Last Friday night, Jimmy Kimmel guest hosted Larry King Live, and the topic was “Paparazzi: Do They Go Too Far?” Near the end of the show, they brought on Emily Gould, an editor for the celebrity gossip blog Gawker. Apparently, Gawker — which I’ve never read — has a feature called the Gawker Stalker Map which uses the Google Maps API to show locations in Manhattan where Gawker readers have reported celebrity sightings. Kimmel, having been the subject of a Gawker sighting, lets Gould have it pretty hard, noting the potential ramifications of real-time celebrity tracking: “that way when Gwyneth Paltrow comes out of the movies, there would be at least a dozen psychopaths waiting for her.”

Now, celebrities and paparazzi have gone around and around in the debate about right to privacy for public figures, and I’m not going to get into that here. What I thought was very interesting was a line Gould came back with that redefines the rules of the game a bit:

“Honestly, I think that there’s a shifting definition of what is public and what is private space for everyone not just celebrities. The Internet, blogs, MySpace, no one has the reasonable expectation of being able to walk around the street and not being noticed by someone.” - Emily Gould

And I think she’s right to say the definition of privacy is changing for folks on the Web. But there is still — and probably always will be — a distinction between two types of public/private interactions. It’s the Cult of Personality vs. the Cult of Information.

Celebrities like Paltrow or Tom Cruise, etc. have chosen a public life in the cult of personality. People want to be them and to be close to them. While folks on the Web who participate in social networking sites are participating in the cult of information. People want to know about them and about what they have to say. It’s really hard to be popular on the Web if you don’t have something interesting to say (porn stars excepted). A majority of the time, users on the Web just want information about other people. Paparazzi and the abusers of the cult of personality want the people themselves.

Typically, surfing MySpace, looking at stranger’s profiles is no different than peeking out your front curtains, trying to figure out what your neighbor’s building in his garage. In the cult of information, once you figure out what it is, you’ve gotten all you need from that person. In the cult of personality, someone would probably steal it.

That’s the fundamental difference between these types of interactions, and I think Gould misses the boat by not making this distinction. Granted, she had Jimmy Kimmel ramming his foot down her throat at the time, but I think she does Web 2.0-style social interactions a disservice by lumping them in with traditional invasions of privacy.

And please don’t think that I’m saying all peepers in the Web 2.0 style are above-board (ask Kathy Sierra). The world is a big place, and there are just as many bad people as there are good. I’m just pointing out a flaw in Gould’s statement.

CNN transcript of the show in question.

How can you have a theme show about the British Invasion without letting your contestants pick any Beatles songs?

The Beatles started the invasion and were by far the biggest act to come out of it. I realize that the show was probably denied the rights to use those songs by whomever owns them, but certainly the modern entertainment juggernaut that is American Idol could have found a way around that. Or maybe, if you can’t get the rights to Beatles songs, don’t do a show about the British Invasion.

So I’ve been hooked on American Idol since Taylor Hicks pulled out his harmonica in his first audition last season. In the past, I’ve equated my growing enjoyment of that show to getting older, but when I tried thinking about it objectively, I realized that it’s just riveting television. Now, in the interest of keeping up with the blog-o-sphere, here’s a Top Five Friday in honor of American Idol.

I’m still a relative newcomer to the show, having only watched last season and this season so far. But I’ve seen enough to recognize that the contestants make the same mistakes over and over again, and most of their mistakes involve picking songs that aren’t right for them. Especially in the weeks between the top 24 and top 12, in which the contestants are given very little thematic guidance to help them pick their songs.

So, here’s my list of five songs I think could help out these Idols-in-Training.

If five-years-ago me could see me now, I’m not sure he’d be all that happy that I’m so into American Idol. But it has become more than a singing competition. It’s a cultural phenomenon that you can’t ignore anymore. Something like 30 million viewers tune in every week. That’s about 10 percent of the total population of America, and that’s A LOT of people. So, for better or worse, I’m hooked. Now lets see how the top 12 shake down this year!P.S. I’m rooting for Melinda and Chris S.

Click here to open iTunes and download this iMix directly.

In April of 2001, cryptic messages started appearing on posters and in trailers for the movie “AI.” If you took these messages to be clues and followed up these clues on the Internet, you were pulled into an experimental, interactive marketing campaign / game that masqueraded as reality and involved you in the story in ways never attempted before. You would receive emails and phone calls from the game, dubbed by it’s creators “the Beast,” and you were told to make calls and send faxes to real numbers in order to advance the plot. It was an incredibly rich and immersive experience that no one has been able to duplicate, neither in depth nor in popularity.

