Photo by Martin Fisch.

Add one part MySpace and one part American Idol to a martini shaker over ice and give it a powerful shake. Serve in a martini glass and garnish with a million dollars and world peace. This wild cocktail is called WorldSings.

Essentially, WorldSings is a new social media network that gives musicians a free venue and connects music lovers to new sounds the world over. Unlike MySpace and Imeem, however, the community being built at WorldSings comes with a significant perk: the potential for musicians to win 1,000,0000 dollars in prizes.

The web has done a lot to pulverize the geographic barriers between us and WorldSings is a good example. Their annual contest for the World’s Best Song is open to anyone in the world with talent and a good enough internet connection to upload a video. Members of the site then get to vote over the course of the year on the artists that they like best.

Like most everything else today, it started with reality TV.

“We were watching Eurovision,” co-founder Dragana Ognenovska told me laughing over the phone when we spoke yesterday. “Do you know Eurovision? It’s like American Idol.”

The Eurovision Song Contest, which has been broadcast since 1956, is an annual music contest held among member countries of the European Broadcasting Union. The premise is simple: every country selects a singer and song to be performed and then other countries vote for the songs, eventually selecting the most popular.

“It’s actually one of the most watched non-sporting events in the world,” Ognenovska told me. She’s right. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, the show is viewed by 600 million people.

“Me and my brother, we thought, wow, why don’t we do something like this for the world?”

That was only a year ago. Today, WorldSings is a social network blossoming with talent and the rush that comes every time a user discovers a new band or artist.

Anyone can join the site for free and begin browsing bands by country, keywords or genre immediately.

“For bands, it’s great, you get to upload your music for free, and we don’t take the rights to the music,” Ognenovska said. “And you can expand your fan base—we give musicians the statistical information so you know where your votes are coming from. Let’s say you’re Canadian and Canadians don’t love your music, but Brazil may love what you’re doing. You don’t know exactly who voted for you, but you get the demographic information such as age and country.”

WorldSings offers report-like stats on fans so bands know who’s digging their stuff. But being able to check in on your fans’ details isn’t really new in the world of social media, where everyone slaps that kind of information right on their profiles.

“There’s a climax,” Ognenovska told me when I asked how WorldSings is different from sites like MySpace and Imeem. “There, you put your music up, people check it out, but you’re not looking forward to something, whereas here you’re looking forward to a contest that’s happening every year. You can win 500,000 dollars or 10,000 as a finalist, so you’re working toward something, you’re not just adding friends and putting events up so people go to your shows.”

Another difference is that unlike most other musical competitions, WorldSings’ World’s Best Song fosters individuality among participants.

“WorldSings is not like American Idol in that we’re here for the musicians,” Ognenovska told me. “We’re not looking for people that just sing well or not. American Idol is a great concept, but you have to have your own music, your own style, to be a musician. It’s really hard—you may sing like Mariah Carey, but can you do that for yourself and be someone totally different? We’re looking for the trade musicians that put in the hard work, for the musicians that go out, spend their money, write their own songs, play and put everything together.”

Even with the lure of such a hefty sum, time and again, Ognenovska impressed upon me that WorldSings seeks to be more than a contest.

“We’re really trying to make a home, too. A home for people,” she told me. “It’s more than a place where you go make money. We want to bring people from all over the world under one roof. Music is a universal language, and we want too bring everyone in through that to promote peace.”

Music as a trojan horse for peace? Their vision of involves working with charities around the world and donating a part of their profits to varying important global causes.

“We plan on giving part of our proceeds to charities,” Ognenovska said. “We’ll do little fund-raising events where all the money will go to charities—all over the world, not just the US, in every continent. We still don’t have a clear-cut plan about how it’s going to be done, though we are working with several ideas right now. Once we have it figured out, we’re going to put that information on the site.”

When I asked her whether her interest in music originates from personal aspiration as a musician, Ognenovska confessed she plays no instruments.

“But I love music and I’ve traveled around the world and listened to all kinds of music,” she said. “I always wanted to do something with music, but I’m not really talented when it comes to being a musician so I had to get in on the back end of it.”

WorldSings is a wonderfully ambitious way to go about it.

Of Possible Interest:
WorldSings Official Contest Rules

While Celebrity gossip blogs have existed for a while and Hulu, which brings film and television to computers everywhere, won best of show for film and TV at the South by Southwest: Interactive awards this year, in general, the merging of Hollywood and the web has been slow and clumsy.

Enter Leslie Gornstein, the Answer Bitch for E! Online. After working at a start-up that failed and spending some years freelancing, Gornstein got a column online when an editor at E! approached her in 2004.

