The Web consulting firm Blue State Digital helped the Obama campaign raise some $500 million online, catapulting a relative political novice into the Oval Office.

Its next challenge: Help fashion bible Vogue magazine cash in on its far-reaching influence at a time when advertising dollars are bleeding out of print.

Vogue has hired Blue State Digital to help analyze the Conde Nast publication’s audience as part of a broader, revenue-generating push that ultimately will involve implementing paid subscriptions on Vogue.com, said Tom Florio, publishing director for Vogue and several other Conde Nast magazines.

The collaboration between magazine publisher and Web strategist began several months ago when Diego Scotti, Vogue’s executive director of marketing, emailed Blue State Digital co-founder Joe Rospars. Vogue executives, keenly aware that the monthly magazine is just one of many ways people connect with the publication, had been looking for ways to capitalize on its influence.

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For Kiaya Steele, the men in suits and dark glasses who appeared suddenly through the raindrops of a New Hampshire morning were the first sign that something very unusual was going on.

One of the men stood under an umbrella next to the car Steele and her friend Kellin had been riding in moments earlier and delivered a message. As Kelli’s sister Jenna was brought out of a second car that had pulled up mysteriously behind them, Steele was told that if she couldn’t quickly prove that she was “the real Kiaya,” the bomb planted inside Jenna would explode.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg of a day spent driving all around the countryside, complete with vans, staple guns, cameramen in trees, threats, red phone booths, and a series of hidden clues.

But this wasn’t a situation for the FBI. Rather, it was a very small-scale–and low-tech–version of what is known as an alternate-reality game, an entertainment genre that has grown in popularity in recent years, especially because its traditional use of mixed-media–the Web, cell phones, social media, and others–can allow large numbers of people to play together collaboratively.

Over the years, the games have become a favorite marketing tool of large companies like Microsoft, which has commissioned huge ARGs, as they’re known, for the launches of things like the video game Halo 2 and Windows Vista. Indeed, the first widely known ARG was called The Beast, and was used as a promotion for the release of the Steven Spielberg film “AI: Artificial Intelligence.”

Those versions of ARGs have seven-figure budgets and allow thousands of people to participate. Yet while they get most of the ink written about ARGs, there has long been a steady stream of games built for very small audiences or, as in the case of Steele and the friend with a “bomb” insider her, an audience of one. It turned out that the intrigue was all part of a day-long mystery concocted by Steele’s boyfriend, and involving several of their friends, as part of an elaborate marriage proposal.

“It’s such a cool format, and the people who can make it through a whole one of these get an experience that no other media can provide.”

–Jim Babb, founder of the AGR Awkward Hug

“We use a lot of fictional analogies in our lives–gangsters in an alley (and) later in the quest there was a Soviet scientist, all themes that had played out in our courtship,” Steele recalled. “We would write stories of sorts to one another before we dated. We’d take an image and run with it until it was too tired to move anymore. The whole thing was kind of a collaboration of our lives together.”

Given that the game Steele’s new fiance planned for his proposal had such a small audience, it was, to be sure, at the extreme end of the size and complexity spectrum for ARGs. But at any given moment, there are several ARGs being played that have slightly larger, yet still very small, numbers of participants. And it is these games, usually carried out at minimal expense and with no deep-pocketed sponsor, that may well be the true lifeblood of the increasingly popular world of ARGs.

And while there are practical limits to the kinds of interactions that are possible between the people running the larger games–the so-called puppetmasters–and the players, these smaller adventures offer everyone involved a much greater chance at direct communication.

“There are quite a few people making [small] ARGs, either without profit in mind or marketing [who are] saying, ‘Look at me, I can do this,’” said Michael Andersen, who runs ARGNet, the leading source for news and information about the genre. “The motivations for a lot of these things vary. [One] advantage of doing these grassroots games is working for yourself. [And], it becomes a lot easier to have those one-on-one interactions [and the] feeling that not only can you communicate, but you can change what’s going on” for fans.

Robot love

Earlier this year, a New York duo calling themselves Awkward Hug built and pulled off a small-scale ARG called Must Love Robots, which was centered around the idea of helping make love connections between people and robots.

Through a series of Web sites, social media, YouTube videos and more, Awkward Hug founders Jim Babb and Tanner Ringerud turned a $3,000 budget into a 3-month-long game with at least 300 participants.

Babb said that the project, which was entirely self-funded, came out of an original desire to create a Web series about a robot. But when the two realized that they could “make it so much more” by adding the various multimedia elements, they set out to build a bona fide ARG, one that would allow them to communicate directly with almost anyone who wanted to talk with them, even to the point of playing online games of Scrabble. And, of course, there were real-world meetings between prospective “dates” and the game’s signature robot (see video below).

