Last night was huge step in the democratization of media. The FOX show “House” aired it’s season finale which happened to be shot on the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR camera.

Why is this such big news? Well, that camera retails for under $2700. Normally House is shot on film with cameras and lenses that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last night’s episode proved that the cost of equipment is no longer a barrier to entry on making broadcast-ready television.

I bought the Canon 5D in December of 2008. I had never owned a DSLR, but had seen the video that people like Vincent LaForet were getting out of these cameras and I had to try it. I ended up selling that camera and getting the Canon 7D about 8 months later. That camera was almost $1000 less and had more functionality at the time than the 5D. Canon has since remedied that with a firmware upgrade. Now there is a new camera called the T2i that costs $800 that has almost all the functionality of the 5D and 7D. That means there is no barrier to entry. For the price of a home video camera, you can now own the proper tools to help you shoot a film or make a television program.

When I started the American Cliche radio show back in June of 2005, I talked often about the democratization of media. The internet has allowed us to each have a voice and be able to tell whatever story we want. Since I started this show AC has been listened to almost 5 and a half million times. I think that’s pretty powerful.

AC’s success proves that we have the power to take the power away from radio, but television and film has been a tougher nut to crack. Shooting an entire episode of House on a sub-$3000 DSLR camera brought us much closer. If you have a great story and the talent to back it up, there are no excuses anymore. Get out there and do it.

Last week I posted an update to Facebook and Twitter that read:

“Anyone get the sense that BP is throwing darts at a dartboard of ideas at this point & going “what the hell, let’s try it.”

This weekend SNL confirmed my theory with their cold open.

I watched this episode of “Real Time With BIll Maher” when it aired and I have been looking for a clip of it online. Bill Maher sums up exactly how I feel about the Arizona Immigration Law. It’s misguided and seems to be picking on those that are most defenseless. Recent polls show that most Americans support this type of law, but I think their anger is aimed at the wrong people.

I’m in San Jose today to produce a video production for a Fortune 500 company. They are dipping their toe in the waters of videocasting and I was called to help. It’s a huge opportunity and I’m really excited to be a part of it. I don’t mean to be all mysterio about who it is, but I’m not sure if I’m able to talk about it yet.

Anyhoo, I’m staying at a Larkspur Hotel Property. Apparently they own 23 hotels and 6 restaurants all over California, Washington and Oregon (fun facts I got from their Twitter profile). I was told at check-in that the wi-fi was complimentary using the code that they gave me. I got to my room, signed in and instead of being redirected to the usual corporate site, I was taken to the Larkspur Twitter page.

Nicely played Larkspur Marketing peeps. Instead of doing the obvious and taking me to a page they knew I’d quickly navigate away from (the corporate site), they provided me with an opportunity for engagement. I immediately followed on Twitter. That means that long after my one night stay is over they’ll be able to continue a dialogue with me about their properties.

Would this work at a hotel in Boise? Probably not, but we’re in the heart of Silicon Valley. The hotel that I’m at is crawling with tech people. The odds that many of them use Twitter is pretty strong.

I talk a lot about the things that companies do wrong on this blog, so I occasionally like to point out when I think someone’s done something cool.

It seems that Twitter is having a bit of a problem counting followers and following across many accounts today. As of 10:15 AM PT, I noticed that my account had zero “followers” and “following.” First, I thought it was a glitch in my account, then I checked my many of my friends accounts and they all had zeros as well. Even cyber-celebs @kevinrose and @scobleizer weren’t immune.

As a true sign of the impending apocolypse, even Ashton Kutcher’s account, @aplusk was doomed.

I’m sure Twitter is in the process of resolving this, but Twitter-holics everywhere have got to be squirming in their chairs right now at the thought of, gasp, ZERO followers!

This got me thinking about a larger problem. Should we be putting such a huge amount of our corporate and personal branding in the hands of a third-party? I am absolutely convinced that Twitter is going to be able to restore the temporarily missing data, but what if they couldn’t? Companies now invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, in using Twitter as a marketing tool. Individuals spend hours and hours each week (or day) curating their Twitter profile. What if all that time and effort was for nothing? Could it be wiped out overnight? Should it make us think differently about where we build our brand online?

Something to think about for sure.

This past weekend I brought my daughter Emma to the Santa Barbara Fair. She’s two years old and her main area of interest lies in seeing the animals – especially the goats, piggies and bunnies. Since the very beginning she’s always had a fascination with all animals and has no fear of touching them, errr, tackling them.

