I am always pleased to see mainstream entertainment embracing online and amazed at how quickly consumer-led media platforms, such as blogging, podcasting and social networking have entered the mainstream. Peter Jackson, for example, had his very own production blog, Kong is King, tracking the progress of filming King Kong and creating a unique connection with fans in the build-up to the movie launch. On the positive side, this blog is still updated and didn’t get killed off; unlike the great beast. The sci-fi series ‘Invasion’ even included blogging as a central theme in a main character’s daily life. He used it to get the message out about a forthcoming alien invasion.

Ever since the amazing success of the Arctic Monkeys (who got to number one in the UK primarily through building a MySpace fanbase), the music industry seems to have become addicted in using the social network to promote pop singers to rock stars alike. I am a bit sceptical about the continued effectiveness of this though, especially when you hear interviews with the stars themselves who quite clearly don’t get that involved with their profiles. This was highlighted by Justin Timberlake on BBC Radio One last night, when he proudly talked about being on MySpace, but then added that he doesn’t actually update it himself!

So why was I thinking about this today? Well, I went to see ‘Superman Returns’ on Friday and was very pleased to see that the principles underpinning the MrPaparazzi.com site we recently launched were featured memorably in the movie. The site is focussed on making the public the paparazzi, enabling anyone with a digital camera or cameraphone, to send their pics to the site within seconds of taking the photo and make money from the sales to the newspapers & magazines. In the movie, the power of this was played out in a comedic scene where a young boy takes a close-up photo of Superman using his cameraphone, which makes Jimmy Olsen’s photo of a tiny blurred flying Superman look awful – leading to the unavoidable – ‘is it a bird, is it a plane’…