Given the huge gap in size between a large-scale ARG and something like Must Love Robots, it might be surprising that many of the ultimate goals are the same. It certainly was to Babb.

“What surprised me the most,” Babb said, was that “players want more and they want to do things with you. It becomes a collaboration. The audience becomes characters.”

And while it’s not always possible for everyone to participate in person–Must Love Robots attracted players from around the world–one of the great things about the ARG genre is how many people who play do participate directly in one way or another. In Babb and Ringerud’s game, for example, 20 people created costumes related to the story line and sent in pictures of themselves wearing the outfits, all of which were intended to be folded into the larger story line.
Kids creators
A different kind of small-scale ARG was Find Chesia, a project put on by the Finksburg, Md., library on behalf of its local schoolchildren and their summer reading program.

The story, said organizer Heather Owings, was centered on the story of Chesia, a 14-year-old girl whose parents have gone missing on an archaeological dig and who sets out to find them. The game was designed by five small teams of 11- to 15-year-olds.

Like with many small-scale ARGs, Find Chesia encountered a series of structural problems, most notably, Owings said, the fact that the kids turned out to be resistant–mainly due to regular conditioning about the dangers of online anonymity–to the idea of posting information in character to the game’s Web site. In addition, there was the unforeseen problem that almost none of the kids were old enough to drive to the game’s real-world locations.

Still, the game was successful enough for Owings to want to run the game again next summer, incorporating some of the lessons they learned this year. And despite the problems, Owings said that she came away with an appreciation for what the ARG genre can offer its organizers and participants.

“I like that ARGs use tools that were set up to do something else, and they’re used to create something new,” Owings said. “It’s the taking of something and changing it and using it for something it wasn’t intended [for] in a new and creative way.”

Plus, she said, Finding Chesia turned out to be a perfect way to get the kids in on the enjoyment of building their own game, even though they lacked many of the skills generally considered necessary for such a task.

“It’s a way for teens to create their own game,” Owings said, “and we really enjoyed that aspect of it…They don’t need to be computer programmer [and] here is a way for them to take ownership for creating a game on a fairly small level. [As well, it] helps them to realize how much the Internet does facilitate networking within the community, as well as outside the community.”

These days, said ARGNet’s Andersen, there are at least as many small, grassroots ARGs being produced as the larger, corporate-backed games. And those numbers could grow as an increasing number of people become versed in the tools for building them. According to Andersen, teachers at the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Mary Washington are both teaching classes about ARGs.

But the real upside in the genre’s growth will come naturally, as more people in more local communities get exposed to ARGs and discover the joy of playing something truly interactive and truly collaborative.

And while it’s true that most small ARGs quickly peter out as players and organizers discover that they don’t have the time or energy to follow through, there are those who feel that the ultimate payoff of participating is there for anyone with the stamina or commitment to grab it.

“For an independent ARG, the most successful thing you can do is complete it and have your core audience go all the way through,” said Awkward Hug’s Babb. “It’s such a cool format, and the people who can make it through a whole one of these get an experience that no other media can provide.”

Copyright ©1995-2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet–the empowerment of the amateur.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

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China’s military is under attack. At least its Web site is…from hackers.

In a sign that China’s Ministry of National Defense faces the same kind of Internet security challenges that militaries around the world have reported, its new Web site was attacked more than 2.3 million times within a month of its August launch. The state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported that revelation Wednesday in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Chinese defense department’s site, Ji Guilin.

In the report, Ji said it battled down a variety of hackers and no harm was done to China’s national security. He said the site has boosted its network security.

He didn’t say where the hacker attacks originated.

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Does this sound familiar?

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google (GOOG) era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.

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For many women, a $1,000 dress is something they admire in the pages of a glossy magazine or see draped on the frame of a celebrity–not an item hanging in their closet.

But a nascent Web site called Rent the Runway is hoping to make high-end fashions much more accessible and almost as easy as renting a movie from Netflix (NFLX).

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This Is Why You’re Fat, a Web site for food gone awry, is holding a photo competition in which contestants visit New York street vendors and shoot themselves with coronaries-on-plates.

It’s not a contest for the faint of heart. For a site whose tag line is “Where dreams become heart attacks,” each food truck will create an appropriate contest dish, like chocolate cupcakes with bacon shavings.

This Is Why You’re Fat will tweet the location of the participating vendors every 20 minutes, and competitors are to respond by sending a photo of him- or herself with the dish. The first player to post pictures from all six trucks will win a party for 25 friends catered by his food truck of choice, as well as free copies of This Is Why You’re Fat’s new book. The competition will also be filmed by VendrTV, a weekly street-food podcast.

