November 07, 2005

Curtis Wong

Curtis has worked in the production of interactive media for a long time (at least long by technology standards), working with every iteration of the format. He started doing CD-ROM stuff and is now doing websites, especially websites that tie in with TV programs.

This speaker left me a little bit cold. I was hoping to get a good meta-view of the path of interactive media, but he mostly just gave us overviews of his own projects.

One thing that struck me was the timeline for his projects. Also the budgets. He's overseeing multimillion-dollar projects for PBS, and the projects have timelines of 6-12 months, it seems. When Mr. Wong said this, part of me wanted to scream out, "but it will be irrelevant then!" Mr. Wong's work provides good contrast for Ze Frank's philosophy. Ze's take is basically, create today, get it out there so people can see it because they have infinitesimally small attention spans and won't be here tomorrow if they don't like what they see today.

I realize Ze and Wong are targeting different audiences (and Ze has no advertising budget), but it seems to me that Ze's approach is more relevant to today's audiences. I wonder how often we are going to see large, "produced" web sites in the future. My guess is that they are going to appear more rarely as time goes on. At the very least, I doubt underwriters will settle for multiple-months timelines on projects they finance.

Posted November 7, 2005 10:19 PM. Categories: Week 8 | Permalink