BuzzMachine

Project Trainwreck
: The numbers are in: The Battle of Shaker Heights, the product of this season’s Project Greenlight on HBO, brought in $47,693 in five theaters last weekend. So that’s less than $10,000 per screen. Miramax execs had said on the Greenlight season finale that if they were going to consider wide distribution of the film, they’d want to see $20,000 per screen (to which one scarred exec replied: the only way this is going to make $20k is if everybody seeing the movie leaves a $100 bill on the seat when they leave). So by that measure, it’s a bomb.

But that doesn’t matter. It’s better, in fact.

This is what reality TV is all about: humiliation. And who better to humiliate than Hollywood executives? It’s such great entertainment.

I can’t wait for next season.

No-speed chase
: I’m watching a no-speed chase in L.A. on FoxNews right now: The perp isn’t moving and when she is, she merely creeps or goes around in crazy circles.

Could this be the result of skyrocketing gas prices: Cops and robbers can’t afford bad fuel economy?

Turns out, the lady just got out of a mental institution (a bit too soon, I’d say).

As I’m watching, a few colleagues come into the office to catch the, uh, action with me.

One turns to the other and says: “David, here in New York, those people aren’t in cars. They’re in subways.”

: Now she’s proving to be a Pied Piper; there’s a parade of pedestrians (yes, they exist there) following her. I half expect to seem them waving to the choppers above.

Two years
: Anniversary stories are among the least informative nonstories media cover; they’re dutiful and predictable and so I’m no big fan of them.

But I do think that September 11th is different. Network news will be all but ignoring the date — here’s the Post’s roundup — and that will probably indicate how other media will handle the date. Perhaps they’re reflecting a national mood to get past, to get over, to get on with life. But I wonder. There are plenty of good stories two years on: How safe are we? How are the families coping? How much have our lives changed? What has been the cost of terrorism to business and government? What has the health impact been on New Yorkers (I’ll tell you mine)? What has the psychological impact been on our children? What about the explosion of this new medium, weblogs, after 9/11? How about following the memorial jury for a day to see how the outpouring of tribute is affecting them? There are a million stories…

: For what it matters, I will again take the day away from work to spend at the World Trade Center and I will blog about it.

Attention must be paid
: Inspired by David Weinberger’s blogging from the Dean bus, I suggested yesterday that a wise campaign would invite some bloggers to get press credentials and get on the buss to cover the election. Why not invite Ken Layne, Matt Welch, Michael J Totten, Roger L Simon, Matthew Yglesias, make your own list. You’d get a fresh perspective of real people, real voters; it would shake up the status quo, and it’d be easy to get lots of digital link. Just look at how impressed Dave Winer was to get a press advisory from Dean:

I got a press advisory this morning, via email, from the Dean campaign. That’s very cool. Someone decided that even though I write for a weblog, I count as a press person.

That’s what it’s all about: Letting people know that they count.

Share and share alike
: I haven’t done a video weblog (aka vlog) in too long because (a) I’m lazy and (b) I’m cheap — that is, I don’t want to find myself with a big bandwidth bill.

The solution to that problem is bubbling up: weblog P2P. It was a topic raised at the Boston weblog conference and now John Robb is raising it again, starting to define how it would work.

Unlike nefarious Napster, weblog P2P would work, Robb says, only via links, not hard-drive searches. Thus the files would be legit. And they’d be served from many webloggers all sharing the bandwidth bill. Content communism.