundation of dreams. He proved that they are not so insubstantial after all.

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Run rabbit run. Dig that hole, get the sun.

We went up to the top of Marin Headlands with Mike and he was stoked on the natural beauty of the place. He sounds pretty tripped out by what he saw but I assure you he was stone cold sober. Take a look. Amazing view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the incoming incredible San Francisco fog.

I was recently contacted by a Montreal based company called StandoutJobs. We met over the phone and talked video and how to help companies manage their recruiting brands using media and the Internet. I thought that seemed pretty smart and that I’d like to help them, with video of course. The following week, they invited me to come shoot the TechCrunch August Venture Capital party. The idea was to interview prominent members of the silicon valley business community and get them to tell the craziest stories of hiring or being hired and use that information to back up the value statement of StandoutJobs. We got both some Silicon Valley only kind of stories as well as some great common sense commentary from some of the tech/web media industry’s best and brightest.

I’m still doing my best to prove that video, engaging content will ALWAYS be better to promote your brand than just some text on a page.

Stanford always struck me as a stuffy place, can’t say why, I guess it comes from some rivalry from when I worked at UCSF. This trip to their campus and the car show really changed my mind about the place and I had a blast meeting all the amazing car enthusiasts and seeing their prize carriages.

If you can make it to 2008, I assure you it is worth the trip. Get down there and check it out.

This one is a little long, granted, but, if you wait till near the end, you will be rewarded with a demonstration of one of the greatest cars ever built, the Citroen, which can raise, lower and has headlights that follow the turn of the wheel. Super sweet.

This year, E3 was limited to media and game companies only. Even the media and game companies were spared only a few badges each and the fanboys were left out in the cold. On one hand, I think this makes the show more pure and helps to provide the show that the companies and media groups paid for. On the other, I think it was sad to miss the enthusiasm of the hardcore fans.

I got to go in the capacity of videographer (shoot, edit, post) for their online video group. They were a ton of fun to work with and I learned a lot, mostly about how much I enjoy this work. Individually I posted more videos in three days than I normally do in a couple of months and as a whole we posted an insane amount of video. The pace was simply insane. There were some good travel stories, most of which I am obligated by the eternal edict of “what goes stays” but if you ask me sometime I might share. One of them has to do with a very inebriated Chyna of WWE fame and Ron Jeremy.

Since I was kind of doing the One Man Band thing while a part of a larger team, I did many different roles. As to the final product of my work, there are a couple different categories: Shoot/Edit, Shoot only, Edit only.

Shoot and Edit

Sony PSP 200 Announcement

Shoot Only

Insecticide Interview

Fury Interview 1

Fury Interview 2

Edit Only

Tour of the Blizzard Suite (Blizzard makes World of Warcraft and Starcraft)

Discussing Little Big Planet, by Sony

Ratchet and Clank by Sony