That doesn’t mean folks haven’t tried, though. Between the second and third seasons of the ABC show “Lost,” the producers started their own Alternate Reality Game called “The Lost Experience.” And, while thousands of people participated, it has left some Lost fans feeling cold. Some even contend that the Lost Experience is a factor in the drop off in viewers this season. I tend to agree. So I’m going to try and flesh out the argument that the missteps of the Lost Experience may, in fact, be a reason for declining ratings.

1. Back to the beginning

Before the Beast, there was no such thing as an Alternate Reality Game. It was the first and so far the most popular. So, what was it’s model? According to Wikipedia, ARGs follow these basic design principles:

1. Storytelling as archaeology. Instead of presenting a chronologically unified, coherent narrative, the designers scattered pieces of the story across the Internet and other media, allowing players to reassemble it, supply connective tissue and determine what it meant.
2. Platformless narrative. The story was not bound to a single medium, but existed independently and used whatever media were available to make itself heard.
3. Designing for a hive mind. The design was directed at a collective of players that shared information and solutions almost instantly, and incorporated individuals possessing almost every conceivable area of expertise.
4. A whisper is sometimes louder than a shout. Rather than openly promoting the game and trying to attract participation by “pushing” it toward potential players, the designers attempted to “pull” players to the story by engaging in over-the-top secrecy.
5. The “this is not a game” aesthetic. The game itself did not acknowledge that it was a game. The narrative presented a fully-realized world: any phone number or email address that was mentioned actually worked, and any website acknowledged actually existed.
6. Real life as a medium. The game used players’ lives as a platform. Players were not required to build a character or role-play being someone other than themselves.
7. Collaborative storytelling. Game designers incorporated player content and responded to players’ actions, analysis and speculation by adapting the narrative and intentionally left “white space” for the players to fill in.

2. Breaking the rules

Establishing and following these parameters paved the way for the Beast to be such a successful game. The creators of the Lost Experience didn’t comply with several of these rules and set themselves up for potential failure.

Rule #4 is maybe the most important of all. Consumers, for the most part, don’t like being pandered to. This is especially true of fans of a show like Lost. All that participants of the Beast had to go on were ambiguous phrases on movie posters and trailers. With the Lost Experience, the producers announced that it was going to happen. They sent out press releases telling everyone it was coming. They didn’t trust their audience’s curiosity to let the viral marketing do it’s job. They spoon-fed their audience, disengaging them from the start.

To make matters worse, they broke rule #5 by allowing sponsorships to creep in. Who knew that Alvar Hanso worked for Jeep? Or that Rachel Blake loves Sprite? I’m exaggerating, but these sponsorships are like flashing neon signs saying, “This is a marketing campaign! This is not reality!.”

And finally, one of the things that made the Beast so great was that the game designers would change content and storylines on the fly because of things the participants would do. The Lost Experience was planned from beginning to end, defeating the spirit of rule #7. If you’re just going to tell a story, why not tell it in your TV show?

3. The last straw.

Despite the flaws in the game structure illustrated above, the Lost Experience could have pulled everything together with a killer storyline. In the Beast, the story was set 50 years after the events in AI. The characters and plot stood on their own. You didn’t need the game to enjoy the movie, but the game enriched the movie, giving the universe of the movie an added layer of intrigue for those who followed the Beast.

With the Lost Experience, the producers gave away one of the most integral mysteries of the first two seasons of the show: the meaning of those damn numbers. So, if you didn’t follow the game, you’ll never get resolution to what was presented as a pretty important element of the show. I can imagine watching seasons one and two and hearing over and over again about these numbers. There’s an entire Hurley episode dedicated to them! Then here’s season three, and there hasn’t been a single mention of them yet. Why? Because we covered all that during the Lost Experience. Oh, you weren’t there? Tough tacos. I bet, as word of this crept out to the viewers who didn’t participate in the game, so many loyal folks were disenfranchised. Nobody likes to feel excluded, especially by a TV show.

And that’s where the Lost Experience dropped the ball big time: they made it matter too much when it was just supposed to be a game. If they had just followed the blueprint set out by the Beast, maybe their ratings wouldn’t be on the decline. Or maybe if they’d start giving us some concrete answers to their increasingly convoluted mythology: that might help, too.