“He was looking for a sassier, angrier ‘Ask Marilyn’ character,” Gornstein explained over coffee at Caffe Luxxe in Brentwood, where she met with me, Laurie Percival, editor-in-chief of Lalawag and Macala Wright, director of marketing and PR for 1928 Jewelry.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for someone to be the answer bitch, you can be the answer bitch,’” Gornstein recalled. “I said ‘all right.’”

Thus, the entertainment question and answer column ‘Ask The Answer Bitch’ was born. Gornstein never looked back. After living and breathing the celebrity lifestyle for four years, writing a book was natural progression. Her book The A-List Playbook, was released by Skyhorse Publishing last month.

“Despite what’s going on in technology right now and despite the ways that you can push yourself out there to a lot of people, people still see a book as a calling card,” Gornstein said. “I learned some really fascinating basic facts about Hollywood. But there was no compendium of it anywhere—the fact that celebrities have three nannies per child, the fact the average celebrity spends an hour a day with their child, and maybe three to four during a vacation period, the fact that most celebrities get 20,000 dollars a month of free stuff—and the fact that’s how you can gauge if they’re A-list or not. I wanted to put it in a survival guide format because I thought that was the most fun way to read it. But really it’s a window for the rest of us about how those people really live.”

“Are you using social media to promote your book?” Lalawag’s Laurie Percival asked.

“Everything that has an internet connection is now my bitch when it comes to promoting my book,” Gornstein responded, laughing. “Facebook, MySpace—not so much, there is something really disco about that. It looks like a Lebanese disco whenever I go on there! I can’t deal with that. So Facebook, Twitter, E! Online—even World of Warcraft. If it has a line out to the world, it’s my bitch.”

Gornstein, who started tweeting as @answerbitch only last November has almost 2,000 followers. She follows almost everyone back.

Macala Wright can’t get over the information saturation that comes with following that many people on Twitter. She confessed she’d pulled a Loic just a few weeks ago to make her stream more manageable and reflected on how annoyed some people got when they were unfollowed.

“Someone has decided following everyone back is Tweetiquette and you know what? I think people are taking things way too personal,” Gornstein replied. “Because, what does that mean when I don’t return someone’s phone call? Sometimes I’m just not going to return a phone call.”

“I think about this all the time, too,” Laurie Percival pitched in. “Do I have to reply to every @message? How do people do this all day long? There’s no way!”

She described with awe the people who sent personalized direct messages (DMs) after she followed them.

“I just don’t know how they have time,” she said. “So I just don’t do it.”

“You could send out auto-DMs.” Gornstein suggested.

We looked at her with horror. I think one of us even gasped.

“The only reason I think an auto-DM would be offensive, and I got one of these recently, ‘thank you for following, be sure to link my blog’—that’s not cool,” Gornstein defended her position. “When people follow me I send out an auto-message that says, ‘Welcome to the all American festival that is me!’ I don’t see that as a particularly obnoxious thing to do.”

Gornstein seems to have an inherent understanding of how to work new media and leverage the power of real-time user feedback.

“I’m really careful to do it,” she said about self-promotion. “You have to come correct about it, as the drug dealers say. You come to people correct and you say ‘yes, I’m pimping now,’ or I’ll make it participatory and say, ‘correct me if I’m wrong…’ and people like that. It’s conversation. I think that’s respectful.”

She limits the bulk of her self-promotion to Sundays and constantly invites input from her followers and readers. To a large extent, the web has allowed her following to grow and thrive.

“On the internet we have the concept of microcelebrity—being famous for fifteen people, as Momus said in the early 90s,” I told her. “Do you think of yourself as one?”

“I’m definitely famous for fifteen people,” she responded. “My husband loves me!”

“Do you think microcelebrities could apply some of the knowledge found in your book?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “You really need to be visible planet-wide to be able to sling this kind of power around.”

“So you don’t think Julia Allison could get through airport security without having to remove her stilettos?”

“No,” she replied. “Microcelebrities are most famous to themselves. Without the internet, would these people be famous?”

Sounds like a challenge to me. Hear that, NonSociety?

Gornstein pointed to a copy of her book on the coffee table, buried under iPhones, packs of cigarettes and idle Flip cams.

“These people are all cross-media megastars,” she said. “If the internet did not exist, Julia Allison would be a nice intern somewhere, working her microminis and then maybe one day meet Tina Brown and have something nice happen to her for a year. She’s extremely bright and when you read what she writes you see it’s well thought-out, but to be really famous your face needs to be recognizable, your name needs to be recognizable—by more than a small subset of people. If you said, ‘I saw Julia Allison yesterday!’ most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. But if you said, ‘I saw Julia Roberts yesterday!’ they’d know what you were talking about.”

She’s right. Even so, the section about how Paris Hilton plays the press (“The Paris Hilton Method,” page 65) could be of some use to aspiring fameballers—I’ll trade Laurie’s home phone for Owen Thomas’!

