Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Blumenthal mastermind behind Web site
By LOREN FERGUSON/Era Reporter
A local woman has provided an ironic twist on the Orwellian novel "1984." Instead of Big Brother watching you, you can now watch Big Brother right from your own home.
CBS' "Big Brother" is a reality show that also serves as a psychological challenge for the participants. The station screens thousands of applicants and picks 12 people to live in a house for three months.
The catch is that these 12 people have absolutely no contact with the outside world. Television? Nope. Telephone? Fuhggeddabouddit! Not even a nice dinner with family? No way, Jose.
The dozen contestants are left to entertain each other, or, as one can easily predict, get on each other's last nerve. As the season wears on, contestants get voted off one by one until there is a lone winner of the stressful game.
Not only are the participants left to fend for themselves without any relief from the outside world, but they are also on camera all of the time. A cameraman behind every wall catches all of their romantic and embarrassing moments in the house. Sounds like there would be some hair-tearing going on?
Not for Jodi Blumenthal of Bradford, the mastermind behind bigbrotheraddict.com, an interactive Web site that is pretty much self explainable. Those crazy reality-show lovers who just can't get enough of the show can go online at anytime and chat about Big Brother or watch images from the house.
Blumenthal isn't a rookie when it comes to creating complex Web sites like this one. She has been creating homes for organizations and businesses on the Web since 1994 and has training in most of the components of Web site creation. The rest of her knowledge has come from reading and studying on her own.
Blumenthal decided to create the site when she became interested in the show.
"The first year I was really fascinated with the whole process and I had to find out how these people would be able to live without any media or contact with family," she said. "A lot of people became so enamored with the whole process that they couldn't stop watching and that's when the idea for the Web site came to me."
The Web site becomes addicting itself because of its setup. There are live chat rooms, so that when people are watching the show they can also be on their computers discussing the action on screen.
After spending quite a bit of time on the Web site during its first year, Blumenthal became to busy with her business and called for help from people familiar with the Webpage.
"I really tried to make the site have easy to manage elements so that I could have an administrator go in and do things on the Web site and not necessarily have any computer background," Blumenthal said.
Now that the site is up and running, it doesn't require so much work and is more fun than anything.
"This year I wanted it to be less of a maintenance burden," Blumenthal explained. "People submit news articles, photos, links and updates on what's going on in the house and it automatically generates an e-mail to me saying that I need to approve the articles that have come in."
Though CBS does do some censoring, Blumenthal admitted the show is not for kids.
"There are some images that are borderline for going on the Webpage," Blumenthal said. "People are into the art of clipping from the video feed (on the CBS page) and capturing a perfect image between two of the contestants."
Blumenthal's site is free for users, which might entice them to use her site instead of the CBS site.
"The first year CBS didn't charge for the live video feed," Blumenthal said. "The second year they did, and there was a big uproar. It's approximately $9.95 a month for anybody to go on and watch the live feeds on the CBS site."
Blumenthal doesn't get the live feeds that CBS does, but she does suspect that CBS does some censoring on the video feeds.
"They say that the feeds aren't censored but they really are" Blumenthal said. "There have been a lot of complaints this year on the way that they are censoring the feeds. They don't want to give away secrets that are going to be on television."
Blumenthal said that CBS has been supportive of her Web site, which was somewhat surprising to her.
"Sometimes they'll even feature fan sites on the show," she said. "I think that because we are so supportive of their program, they support us in return."
The biggest reward for Blumenthal is the learning experience while creating and updating the Web site.
"It's a good test bed for any new technology that I might have because it gets a lot of traffic," Blumenthal said. "I use bigbrotheraddict.com as a way of learning new ways to build communities on the Web. You can go on the Web site and see how our site has grown from the first two sites."
By "a lot of traffic," Blumenthal means about 50,000 hits a day. So far for the month of July, the Web site has had almost 1 million hits. On days when the show is being aired, she said the site is accessed on an average of 87,000 to 100,000 times. The popularity may be because of the new look the site has.
"We use whatever state of the art technology available to us on our site," she said. "I like doing this Web site because most of the time, customers want a specific design for their site and with this site I get to do anything I want."
Right now, Blumenthal is using some of the tricks that she learned during her second season running the Big Brother Web site to create a site for Olean (N.Y.) General Hospital.
A few example of other sites that she can take credit for are the Bradford Travel Web site, the Olean (N.Y.) Medical Group site and the home domain for the Olean (N.Y.) Family YMCA.
As for bigbrotheraddict.com, Blumenthal says that she will probably keep doing the Web site as the only cost that she incurs is a small amount of her time and $35 a year for rights to the domain name.
"I will probably keep doing it because there is always new software to learn" Blumenthal said. "That, and I think that I would start getting hate mail if I stopped doing the site."
Those addicts can be nasty when they don't have their fix!