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Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN unveiled its new Web site Thursday evening in a presentation that was part Hollywood and part Apple (AAPL).

All week long, the network had been touting the event, dubbed “The Unveiling.” Top CNN executives and invited reporters packed a corporate screening room on the 10th floor of the Time Warner Center as KC Estenson, CNN.com’s general manager, took the stage. He looked like somewhat like Steve Jobs in a dark sweater, jeans and wireless microphone.

“It is a revolution for us,” Mr. Estenson said, as he flashed the first glimpse of the new CNN.com, which goes live on Monday. “This is a really special event.”

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A new Oklahoma law that will allow the state to publish detailed information about abortion patients online has created uproar from critics who view it as a blow to women’s rights and is providing the latest fodder in the debate over online-data privacy.

The Huffington Post reported that the law, which would go into effect Nov. 1, would require Oklahoma women who have abortions to disclose the following details:

• Date of abortion
• County where the abortion is performed
• Age of mother
• Marital status
• Race of mother
• Years of education
• State or foreign country of residence of mother
• Total number of previous pregnancies

Doctors will be required to report this information to the State Department of Health so that it can be posted on a public Web site. Supporters say that patients’ privacy rights are protected because their names and other personal information will not be reported.

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The creators of HealthMap, a Web site that aggregates disease information world-wide, have created an iPhone application that lets consumers keep tabs on nearby outbreaks and submit reports of their own.

Outbreaks Near Me includes a map that is updated hourly with reports from more than 30,000 information sources. Users can sign up for alerts on specific diseases, such as swine flu, and see where outbreaks are occurring.

John Brownstein, an assistant professor at Children’s Hospital Boston and one of HealthMap’s creators, said the goal of the free app isn’t to spark panic about the H1N1 virus. “In no way are we trying to tell people not to go into certain areas,” he said. On the other hand, if a serious outbreak occurred, the app could help notify users and get information to them quickly.

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Ford Motor Co. (F) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) are teaming up to market the auto maker’s redesigned Taurus sedan.

Ford and Microsoft first teamed up a few years ago to launch the Sync telematics system, which enables drivers to hook Bluetooth entertainment and communications devices into the car. Now, Ford is using a technology from Microsoft–known as tags–in its print advertising materials in order to give potential car buyers a more interactive introduction to the car.

Looking very much like a bar code found on most consumer products, the black and white tags are integrated into the design of an ad and can be photographed by anyone carrying a camera-equipped smart phone, such as Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone, or Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIMM) Blackberry. Once the image has been downloaded, it then links a consumer to a company-designed website.

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A year after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, former workers keep in touch with each other on a niche social network called Forever Lehman. Strangely, it was founded by an ex-Bear Stearns employee.

Sanjeev Naraine spent eight years at Bear Stearns, most recently as a global vice president of videoconferencing. After being laid off in October 2007, the 31-year-old decided to create a network for his colleagues on the social-networking-creation site Ning, “almost like a virtual elevator where you can meet and say hi,” he said. He launched Who Killed the Bear? in May 2008.

When Lehman went under, Mr. Naraine figured he might as well create something for its staffers too. “It was more of just a gut feeling that I should just reserve the [Forever Lehman] name, and if things get bad, I could just launch it,” he said. “It was a pretty good guess on my part, anyways. And it only cost me a couple of bucks to buy the Web site.”

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Blue Nile Inc. (NILE) is expected to unveil a major overhaul of its Web site Tuesday as the online jeweler tries to broaden its appeal, especially to women. But like other e-commerce sites retooling to combat slowing growth, it faces the tricky task of trying to make improvements without losing core customers.

The vast majority of those who buy rings and necklaces from Blue Nile are men, drawn to the extra information and control–as well as possible discounts–they get by shopping online instead of at a high-pressure jewelry counter. Yet most Blue Nile purchases are given to women, whom the retailer would like to have a more premium view of its brand.

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Two years ago, when other media executives were convinced that the only way to succeed on the Web was to give away their content, “we were regarded as slightly freakish,” says John Ridding, chief executive of The Financial Times.

The FT, which had charged readers for access to its Web site since 2002, stuck with that strategy, merely tweaking its system to try to draw in more readers.

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Outside the local train station, the Maplewood Civic Association maintains a bulletin board plastered with news of jazz festivals and yoga classes for this small, affluent New Jersey town. One day last winter, an unassuming new flyer appeared, nestled between ones hawking a fish tank and a drum set, titled, “Introducing the Local.” The flyer describes the Local as “a community Web site by you and for these communities, mentored by The New York Times.”

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