Paik-Heavy / Fake Site

As I’ve mentioned before, there were many components of my fake site. Here are some:

• Home Pages (the home page was updated several times):
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
• Squidoo Lens
• MySpace Page
• Puzzle
• This version of the home page had a hidden link to this puzzle page which further linked to these pages: one, two, three, four.
• I sold this book on eBay.
• I made a few videos for YouTube

The Official Lost Podcast with Damon and Carlton was pretty good. In addition to some technical info, like the 6 week mini-season in the fall to be followed by a much longer, no-rerun, season starting in early 2007, they gave some clues about how the story might unfold.

It sounds very likely that Desmond is not dead (and presumably Locke and Eko are alive too) - either that or Desmond lives on in back story, like Libby will. But I think Damon and Carlton made it pretty clear that the bright light and vibration noise wasn’t necessarily the hatch blowing up - so the hatch may still be intact.

The other interesting point was that we apparently saw the monster again in Season 2 but we didn’t realize it. I don’t really have any idea what that means, but it’s tempting to re-watch Season 2 to see if I can spot it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a particularly organized approach to the fake site experiement. As a result, I don’t have a detailed recap of how the site evolved. I did try to capture some snapshots along the way, which is what you see with the seven pages below. From the various versions of the home page you can link to most or all of the other pages of the site, but at some point I’ll try to compile a comprehensive list.

There were several versions of the first home page, where the status levels were changed. This is were I felt my first bit of remorse. I was trying to get a site up quickly and so I hadn’t formed any plans for clues or puzzles. As a result, other than the third one, which are the lost numbers (anyone know what those mean?), the contract numbers don’t mean anything. As it became apparent that some people thought the site was part of the game I realized people would be trying to decipher the meaning of those numbers.

Anyway, I tried to avoid fake clues in the future (well, other than the entire thing being fake) because I thought that would be particularly annoying. So, here are seven versions of the home page:

Home Page 1
Home Page 2
Home Page 3
Home Page 4
Home Page 5
Home Page 6
Home Page 7

The online game has already had three corporate sponsors: Sprite, Jeep, and Monster.com. My understanding is that the online game will run throughout the summer, so I’m assuming there will be additional sponsors. Who do you think the next sponsor will be? Take a look over to the right and vote in the little poll!

It will be interesting to see if they continue to run Hanso commercials over the summer, either during other programs or during Lost reruns.

The last official Lost Podcast of the season is out. Entertaining and informative as usual. Check it out.

Most people are probably aware of the in-game sites. I think these are the ones I know about so far:

• The Hanso Foundation
• Persephone - the Hanso Foundation “hacker” that’s almost as annoying as I was with clues, but at least hers mean something!
• subLYMONal - the Sprite sponsored site, recently updated - use 108 as the code (the numbers added up)
• Let Your Compass Guide You - the Jeep sponsored site
• Hanso Careers - the Monster.com sponsored site
• DJ Dan - run by ABC to look like a fan site

There are some “official” Oceanic Air sites and some things related to Gary Troup and Bad Twin but I’m not sure those are actually factoring into the online game.

This is fairly entertaining - I think ABC is stretching it a bit with this fake interview.

I used a variety of web sites to weave my Peter Thompson web. In addition to getting traffic at the basic paik-heavy.com web site I thought it would be interesting to see if people would follow a trail. Initially, I linked directly to some sites - like the PHI-ERI lens on Squidoo. For other things, like the MySpace page, I left them out there for a while to see if anyone would discover them on their own.

At some point during the experiment I had ideas of really trying to leverage these different sites and put together an interesting puzzle or maze. While I did put together some limited puzzles (like this one) I found the experiment consuming too much of my time so I aborted my ideas of a more elaborate treasure hunt.

Another problem I’ve had throughout the experiment is keeping track of what I’ve done and what I’m dong. In retrospect, I wish I had put more planning into the experiment so that I had a clear path when I started. But I didn’t realize anyone would come to the site to begin with so I was caught a little off guard from the start. I’ll try to post things I tried as I remember them. For example, I used a lot of anagrams but now I don’t remember what some of them were for.

I’ve tried to create a comprehensive list of sites that made up the Peter Thompson web. I’ve probably forgot some so I will add those as I think of them.

Sorry guys. Many people figured it out a long time ago - www.paik-heavy.com is a “fake site” - or, as some folks have generously called it, a “fan site”. After a three week run I’ve decided to give it up, for a variety of reasons. If anyone cares, I’ll use this blog to outline what I did, why I did it, and what I learned.

Before I get into any details, let me make one thing clear - I’m not a spammer! Some of you were nice enough to sign up to the email list and you may have received a message or two as part of that but you won’t get anything else from me. It was all part of the experiment.

I didn’t have a master plan going into this and it kind of got out of control quickly. Early on I started feeling bad about leading people on a wild goose chase and a few times I thought about giving up on it. But I figured that there were a lot of fake sites out there, and so part of the game was figuring out which ones were fake. Plus, in most of the forums I was being called out as clearly a fake site, so I assumed most people were on to me. So, if anyone is annoyed and angry that they wasted time on my fake clues, I really do apologize. Hopefully, most people got a chuckle out of it.

Thanks for visiting.

Namaste!

On this site you can find great animal pictures.