Where did they find this guy? Kieren Vogel, a self-confessed loser who, at 35, still lives with his parents, has never earned more than $10,000 a year as a pet shop employee and has a screwed up dating life, has agreed to have his life video-taped 24/7 for six months and broadcast over the Internet on a site called OurPrisoner.com. Wait, it gets sillier. He is confined during this period to a suburban home and all his decisions, like what to eat, what to wear, whom to talk to, will be decided by Internet viewers. If he makes it the whole six months under these conditions, he wins “a prize package that will change his life.â€? Unfortunately, the site delivers what it promises. You get to watch Kieran talk to the camera, or his friends, or his friends talk to the camera 24/7 and, after your register, you can vote on important decisions like should Kieran get his hair cut. Let me tell you about this guy’s hair: he wears his long stringy brown hair in a ponytail that reaches down to his lower back. If Kieran needs an Internet audience to tell him that it’s time to cut that tail, then he truly is incapable of running his own life. I watched the live videocam for about 3 minutes, 2 minutes 30 seconds longer than I really wanted to. This guy is boring – and uncomfortable to watch! He’s painfully skinny and hunched over– with that hair — and buggy eyes.

The site is sponsored by BigString.com, a company that offers “recallable-erasable email accounts�, that runs ads all over the site and random contests in which you must use a BigString email account to participate. Our Prisoner reminds me of Pseudo.com founder Josh Harris’s experiment in 2000 called We Live in Public, (not to mention the movie Ed TV and the TV show Big Brother) where he and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin were supposed to live under similar voyeuristic circumstances for 100 days. The difference is it had no sponsors and promised to capture their “real relationship�, including bedroom and bathroom scenes (thankfully those are not included in OurPrisoner.com). Tanya walked out on Josh after 81 days. We Live In Public failed in terms of their relationship, but still captured viewers, and Wired magazine’s, attention. Kieran, on the other hand, is a lonely shlub looking for input on how he should dress and what he should eat. Reality TV shows are popular because they serve as an escape to your own life, or cross the boundaries as to what you’d ever expect someone to say or do on TV. Deciding that Kieran should eat baked ziti or wear bunny slippers is more boring than most people’s lives.

The consensus from TechCrunch.com is: Been there, done that. Yawn.

Aside from the subject matter being mundane, the site is poorly organized and in great need of some copyediting and navigation advice. But BigString.com has high hopes for their sponsorship experiment as it asks for volunteers to be the next prisoner. They’re currently accepting video and banner advertisers and, obviously, hoping to acquire new customers. Will this be a financially successful experiment for BigString? My vote is no.

Filed under Advertising, Finds. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.