the buzz log

J.R.R. Tolkien in 38 minutes. For free. Online. What are you waiting for?

Actually, many have not waited, as searches have surged for the fan fiction film, "The Hunt for Gollum," which debuted on May 3 online and at the London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film free premiere.

Billed as a prequel to "The Lord of the Rings," this new storyline tells a brief tale of Ranger Aragon and wizard Gandolph seeking Gollum, the mutated Hobbit. The filmmakers, who call themselves "a bunch of Tolkien enthusiasts," modestly call their effort "an unofficial home movie," but a contagious enthusiasm is making this a viral favorite. BBC News describes the venture as a "lavish production" that got permission from Tolkien's estate by being a non-profit enterprise.

With a cast of 10s (say, 150) and a $3,000 budget, the mini-epic dips into the beloved Tolkien minutiae of Ranger life and pays high-def homage to the epic standards set by director Peter Jackson's cinematic trilogy. And, even the volunteer actor who plays Aragon looks like he could be an English cousin to big-screen counterpart Viggo Mortensen.

Fan fiction has always had a huge online following, with regular lookups on Yahoo! for "harry potter fanfiction," "twilight fan fiction," "ncis fanfiction," "the l word fanfiction" and "sailor moon fanfiction." By all rights, this latest respectable entry into Rings lore should, as GigaOm and the blogosphere point out, inspire studios and other "content owners to get engaged with their fan bases" by equipping die-hards with the tools to make such amateur creations and keep the mania going. That would be a fantasy fiction come true.

Filed under: Movies, Literature, Viral, Videos, Cyberculture, Fan Fiction

In the online world, there is no honeymoon period.

When the official inauguration hour came upon America, the biggest noontime search spike swung to Whitehouse.gov (+2,440%), shooting past poet Elizabeth Alexander (+1,564%) and musician Yo-Yo Ma (+1,534%). The Obama-Biden online team didn't waste any time directing online traffic from the transitional site, Change.gov. In the past 7 days, "whitehouse" searches hailed from every state in the nation, led by the District of Columbia, Maryland, Illinois, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Still, despite the site's popularity, Web critics have been taking mixed notice of the online bureaucratic destination.

• ReadWriteWeb marked a positive evolution by combing through Whitehouse.gov's storied 12-year history.
• Slate found broken links and called the online transition "far less civil and ... violently abrupt."
• Blogs made conspiratorial noises over the previous administration's Web coding versus the new one, implying that Bush webmasters intentionally blocked pages from search engines. CNET not only dismissed the implications, but also dared take on "Obama-praising geeks" by criticizing the HTML design and saying "not all pages successfully validate."
• When looking for first family photos, Newsweek was led to presidential pets. (Particularly ironic, considering the still unresolved dog situation.)

Timeliness was the biggest complaint. Another CNET blog nitpicked the government for not posting in a timely fashion the inaugural address (uploaded Jan. 21, 1:27 p.m.), executive orders and memoranda (Jan. 22, 12:39 p.m.). "By comparison," the CNET political correspondent huffed, "the outgoing Bush administration was disciplined about updating Whitehouse.gov." (Worse, the blog believes the privacy policy doesn't clearly state enough that a private company is tracking visitors' computer details.)

Inheriting an outdated infrastructure has plagued many an incoming techie and resulted in transition glitches. PC World reminded readers that similar snafus happened back in 2001, including the infamous placeholder, "Insert Something Meaningful Here." The Washington Post reported that dumbfounded Obama techies this week similarly found themselves plunging into the "technological dark ages."

The most noted omission, and the cross that Director of New Media for the White House (and blogger) Macon Philips will have to bear, is the lack of true community interaction (which happened at some level in the transition site's Citizen's Briefing Book). Letting the masses post, however, brings its own set of horrors, as Nieman Watchdog explains: "The virulence and low signal-to-noise ratio of unrestricted commenting on the Internet has been a source of despair to people who run far less prominent websites." In other words, welcome to figuring out how to funnel out the crackpots, especially those who proclaim free-speech protection when they actually bog down communication. The Harvard blog's solution? A Wiki White House.

The site's biggest battle may lie within itself: Making sure that the flow of information doesn't get strangled in red tape. In the meantime, with Obama's first weekly presidential address coming online this Saturday, Whitehouse.gov promises to be an online hotspot. Maybe then the honeymoon period can get a reboot.

Filed under: Politics, Cyberculture, Internet, Web 2.0