(here's a blog post I put up earlier today at globeandmail.com, related to a story I did for the newspaper)
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried still look like the upwardly mobile twenty-somethings (surgical resident and entertainment lawyer respectively) they used to be a year or two ago. But now - along with friend Ramesh Flinders and Greg's wife, a former executive with Creative Artists Agency - they are the co-creators and producers of the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon.
In Toronto for the FITC design and technology conference, they talked about what it has been like since "Bree" was revealed to be actress Jessica Rose last September.
They also talked about the website, which is built on a hacked version of Wordpress, with widgets from Revver that play the videos (both the ones uploaded by the characters and the ones uploaded by fans); there is a chat room where there are usually between 20 and 50 people at a time, and the site has a Wikipedia-style show encyclopedia called LGpedia - which a fan created - that has over 3,000 articles and has received more than two million page views.
Miles: "I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching videos, and after awhile it was clear they were going to become the leader, so [after we came up with the idea] I decided to upload something there rather than try to get people to come to our site. From the beginning, the idea was to create a sense of mystery, so we started posting comments and video as this character - interactivity was very much a part of it."
Greg: "Miles said we're going to do this for a few months and then we'll be on the cover of magazines, and I said you're crazy."
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