Anyway, before we brought Emma to see the animals, we partook in one of the other mandatory activities of going to the fair – carnival food! I mean, how can you be in the land of the Carny without eating corndogs, cotton candy or funnel cakes? While I was waiting for my lunch to be served up I started watching the kettle corn vendor next to me. He was a man in his late fifties or early sixties and he had a wooden paddle submerged into a giant metal pot. Clearly he had this practiced motion and craft that was necessary to produce the hundreds of pounds of kettle corn that he must churn out every day.

It got me thinking about the lack artisanship in the United States. I mean, creating something locally really is a dying breed. We don’t produce anything in the U.S. anymore. I immediately thought of that scene in Say Anything where Lloyd Dobler talks about what he wants to do for a living:

Everything is now outsourced overseas to the lowest bidder. We complain that there isn’t any industry in our country and then we go shop at Walmart. Does that make any sense? Maybe it’s just a vicious cycle. We don’t have any jobs, so therefore we shop at Walmart because it’s cheaper and all we can afford. Yet, the more we shop at Walmart, the more we feed the business practice of sending foreign manufacturing, technology and service jobs overseas.

This is why the kettle corn maker was such a fascinating thing to think about. Here is a guy that has practiced a craft for probably the last 30+ years of his life. He lives on the road churning out a thousand bags of kettle corn for the masses, then packs it up every few days and starts all over again. New town, new people – but the same practiced craft over and over again. How many Fortune 500 CEOs do you think could do what he does? How many of them could make anything themselves?

We simply don’t place enough value on craftsmanship. We say we want high-quality, locally made products, but we’re not willing to pay for them. We say we value the local worker and 15 minutes later we ensuring his demise because we shop at stores that undercut him by having six year olds in Malaysia produce their products.

I’m trying to help in whatever small way I can. I try to buy most of my produce at the farmer’s market from local growers. I buy wine, almost exclusively from local vineyards I’ve visited. I try support local restaurants and stay away from chains. And I never, ever, shop at Walmart. Still, I’m always looking for more that I can do.

What else can we be doing to support the American worker? What would Lloyd Dobler do?

Celebrity is a strange thing in this country today. You used to have to be talented to get attention. Now you just have take your top off on MTV or be able to sing a Beatles song reasonably well on American Idol. It’s sad because while all these mediocre idiots are making a shit-ton of money for doing nothing, real talent like J.R. Richards flies under the radar.

I’ve been a fan of J.R. since I booked his band Dishwalla to play Babson College when I was graduate assistant there in 1996. The song “Counting Blue Cars” was starting to break all over the radio and Dishwalla’s career was taking off. I thought they were going to be the next great American rock story.

Since moving to Santa Barbara nine years ago, I’ve seen them perform a half dozen times around town. They’re a hometown band after all, and they often give their local celebrity freely to play benefits and community events. And even though most of the world is asking “what ever happened to…?”, I’ve seen them get better and better as they continued to release amazing records. In fact “Opaline” is probably in my top 10 favorite albums of all time.

Last year J.R. Richards released his debut solo effort called “A Beautiful End.” Hands down it was my favorite record of 2009. If you listen to my radio show you know that the title song became a way for me to cope with the death of Mia the Wonderdog back in December. When music is at it’s best, I believe it has the power to heal. That song definitely helped me get through a tough time.

Why am I writing all this? Good question.

As a fan of music, I’m tired of seeing Justin Bieber occupy Twitter’s trending topics list for the last three months. I mean, really, besides being a good looking kid with dumb hair, what has he actually done? We seem to have lost sight of the fact that being famous doesn’t make you talented. There are so many amazing performers and songwriters out there trying to make a living and it’s just getting impossible to cut through all this noise and find an audience. I decided it was time for me to do my part to try and shine a light on someone that I dig.

Oh, and today is J.R.’s birthday and people should say nice stuff about you on your birthday.

A few weeks ago I was in a bar and I saw a commercial come on TV for something called the “Shake Weight.” Until that point I had never seen it before. I remember watching in awe thinking that it must be a parody and that I was missing the joke with the sound off in the bar.

This is the spot that I saw:

Nope, not a spoof it was for real. At first I questioned what self-respecting woman would use such a product with the obvious sexual overtones. Then, yesterday I was in Bed Bath & Beyond and I saw two women using the Shake Weight in the middle of the store for all to see. And yes, if you’re wondering, it looked just as obscene as it does in the commercial. I started to think about how genius this marketing campaign might actually be.

Every company wants their message to go viral and spread organically, but that seldom happens. The dilemma I face every day as a marketer is how I can be true to the brand message of a product, but still make the creative entertaining enough for people to want to actively link to it, Tweet about it, and add it to their Facebook page. Shake Weight, accidentally or not, has a found a way to do that. In fact, two weeks ago the mother of all validation came – SNL parodied it:

Obviously Shake Weight is riding unbelievable buzz from their highly, err, “engaging” TV spots. I’d be really curious to know how all this “excitement” is translating into actual sales. Sometimes something can be so entertaining or so funny, that people may doubt it’s actually real. Does this fall into that category? Also, ponder this, how would the buzz change if they tried to market this to men by using men instead of women in their commericals? Chew on that for a bit.

