• How many of you grew up with Siskel and Ebert? How many of you also wondered who they were related to, who they killed, bribed, and other adjectives I will leave off this child friendly blog, in order to secure those positions?

    Here were 2 GEEKS (in my youthful opinion), and all they had (got) to do all day was be PAID to see movie after movie and say thumbs up or thumbs down. I am sure I never thought about the equivalent of the journalism ‘mail room’ they may have worked their way up from, or that when they put pen to paper they nailed a motion picture in a few sharp sentences. I am only referring to the 2 guys who I saw sitting on their bums yapping about movies.

    Fame (and success attached) used to be analagous to winning a ‘lottery’. Not just the powerball or Ed McMahon, but who was to become the next pop singer, the next biggest movie star, the next Siskel and Ebert. Sure, it took talent, but as my folks used to say = We dont know who the best guitar player is – He is sitting in some corner of a room, playing with no audience to hear.

    With the internet and shows like American Idol, those days are (could be) history. Now the talented but unconnected and ‘unlucky’ are breaking their way into all industries, and in a big way!

    I could totally litter this page with examples, and it would be a lot of fun actually, but I am going to highlight one such example I came across for now since it is a lot more relevant to what I actually planned on writing today.

    I am scouring the web for some of the hottest social networking platforms as I am doing research for a site I am building and before ordering something new, I thought it wise to check out the existing ‘open sourcey’ (apparently open source is not always as simple as the word sounds), and one cannot be checking out social networks and not come across NING. NING allows you to freely create a social network of your own.. let me try to wrap this up since once I hand the floor over to these guys, you will not give too much thought to what I am going on about now…

    Allow me to introduce to you, a group of incredibly talented individuals, who have taken advantage of free online tools, and their collective talents, to ‘win their own lottery’ .. Its not who they know.. its waking up and smelling the ripeness of the opportunities and realizing that it’s all fair game. Even Tom Cruise, albeit with a much heftier budget, is heavily advertising his own website to try to gain more commitment from his fans, as the collective pool of talent grows. He created a gorgeous showcase just to remind you of one of the original and most successful lottery winners!

    Back to this site that has me completely amazed – the site is called Spill.com, one of the most popular NING sites, completely stripped and remade so you would have to know a Ning site to recognise it. These guys could be high schoolers, they could be businessmen, they could be from harlem… thats the beauty of it. Enjoy.

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