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Danc over at Lost Garden recently wrote a great essay about "manufactured" gaming heroes, the public faces marketing teams come up with and trot out to promote a new product.

It's a great read, not the least of which it could be applied so much more broadly:

The game media, trained to vacuum up press releases and pre-packaged interviews, never asks the probing question "What did you actually do?" or "Well, if you didn't, who did?" Marketing handlers merely selects a plausible face and media blindly crowns them as worthy creative visionaries.

Idols, even false ones, fill a uniquely human need for worship. Both gamers and journalists are desperate to adore, to celebrate, to follow the brilliant individuals that birthed our favorite games. When presented with the mechanistic, faceless truth of modern game development, we reject reality and seek something, anything that fits our preconceived notions of creative genius. A paper hero constructed of marketing materials fits the fan's need and is gladly assembled for each game launch.

But do we really need to settle? Are artificial heroes necessary? What if there were real gaming celebrities out there who are actually worthy of our veneration?

As an IT reporter, I've definitely (rarely, but definitely) run into situations where the spokesperson and particularly the customer interview never worked directly with the product.

Let that sink in: A company puts forward as a customer testimonial someone who has never, ever actually used the product.

Level upLately, I've been reading a lot more about game mechanics in media sites. They can be addictive, even with little else compelling to offer: I get very little out of FourSquare since almost none of my friends have accounts, and of even those few none actively use it.

But I still have compulsively checked in 84 times over 32 nights, earning badges like "Explorer," "Bender" and "Local." I'm not even that much of a collector personality, but I imagine this age will take much advantage of those poor souls.

But fly-by-night Web 2.0 services shouldn't be the only ones letting the games begin: As the Guardian has shown, game elements can be useful in encouraging your readers to help effectively dig through mountains of public documents.

Simon Willison, creator of the Guardian's MP expense investigation experiment, told Nieman Journalism Lab that keeping research fun and competitive let the paper offload sorting through 170,000 documents in 80 hours by a team of 20,000 volunteers.

The Guardian's tools were primarily a one-off occurrence, but badges in particular can help direct desirable user/reader behavior for the long haul. For example, if you have a

Maybe news organizations could learn a thing or two from the genteel country club: Keep the riff-raff out, a whiff of superiority in, and everyone (with a membership) gets to enjoy the greens.

Jeff Jarvis wrote an excellent post on news organizations and membership, taking to task those that were considering the "give us money and get a T-shirt" approach done so successfully by the non-profit NPR:

the membership bar has moved up. It’s not enough to let people give you money and promote you. Now you have to invite them to have a real and meaningful role in what you do, even a sense – if not a stake – of ownership and, consequently, control.
...
Note that Wikipedia is trying to figure out what value it needs to add back to its community’s product, not as a controller but as a contributing member itself. That’s part of the secret to successful networks: everyone’s a member, no one is king.

He's right, but that control means taking control on their behalf sometimes. Theories on how to deal with reader comments have varied widely over the past years, but it's widely recognized now that comments can be good, but an uncontrolled, live-and-let-die only serves trolls and isn't really good at "furthering the conversation."

Take YouTube: An infamous cesspool of ignorant commentary. But because it was free, it proved quite the quandary for other streaming video sites: Free can be quite the competitive advantage. While sites like Brightcove have tackled the enterprise market, competitors like DailyMotion seemed to be driving the market as a race to the bottom. Vimeo took a different approach.

Its front page happily proclaims their mission:

Vimeo is a respectful community of creative people who are passionate about sharing the videos they make.

They make clear who they are and who they aren't, not only with this statement but with the cheerful, quirky site design, gorgeous display and even . While there are introductory accounts, any serious users will quickly run up against their upload/download limits that push users to join up, and a lot have. But what they're really paying for isn't so much the upload capacity or even the video quality.

People are paying for the respectful community. And Vimeo knows it: Can you imagine YouTube subjecting its staff to its community the way Vimeo proudly does on its staff blog, with folksy talk and funky profile pictures? I don't think there's enough hazard pay in the world for the abuse they'd endure.

The truth of the matter is, many news organizations forums aren't much better (particularly after a Drudge link!). How valuable are the readers that sling mud back and forth, almost with disregard to the topic their commenting on? Their ad value is debatable, but their difficult to monetize at best and a worthless strain on the servers at worst. But what do they add to the community, for all the entertainment (what else could it be?) that they get?

A number of people have been openly hostile to Rupert Murdoch's talk of closing off his sites to Google's Index, as if he was not only making a bad business decision but also drowning kittens by the act of withholding News Corp. content (here's a sample). But Murdoch isn't stupid, and he hasn't always been anti-Google. As far as I can tell, a lot of the anti-Google rhetoric is simply positioning for later negotiations, either with Bing or Google later on (Paul Carr has a good piece on Murdoch's scheming). But beyond that, Murdoch's made smart moves towards openness when he thinks they'll benefit his empire: You can currently get almost any Wall Street Article free by simply Googling the title, or even by clicking through on a Digg link, both of which are special arrangements. If he really was as curmudgeonly as he's made himself out to be, neither of these special arrangements would exist.

And there is evidence that people will pay for the right community and content. Something Awful, for one. When News Corp. launches its paywall, I will be shocked if the only asset users get is the text content: They're also getting access to a community of moderated commenters (Something Awful has shown they don't even have to be classy commenters, so those Drudge trolls might yet have a home), convenience, and quite possibly more as the News Corp. empire finalizes its plans.

Twitter is a very, very small part of most stories that mention it, yet media outlets seem to be climbing over each other to promote it.

"On these issues, I will not be muzzled, I will speak up and speak loudly against this risky plan," Wilson said in a YouTube video released Thursday evening. "The supporters of the government takeover of health care and the liberals who want to give health care to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan."

The congressman disbursed the video via Twitter and asked his followers to "please watch and pass on."

Fortunately, Twitter (or rather, the url shrinking service Bit.ly) lets us see roughly how many people actually clicked that link, simply by adding a '+' sign to the URL in Wilson's tweet. That takes us here, where we see the link has received 3,402 clicks, slightly less than 3,000 from the original URL, as of the time of this writing.

Not bad, but nothing compared to the 50,847 views the actual YouTube video is registering, and it's nowhere near the top of the YouTube search for "Joe Wilson".

So Twitter is sending slightly less than 6% of the traffic towards Wilson's response video, but gets prime play. What about the e-mail blasts Wilson's surely sent out? The instant messaging networks that people have used to pass it along? The Google that the kids are using to by pass media filters and get information directly from primary actors, just like Wilson is doing?

Is Twitter useful, cool and indicative of the future of communication? Probably. But it has almost nothing to do with Wilson's response. It's a medium, and plugging it isn't much better than writing "the congressman disbursed the video via Outlook Express and Yahoo! Mail, and asked his supporters to AOL Instant Message it out to their AOL IM Buddy Lists."

Not hating, just asking to keep things in perspective.

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