Home > MetNews

Facebook documentary seeks personal diaries

Fanatical Facebook users have a chance to bring a video of their making to the mainstream in a new endeavor called Facebook Diaries.

Starting March 27, 18-to-24-year-olds will have their chance to become documentary filmmakers.

Facebook Diaries is a collaboration between the social-networking site http://facebook.com and Emmy-award-winning producer R.J. Cutler. The concept is a take-off from the phenomenon of Internet video-sharing. Facebook users will submit short video diaries on ten different topics. The best videos will be chosen by Cutler and then broadcast as a 30-minute program on both Comcast on Demand and Comcast’s video site, http://ziddio.com.

“As a social utility, Facebook taps into the twin desires of young people to be distinct individuals and to connect to a larger community,” Cutler said in a news release.

The show will have a 10-episode run that is tentatively scheduled for this summer. It aims to provide immediate, intimate portraits of the submitters.

The first round of video submissions began on Tuesday with the topic “Who Am I?” Each topic will have a two-week window for submissions before the next topic is announced.

“One of the goals of Facebook Diaries is to present the raw authentic stories of a generation that is often portrayed as superficial and narcissistic,” Cutler said in the release.

The diaries can be created with a variety of hardware, including web cams, cell phones, camcorders and even still cameras.

“The most vital element of the video diary is not the hardware, but the individual who created it,” Cutler said in the release.

Facebook is a social utility site that was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. The site has over 16 million registered users in over 47,000 geographic, work-related, collegiate and high school networks, and according to a ComScore MediaMetrix report, ranked seventh-most in visited U.S. websites.

Budding documentarians can submit their videos at http://ziddio.com, or by joining the Ziddio-sponsored group on http://facebook.com.