Entertainment

Is it a childhood nightmare, a modernized niche of folklore, a box-office-tested horror film staple, an ironic riff on American consumerism, or simply an undead corpse hungry for fresh human brains?

Maybe it's all of the above. On Saturday at noon, somewhere around 200 zombies assembled at a bar in midtown Manhattan and proceeded to terrorize the city well into the night. This was Zombiecon 2007, the third annual edition of the pre-Halloween flash mob, and these reanimated corpses took the day very seriously. Among the crowd were undead clowns, airline pilots, ballerinas, doctors, chefs, Roman generals, prom couples, and tennis players. There were also zombified versions of Santa Claus, Pirates of the Caribbean protagonist Captain Jack Sparrow, singer Amy Winehouse, and author Hunter S. Thompson.

(Others, like yours truly, just spruced up jeans and a T-shirt with theatrical blood and white face paint.)

Also spotted: Lindsay Campbell, host of video blog Wallstrip, in a full-on goth-zombie ensemble as she interviewed fellow members of the undead for the cameras.… Read more

NEW YORK--Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator of the upcoming Web series Quarterlife, calls his decision to distribute the show on MySpace.com a "deal with the devil."

At a Thursday screening of the first six eight-minute episodes of the show as part of the CMJ Music Marathon and film festival, Herskovitz--best known as one half of the team that created the critically acclaimed TV series Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life--emphasized his aim to bring creativity to the world of professional online video.

"What I'm seeing on the Internet right now is really boring, and I think these big companies are missing it in a big way," he explained in a question-and-answer session following the screening. "All these new things, Hulu and even Joost, they're creating these platforms as though that's the goal. But they're not creating interesting programming. They're reusing content from television."

He continued: "There aren't any very good ideas coming out of it, and I haven't seen anything that really interests me."

Then, according to Herskovitz, there's the YouTube problem.

"People are quite fascinated by user-generated content on the Internet right now, and I'm not against that. And we want that on our site. But I believe that user-generated on the Internet, just like reality shows on television, are not completely satisfactory," he asserted. "There are reasons why we've had classical storytelling for 2,500 years, and across so many cultures. And there are reasons why we've had a film grammar for the past 100 years about how we shoot a film, and there's a place for that."

Which is why he and Zwick saw a window of opportunity for Quarterlife, a series about a half-dozen 20-somethings working in "creative" industries like acting, writing and filmmaking. Divided into eight-minute episodes, the Web series will be the center of a planned social network for fans as well as young creative people in general.

… Read more

The announcement has been made--read CNET News.com's full coverage here.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an impressive cast of major media and technology companies plans to announce a high-profile list of joint guidelines for preserving copyright and fighting piracy online. Sources told The Journal that the companies involved include media moguls CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox (and its MySpace social network), Viacom, and Disney, as well as tech icon Microsoft and French video-sharing site DailyMotion.

It's unclear whether these are the only parties involved in the deal. Inquiries to several of … Read more

About 13,000 video clips comprising the entirety of Comedy Central's fake-news program, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart will be hitting the its official Web site later in the day, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday morning.

They won't be full episodes, but rather short clips of segments from the program; the more individual files there are, after all, means that there are more opportunities for Comedy Central to insert advertisements. "Designers have been experimenting with ads that appear for two or three seconds at the start of a clip, recede, then emerge briefly from a … Read more

Imax is following the smaller-format movie industry to digital projection technology a bit more rapidly than earlier planned.

The company plans to install three prototype systems in the second quarter of 2008 with a full transformation in the second half of the year. Previously, the company had planned to begin the transformation sometime between late 2008 and mid-2009, the company said.

"Several key exhibitors, studios and consumer research groups have already experienced the digital prototype we've been running for the past several months, and we are very encouraged by the unanimously positive reaction to the next iteration of … Read more

BitTorrent announced Wednesday that the company has named Doug Walker, former chief executive of Alias Systems as its new CEO.

Walker replaces Bram Cohen, the company's cofounder who steps aside to become BitTorrent's chief scientist. Eric Klinker, former chief technology officer of Internap, is now BitTorrent's new CTO.

As inventor of BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol considered by many to be the Rolex of Internet piracy tools, Cohen is revered by techies and file sharers. As CEO of BitTorrent, a startup trying to cash in on the technology by offering a legal content-distribution service, Cohen has … Read more

The thought of a comedian running for president might have been the plot of a tepid Robin Williams movie until recently, but now there are signs that faux pundit Stephen Colbert may actually want to dip his patriotic toes in the (shark-infested) campaign pool.

Colbert formally announced on Tuesday's episode of his spoof talk show, The Colbert Report, that he intends to run for president. More specifically, he aims to get his name on the ballot for both the Democratic and Republican primaries in his home state of South Carolina as a "favorite son."

"And not … Read more

Birthday alarms and reminders have been taken a step further with Kaltura's new Facebook app, the clunky-sounding Friends' Video Cards. It's a cool, fun way to fill an e-card with video and photo content and get mutual friends in on the deal.

I test drove Friends' Video Cards with a greeting for my friend Erin, whose birthday it just happens to be today. Creating the card is cake--the Friends' Video Cards app conveniently pulls your friends' upcoming events or lets you name your own occasion. You just add a title and invite mutual friends, if you want, to … Read more

It starts with the "zombie march." Then the "march booty swim," followed by the "shuffle ha slide" and the "hip n' roar."

Remember those phrases and you're on your way to becoming part of "Thrill the World," one woman's effort to get people around the globe to simultaneously perform the "Thriller" dance from the iconic Michael Jackson music video.

Dance instructor Ines Markeljevic is the mastermind behind the event slated to take place October 27 and 28, and she's hoping to draw enough participants to … Read more