new positions, Thompson at the Fresno Bee, and Sloan at the Current. Finally, by the third week of November 2004, they decided to just post the film. They posted it to three blogs: Convergence Chaser, Snarkmarket, and Jason Kottke's popular blog. They never intended it to become as widespread as it did. But it soon became very popular. By December, the film was slashdotted. Several hundred links from various forums and blogs followed in early 2005. In January 2005, they released an update to the original movie, EPIC 2015. The sequel follows the same general direction of the original, but also examines the roles of podcasting, GPS and web map services such as Google Maps. Sloan himself does not believe the future portrayed in the film will actually come to pass, saying that he certainly doesn't believe that Google and Amazon would ever actually merge. He also believes that The New York Times would actually be the last media organization to fold, citing, "some incredibly good and smart things that they do in their online publishing." But he points out that the purpose of the film is not to paint an accurate picture of the future, but rather, to illustrate the fact that the various monopolies of the large media organizations are currently being threatened by many of the new online services. He states that, "It's very possible that there will be some crazy integrated suite of Google services that will rule the world, but it won't be such a big deal. I do hope that there will be an integrated and easy way to navigate the network of citizen reports." Cultural impact The term Googlezon has gained a life of its own, sometimes being used to generally refer to real or hypothetical convergences of Google-like and Amazon-like technology. The term Amazoogle is sometimes used to describe the same effect. See also Consumer privacy Privacy concerns regarding Google Criticism of Google References External links EPIC 2014 EPIC 2014 and EPIC 2015 Dystopian films Films set in 2014 Films set in 2015