Seriously, though, the way fame is spreading on the web, and with microcelebrity having such a wide and bizarre array of wonders and dangers (from the power you can exert dating the founders of your choice start-up to death by commenter execution) I think there’s a definite sequel there.

Of Possible Interest:
Leslie Gornstein will be signing books and holding a live chat in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 19, 2009, at 7:00PM at the Barnes and Noble at the Grove on 189 Grove Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036. Call (323) 525-0270.

Full disclosure—Leslie gave me a copy of her book. Yes, I’ve read it, but I’m not gonna tell you just how juicy it is. I’ll leave it by saying that two friends have already attempted to steal it.

POPPORN.com offers an light-hearted spin on adult entertainment industry news and events and provides regular fun, irreverent video content. I caught wind of it when they added me on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I knew right away I had to get some more information, so I shot off an e-mail to editor-in-command Brian Bangs to get the skinny on how the site came about, how they’re making use of social media to gain popularity and where they wanna take their vision.

When did POPPORN get started and what’s the concept behind it?

POPPORN started unofficially in March of this year. Our goal with the site was to create something that offered a totally different perspective on the adult industry and then cross over adult and mainstream content.

It seems that even as the adult industry continues to reach into the mainstream there aren’t many sites dedicated to this concept. Sure, you have adult industry news sites which serve a great purpose, but they don’t really offer much to the casual adult fan.

POPPORN tries to create an environment that can reach into a more wide-spread demographic and retain a sense of humor about what adult content is.

How did the idea come about?

The idea was kind of a fluke. We are all amateur film makers with an interest in the adult business and I’m kind of a project guy so we decided at last year’s AVN [the Oscars of adult entertainment] to bring a camera and interview folks. Our perspective is a little more skewed than most adult news or review agencies and the folks and studios we covered really liked what we were doing: giving adult an attitude and opinion. So we figured creating a blog where this content could reside made the most sense. Sort of right time scenario.

Do you feel the industry has a need for this kind of angle?

I’m not sure there was a need for what we were doing, It would be a little arrogant to believe that, but I think what we saw was a void in the market for this kind of content. We knew that we could do something a little different that could put an edge on adult content, yet still keep it more mainstream for folks who aren’t diehard porn fanatics, while at the same time, adding a little levity to the adult industry as a whole.

So you see yourself developing into a mainstream-adult industry hybrid media outlet, a sort of sex for the common man, fun, accessible and real.

I would be cautious in saying we believe we can become a mainstream porn outlet, I don’t see that as a goal. But I do see us as being a fun resource for folks who are either into porn or curious about porn. A site that can give a laugh while still giving folks a valuable look into the adult industry.

Would you say it was accurate to say POPPORN was an SNL-meets-The Onion of adult entertainment?

Hmm, I never thought about the SNL angle, but maybe, yes.

Are you making money with the site? If not, how do you finance your endeavors?

We are making money off of the site. We sell advertising and while it’s not making us rich, it runs our site.

A lot of people are getting on the social media bandwagon—obviously Twitter was how we connected initially. How has that been working for you?

I think that taking advantage of social networking is the key in a web 2.0 environment. Twitter and Myspace have been excellent resources in helping folks find us who may not have had the opportunity to find us in the past. Those networking sites spread like wildfire and we’ve been very successful with finding new readers taking advantage of them.

Honestly, the success we have had has been through a lot of persistence and word of mouth. We’ve just focused on trying to create something new and unique, something that we are proud of that makes us laugh. It seems that kind of attention to the process has resulted in folks responding very positively and it’s trickled down from there via word of mouth.

What are your visions for POPPORN in the future?

A ton. We actually launched a sweepstakes for this year’s AEE [Adult Entertainment Expo] show sponsored by AVN so we’ll be running around shooting tons of content there. We’re also shooting the red carpet at the AVN Awards with Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake, she’s co-hosting with our host Spock Buckton and then in the New Year we are shooting our first adult film. We are partnering with a major adult studio to bring our retardation to a living room near you!

What’s your first film about?

Our first film is kind of classified at the moment. Ideas tend to get ripped off like crazy in the adult business but it will tie into POPPORN very directly and feature a lot of the characters and stars we feature on the site.

As filmmakers do you eventually see yourselves eventually running your own studio?

We are considering developing into a studio; however, there is so much bad porn out there we want to take it very slow to make sure what we put out is worth the consumers’ dollars.

What do you mean when you talk about bad porn?

There is an influx of cheap, poorly-made porn. Bad lighting, poor production values, etc. When someone tries to make a funny adult film, it’s rarely funny. I mean, watch Not The Bradys XXX and you will see what I mean. As for how we can improve on it—I think that we have a certain personality that will come through in our films.

POPPORN isn’t currently looking for talent for their debut film, but they’ll always take your n00dz.