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[jonatj38]

 [PRESS] Articles and Media mentions about this Experience

[Strings]

Not quite an article, but Channel4.com is currently showing a banner advert for The Hanso Foundation. The adverts feature the little Joops picture that slides down the page. Very nice =] If it's not showing, then refresh a few times. The ads are random.

Channel 4 is the UK channel that shows Lost by the way, in case anyone wasn't aware.

[Jenna]

Got this article in an Internet magazine

[puma88]

not sure if this has been posted but i have just listened to the official abc lost podcast and when damon lindelof and carlton cuse answered a question about the hanso websites they proceeded to go all out tinag and say that 'they had included real life companys and people into the show and now they were getting legal threats from hugh mccintyre' ....so yeah...interesting....

[Astald]

Ok, this is pretty interesting. I was over at The Lost Experience Clues and apparently Hugh McIntyre is going to be on Jimmy Kimmel Live this Wednesday night. If you don't believe me, just look here:
http://abc.go.com/primetime/jimmykimmel/
That's Wednesday 12:05am EST, don't miss it! And if someone could get a video capture of it, that would be great.


(no, it's NOT! It will be on Wednesday LATE NIGHT, or Thursday 12:05AM and not EST but EDT; that is for the live broadcast, while the West Coast will see it local time delayed as usual -- catherwood)

[bakntime]

[Lucy]

I think that is what puma88 meant when he said "they proceeded to go all out tinag"

[konamouse]

[PRESS] Yahoo article about Advertising

[oli]

Here's a good article from Canada:

24 May 2006 - The Globe and Mail

It has been called TV 2.0: The hit series Lost has left passive viewing behind, entering an interactive space where fans comb through fake websites for clues and read real books by fake authors in an attempt to figure out what is happening on a mysterious island. This is either a brave new world of storytelling or an absurd marketing gimmick -- and it shouldn't really matter which, since both could be entertaining to follow.

The Lost story, in one form or another, promises to continue over the summer even though its second season wraps up tonight (ABC, 9 p.m., CTV, 10 p.m.). Here is an overview of what the show's busy producers are up to -- and one person's opinion as to which strands are worth following:

A plane crashes on a tropical island and the survivors are set upon by bizarre outside forces, including a polar bear, researchers who switch between lab coats and rags, and a wispy monster with a built-in projector. Add a few men making googly eyes at Kate (Evangeline Lilly) -- plus 27 different showdowns with a miserly character named Sawyer for supplies -- and you get the general drift of the science-fiction-tinged action soap that is Lost.

During a commercial break from the madness of its May 3 episode, an ad for something called The Hanso Foundation was aired. There was a 1-800 number to call and an elaborate new website for the fake organization was launched (thehansofoundation.org). Callers and web visitors were directed to clues that were part of a game, The Lost Experience. It belongs to a category known as alternate reality games, or ARGs, wherein fictional stories are combined with real-world elements. There are puzzles to solve and research to be done using a mix of real and contrived websites.

The Hanso site, with its visually impressive splash page and flashing clues in unexpected places, is certainly worth a visit just to see the effort (and the real funds) involved in the game, but several other linked sites have been derided for being blatant ads, especially one for a soft drink that has little to do with the castaways on the island.

Lost was not the first to go the route of an ARG linked to a TV show. The Canadian series ReGenesis, which is aired on TMN here, has a strikingly similar game going, including a convincing website for an organization called the Ontario Genomics Institute. Like the Hanso, it offers itself up as a research-minded non-profit group.

Since these alternate reality games rely heavily on the Internet, following clues often leads to sites set up by people who are several steps ahead of you. This means you can easily get caught up in the game -- or you can completely skip the research and simply read the plot points that relate to the shows. (The first few hits on a Web search for "The Lost Experience" will aid any would-be cheaters.)

From a game point of view, both the Lost and ReGenesis ARGs are good experiments, but they aim at very familiar targets: Nine out of 10 video games involve evil corporations, usually with secretive research divisions, that are set up to look benevolent. In a world where seeing through marketing and spin is a daily necessity -- where a law called the Clean Air Act actually strips away environmental protection, for example -- two more trips through the wonders of Orwellian language may appeal to some. But in terms of content, little new ground is being uncovered. (In related news, a full video game for Lost was announced yesterday; it will be developed by Ubisoft's Montreal studio and should be on store shelves by next year.)

Around the same time as The Lost Experience was introduced, a novel called Bad Twin was released by Hyperion, the book-publishing division of Disney, which also owns Lost's home network, ABC. On the show, Sawyer is glimpsed reading a manuscript called Bad Twin, and the book's author, Gary Troup, was supposedly among the passengers on the doomed plane. Rearrange the letters of his name and you get "purgatory," which is connected to one of the more persistent theories about what is happening to the hapless survivors: They are being tested in limbo.

The novel is a routine mystery about a rich man hiring a detective to find a lost twin, but it has references to the plot of the TV series and the Hanso Foundation sprinkled throughout. None of it adds up to much, but it has been designed (by Stephen King, some say) to be a quick summer read -- some editions even have covers showing the title etched in wet sand, which is as literal an invitation to beach reading as you are likely to find.

The game and the book ultimately help feed what has become a cottage industry: talking and writing about Lost. Theories are posted on-line, distributed in e-mails to co-workers, and discussed in official and unofficial podcasts. J. J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, has certainly proven himself capable of setting up an intriguing mystery, of inviting viewers to fill in gaps with their own hypotheses and imaginings. But with Alias, the answers he eventually provided either confused or turned off much of the audience -- say the name Rambaldi to a former Alias fan and watch them roll their eyes.

Lost may have been forging new types of connections with dedicated viewers over the past few months, but it has also been dropping in the ratings. For people who are not doing the assigned homework and are overwhelmed by the pile of surreal mysteries, Abrams and his team will have to stop focusing on what is lost and find something: a good answer or two.

[danteIL]

May 27, 2006: An article in The New York Times about the phenomenon that is Bad Twin.

Warning1: registration required to read the article online.
Warning2: some mild season 2 spoilers therein

Highlights:
Bad Twin is going to be #14 on NYT bestseller list.. whoa!
The ABC rep claims that Gary Troup is the dude that got sucked into the jet engine. yea. okay.
The publisher is really going all out with the whole TINAG aspect of it.


Interesting.

[Gus Raja]

The following link is to an article in last Wednesday's Oregonian that compares the LOST show to Psalm 23...

http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/living/1148437516213010.xml&coll=7

At the top there's also a link to another article about how students at a local Bible college view the show wherein this somewhat interesting quote can be found...

[Center Lot]

I'm fairly rusty on my Asian symbols, but I think the Dharma logo is just a bagua with a swan inside of it. Not a yin yang.

[Gus Raja]

[Center Lot]

Ah yes. I've always assumed the Hanso 'O' was a picture of an upsidedown feather, which made no sense to me. Now I see the resemblence to a yin yang.

Also, have we discerned the meaning of the Namaste lady in the background of the compass on the LYCGY site?

[danteIL]

Entertainment Weekly has a longish article about TLE on it's website here.

There are some interesting tidbits therein, including the fact that this game is supposed to occur in 'three acts' (rogue videos aside, I guess we can presume that P's last message was the end of Act 1?).

There's also this: