The New York Times reports today on a Brooklyn entertainer named Ze Frank who used SmartMobs consisting of blog subscribers to work together and write as script for an online video that he would faithfully execute the script no matter how absurb and post the video on his site.
...."With help from a programmer friend, he set up the comedy-writing equivalent of a Wikipedia page — an online site where anyone could write a joke and edit or even delete the jokes of others — and told his viewing public that if they were so brilliant, they could collaborate to write a script for his show. If they did so, Mr. Frank promised, he would faithfully execute it, no matter how absurd, and post the resulting video on his site.
...."All the feedback started Mr. Frank thinking, and he decided to turn his show over to his viewers. He offered them no guidance, and promised to perform their script faithfully, so long as it was under three minutes long, and required no nudity."
....." over the course of a week, a script emerged. Some 220 or so writers made more than 2,000 revisions to what turned out to be a 4-minute-40-second comedy script touching on the World Cup, gay marriage and NASA. It also included, perhaps inevitably, some good old-fashioned bathroom humor".
...."Mr. Frank's audience seemed pleased with the result. Within an hour of his posting the show, he had more than a hundred comments on the site, most of them complimentary. The show has been viewed 21,000 times."
Hah! The Mr Frank's show as viewed 21,000 times - that's probably more than the top rated YouTube Video