I’d love your feedback in the comments below.

I was talking to my friend Marko DeSantis earlier this week and he said something really profound to me. He said “I’d rather be the single red dot in a sea of blue than be one in a thousand people doing the same thing.”

Let me back up a second and give you some back story and context. Marko is the guitar player in the band Sugarcult (Full Fanboy disclosure: I’ve been a fan of Sugarcult for 10 years – long before I ever met Marko). This week we happened to be talking about SXSW Interactive and how he was there to DJ an event for our friend Mike Barash.

Conventional wisdom will tell you that Marko should have skipped the Interactive portion of SXSW and intead showed up to hang out during the Music event. After all, he’d fit in much better among his rock n’ roll brethren, right? That’s when Marko dropped that line I noted above on me. He went on to explain that by going to Interactive rather than music, he got to be the only rock n’ roll guy in a sea of tech people. By going to SXSW Interactive he was a rockstar – someone that everyone wanted to see and talk to. If he had gone to Music, he would have been just another person in a band that you may or may not have heard of. Sure, it’s comfortable to be among people that are just like you, but how can you really stand out and make an impact in that situation?

This got me thinking about business and how we approach marketing. A great example of this outside the box thinking that I saw in Austin was Chevy. I’m sure the easiest thing for them to do would be to “check the box” and attend every auto show to peddle their latest cars. But how bold of them was it to exhibit and show off their new vehicles at SXSW Interactive? At first glance it may not make much sense, but then you realize that they essentially got a monopoly on eyeballs because they were the only car company living and breathing in the tech space at that event.

This also applies to standing out on an individual level. When I attend SXSW each year I’m just another technology social media guy. There are thousands of those. But, if I were to attend something like a national hotel owners conference, I’d probably really stand out and be able to bring in a lot of business for myself. At a social media conference I’m just another guy in a band. But, by stepping outside that box as the lone red dot, I can be a rockstar.

Do you have a situation like this where you’ve had some success? I’d love to hear about it.

I’m going to get this out of the way right off the bat: I’ve been watching this season of Celebrity Apprentice. I know, it’s lame and I’m not very proud of it. But it was worth outing myself to talk about MSNBC’s lame attempt at covering “Entertainment News.”

First, when I read the entertainment section of a website I expect to read about who died, who OD’d or who’s sleeping with whom. I don’t, under any circumstances, want to be reading spoilers about your own network’s TV shows. I mean, really?

Think about it this way – if I care even the slightest bit about a television program, I either watched it when it aired or I’ve DVR’d it. If I’ve watched it, then I obviously don’t need your play by play of what happened. If I’ve DVR’d it and you spilled the beans on the show, well, now you’ve just pissed me off. That’s exactly what happened this morning with the Apprentice. I woke to the headline of “*** Gets the Boot on Apprentice.” Notice how I blanked out the name? That’s because, unlike MSNBC, I care enough about my readers to not spoil TV shows for you.

Now, I realize that some of you are saying “but Scott, if you DVR’d the show NBC doesn’t really care if you watch it later or not since you’ll forward through the commercials and that’s all they really care about.” Ahhh yes, good point astute reader, but if you’ve ever watched an episode of the Apprentice you know that each episode is basically a commercial in and of itself. Trump and Mark Burnett have been geniuses in integrating brands into the challenges and tasks on the show for years. So while, yes, I may skip the commercials, what about the company that ponied up big bucks for a giant two-hour spot? Ask Kodak, Lifelock or Norton if they’d be pissed about that.

And let’s be clear here, it’s not just Apprentice using integrated sponsorship in programs. Show likes FX’s “Damages” and Fox’s “24″ have been using American car brands front and center for years. Like it or not, this is the new reality of television advertising and when you print spoilers hours after a show airs, you’re screwing the pooch on your ad sales.

Finally, let’s talk about my real beef with all of this “coverage.” It’s lazy, lazy lazy. How can you watch a TV show on your own network, write a four paragraph rundown of the episode (complete with spoilers) and call yourself a journalist? Where’s the analysis of why *** was fired? Where’s the gripping piece about the rise and fall in ratings of The Apprentice? Why did NBC decide to make this season’s Apprentice run a two-hour weekly program instead of the usual one hour? Journalism should be about covering a real event – politics, sports, human interest etc – not shortening the transcript of a show into four paragraphs.

I don’t know what’s more lame – the fact that I actually watch the Apprentice or that MSNBC thinks that this even remotely qualifies as insightful news.