Catch Us at MIPTV.

I'm at MIPTV to liveblog the sessions alongside The Guardian's Stuart Dredge and Fearless Leader James Martin. Here is our first-ever videoblog. More to come, and I'll be doing them, so huzzah for experiments!

This afternoon we'll be meeting a bunch of hackers on a yacht called the Mojito. Their challenge: to hack up some game-changing TV-mutating magic in the next 48 hours. Can't wait to see what they've got on the plate, but more crucially: will there be hot tub hacking?

I Am at MIPTV This Week. You Should Follow Along!

Once yearly I hit MIPTV to find out, and report on, what the world's networks and producers are passing around to appease the seething throng. You should follow along because our wee little team is covering all the sessions quite thoroughly. Where to go:

• The MIPWorld Blog. All our "liveblogs" will go up about half an hour after each session, complete with photos. (Videos of each session come up a day later.)
• The MIP Twitter account @_mip_.
• My Twitter account @luckthelady (although @_mip_ will be infinitely more relevant and all-encompassing. But you can follow me too for the occasional intelligent reflection and group project.

To situate you a bit, or if you have no idea what MIPTV is all about, self-orient with my pre-show post on what I most look forward to. I will be covering many of these topics and plenty of others, too. Stuff I covered today:

• MIPFormats: The Creator's Toolkit. A breakdown on producing and protecting your format. Also jam-packed with reflections on the birth and development of Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire?
• MIPDoc: Financing for New Co-Production. A primer on co-production, and a new financing model, for documentary filmmakers and producers.
• MIPDoc: Crowdsourcing: The Frontier of Documentary Funding. How crowdsourcing is changing the face of documentary funding. (Or could, in any case.)

Don't you feel smarter already? I kind of do but that might just be frozen headache. (Häagen-Dazs.)

Just So's You Know

Will be tweeting/liveblogging for Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies. Follow me @luckthelady and watch blog updates on http://community20.blogspot.com/.

Also, if you want, you can see me talk about demystifying social media in Hoboken on Thursdee.

Just So You Know That I'm Alive

Hokay, here's my wrapup post for MIPTV, which links to all the liveblogs I wrote for the conference over the course of the week. In terms of promise, creativity and where the future is, the last set of talks was my favourite -- and probably the least coherent in terms of post-session coverage.

One thing I got out of it was this data visualisation of SMSes sent in Paris when the New Year hit, courtesy of Orange and faberNovel!



Doesn't it make you happy to be alive right now, in a time when maps can share so much more than topography?

What's coming in terms of TV? More reality show fare, but the following three trends were cited as hot this year:

• Family/emotainment. And I don't mean friendly family fare like Step by Step; I mean reality shows about family members. One involved taking a mass of people and finding which family members went with which, then matching the completed family to their living room. Another locked strangers with vague and unknown familial ties together in a house, where a series of terrible events lead to the discovery of how they're related. There is much screaming and crying.
• Flashmobs.
• Mobile. You'll be seeing a lot of reality shows that incorporate smartphones heavily in the plot; networks like the BBC have gotten more imaginative, with live quizzes you can take on your phone while watching EastEnders, for example. (The quiz loads on your phone while the episode kicks off on TV. A microphone indicates to the software where you are in the plot, then shoots you an appropriate question.)

After MIPTV, drama involving a certain volcano turned travel into an arms race. Most of my UK-based colleagues for the week got trapped in the south of France. Not a bad place to be stuck, all things considered, but annoying nonetheless.

One of my favourite quotes of the week came from the editor of a major industry newspaper, who exclaimed, "A stupid volcano is affecting the TV industry! It's bloody inconsiderate."

(This is in the event you ever wondered which industry is more insane than advertising.)

I got back to Paris easily enough but not unscathed: since my return, I've spent most of my time emptying the contents of a red nose into enough sheets of Kleenex to clear a small community park. Sorry, Greenpeace.

Hope you missed me. As always you can catch my ad reviews on Culture Buzz or via AdVerve. Bob Knorpp recently also had me on the 100th episode of The BeanCast, where me and a pile o' smart girls talked about Twitter and, appropriately enough, who deserves to die. If you miss it, your soul will cry.

On the Conference Docket Now

My conference moderator face.

There's a number of events I attended in the last few weeks that I wish I'd had time to mention earlier: Plugg Brussels, Marketing 2.0, TechCrunch Paris. But, deadlines being what they are and with the internet constantly throwing stuff like this at you, I never really got around to it.

Let's try moving backward.

Humor me ››

Here We are Now, Entertain Us

One Show wants a little interactive spice in its life.

To help out, Adrants is sending me to the Festival next week. We'll be doing ceremony coverage and afterparty stuff. I am a goo pile of happy.

If you happen to be in Manhattan, we can arrange meet-ups via Twitter. Follow me on Twitter anyway for real-time news and whatnot.

Hope my ad:tech SF cough goes away in time. =\