Google and Amazon: The next Media Empire?

TWO GUYS named Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson created a short Flash film last year which has been making people raise eyebrows, or laugh, or criticize it, or write tons of babbling in the blogosphere.

Before you fall off your chair after seeing me, the flash-hater mentioning Flash content in a positive way, let me remind you where I stand. I think that flash is nice but in my opinion only when used to deliver short movies, games, and and other downloadable interactive content - not when used to replace light html to design web pages or present text information. Period.

Back to the film, it has made people speculate about the future of the interweb and how it will affect - or not - both the online and off-line media. Some discovered it early, others discovered it just last month, and I have probably discovered it last, today.

Dubbed "EPIC 2014", dated in 2014 and described as "a future history of the media", it can be serious, controversial, parody, or boring, all depending on who watches it and what is your current opinion of all the mentioned companies. Without spoiling everything more than I have already with the story title, I'll only say that the plot is related to blogs and computer generated media and how it will affect the old, established media, and us all. Or as some viewers described it, it's "a short movie about the future of the blogo-news-web-sphere. Or something".

Besides the plot, one interesting fact is that this short film was released under the "Creative Commons" licence, with mirrors and translations of its script to several languages developed over time. So, will Amazon or Google kill us all? Will just the elder subscribe to 'dead tree' (paper) magazines?. If the title "Epic 2014" doesn't ring a bell for you, find the answers by watching the eight minutes long flash film here. That is, in case I wasn't the last man on the planet to discover this at points funny and at points thought provoking short film from the future. µ

See Also
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Google buys Urchin
Macromedia Flash the only winner in the US election
New Flash-Infested Netscape.com portal beta disappoints Creative Commons Licence - The Hippie Professor and his PDF book