Ask A Ninja Special Delivery 13 "SXSW 10 Years"
The Ninja made a video for the SXSW Web Awards, enjoy. — Click below to Download this movie: iPod/Quicktime — If you like it, tell a friend! — You got questions, Ninja got answers. — Remember to send your questions to askaninja@gmail.com.
Context & Ripple Effects
The finalists in the 10th Annual SXSW Web Awards were announced on March 12, drawn from hundreds of global submissions of sites launched or redesigned in 2006 — so this year's ceremony doubles as a ten-year marker for the interactive festival. For the show itself, organizers turned not to television or film talent but to Ask A Ninja, commissioning "Special Delivery 13" as the ceremony's video.
That booking is the story: a two-person web-video act, built on a Gmail submission loop and distributed here as an iPod/Quicktime download, filling the entertainment slot at one of the web industry's signature events. It tracks the same shift seen across this year's panels, where blogging practice itself became stage material — a contrast to earlier coverage like 10 Questions for Seth Godin, which treated the web as a subject of interviews rather than a source of on-stage performers.
First-order effects
- SXSW gets ceremony entertainment produced natively for the web, while Ask A Ninja converts the appearance into a downloadable episode pushed straight to iPods through its own site — no network or distributor in between.
- The audience-facing question pipeline (askaninja@gmail.com) means every high-profile appearance feeds back into more episodes, tightening the creator-to-viewer loop that made the act bookable in the first place.
Second-order effects
- Other conferences and awards shows now have a template for sourcing hosting and interstitials from web-native personalities, turning paid or comped appearances into a revenue and visibility channel for video creators.
- For traditional entertainment intermediaries — agents, networks, production companies — the risk is being routed around when festivals can commission work directly from acts whose audiences already exist online.
Third-order effects
- If marquee events keep booking performers on the strength of their existing web audiences rather than credentials from film or TV, the path to mainstream visibility for comedy and video talent starts running through the feed rather than the agency roster — a structural change in who gets to be professionally funny.
The trend: Web-native video creators are moving from distributing around traditional media to being hired directly by institutions like SXSW, marking 2007 as the point where online audiences become a professional credential.