Flicking through this year’s Webby Awars winners, I’m a bit baffled by the people’s voice for the employment category. Yes, Monster’s new career site looks a lot better than it did. And yes, it’s tweaked some of its features. But no, what they’re doing is not exactly ‘new’.

I’d say VisualCV – one of the other nominees – comes much closer to actually innovating on the recruitment front. But as people and voices go, Monster probably got a fair share from its truckload of employees.

I gave 8tracks a big thumbs up in the music category (didn’t win), and I love IBM’s Wordle (won ‘best typography’; something I’m definitely going to use more often – see image below).

(photo silly chair monster by massdistraction on Flickr)

There’s a new town in town

Since 19th February, lucky Amsterdam has Cineville.nl, a collector for all films on exhibition in the city’s 13 film theatres. The site contains synopses, trailers, reviews, and film news. But most importantly, it provides an overview of what’s on, where, and when – something we’ve all been sorely craving for.

Even better, €17,50 a month gets you into 550 exhibitions per week and 400 specials per year, in any of the cinemas, whenever you feel like it. So do away with the dissatisfaction of your monthly television subscription fee, and get something of real value.

The Cineville pass is already on sale online (click here), as well as at Cinecenter, Kriterion, and Rialto. But if you join the crew at Vive La Ville! – Cineville’s launch party on 27th February in Studio/K, you can have one made on the spot, in between your dance floor braveness.

(screen shot Cineville by de Balie, by me on Flickr)

When Coolblue’s entrepreneurs were still young and budding, they got phone calls from customers who wanted to come and pick up their gadget from the attic-based office. So now they’ve built several places for potential customers to grab hold and get an actual feel for what they’re looking to buy.

And what gives? The number of online orders from the area codes surrounding the stores is growing. So instead of cannibalizing on more cost-efficient online business, the offline store-fronts lend it a helping hand.

Source: NRC Handelsblad, 11th january 2008, p. 15

(photo coolblue by allyBrown on Flickr)

How do you sell authenticity when there’s no such thing?

Have a look at this 15-minute talk to see how you can be (un)true to yourself and (not) say what you are. Or, how you can produce fake fake, real real, real fake, or fake real.

Interesting, especially for those working on sustainable entrepreneurship, because Pine’s two-by-two can help you re-evaluate who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish (a process The Necessary Revolution also talks about).

And for us Dutch, he’s as entertaining as he is painful. If we think we’re authentic in comparison to ‘you Americans’, have a look in the mirrow: every square meter of The Netherlands is manufactured – most of it made look as if it had always been like that.

To summarize, for successful entrepreneurship in the experience economy, you have to stick to 3 simple rules:
- Don’t say you’re authentic unless you really are;
- It’s easier to be authentic if you don’t say you are;
- And if you do say you’re authentic, you better walk the walk.

(photo Carol Channing Certificate of Authenticity by zoomar)

Alluding to George Orwell’s 1984, it proved a masterly teaser to Jobs’ (also masterly) personal introduction of the Macintosh two days later. For one, the ad became a free publicity stunt when it was shown in full on several of the major news networks. But, according to Murray, its real success was striking a specific chord with the audience. Have a look at both ad and presentation, and a short explanation of how and why.

In this CNBC interview, Murray explains how the board deemed the commercial too radical and initially didn’t want to air it. But with the Super Bowl slot already paid for, and no suitable replacement commercial, they reluctantly agreed to have it shown.

Why it struck such a chord? Murray: ‘What that commercial did was it picked up on a particular vibe of a large segment of American society. Young people, innovators, creative people, people who don’t want to feel like they’re just stuck in the masses. And we felt that way, but I think we also perhaps underestimated what a strong vibe that is.’

And now for Jobs on stage, introducing the world’s first graphical user interface, mouse operated personal computer:

Thanks to Zee and his The Next Web post Today Marks the 25th Anniversary of Apple’s 1984 Ad. What Are Your Memories?
(photo Bastelstunde: Mac by dersVen)

In its recently published report, TNO – Dutch public institution working for the applicability of scientific knowledge in government and industry circles – concluded the following: access to a wide range of cultural goods increases out well being, simply because most of us would never have bought our downloaded content.

File shares are financially unable – or plainly unwilling – to buy many of the things they’re enjoying via p2p networks. And getting stuff for free obviously makes us feel nicer than not getting the stuff at all.

But before we’re made to believe that companies should be losing their money for a public cause and an economic externality – even when both of them are nice side effects, the report’s researchers also found this: people who download music and film are buying no less than people who don’t.

Gaming company Electronic Arts admitted last year that ‘every Bittorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale’. This report goes one step further: file sharers visit concerts and buy games more often than those who don’t.

And while the Netherlands’ entertainment industry continues to suffer losses in the order of €100 million per year, consumers are spending an estimated €200 million per year more because they have free access to not-so-free content.

So now its official: the industry’s arch nemesis is a very successful marketing tool. Yet, as the report will have it (of course), within the music industry it’s the lesser-known bands that profit the most from file sharing.

To me, another sure sign of a playing field in transition. While most big and established companies are slow to recognize that bygones should be bygones, the smaller, newer ones see opportunities in the web. Instead of whining about it, they’re discovering how they can monetize on the Internet as a non-exclusive distribution platform.

And let’s not forget about us consumers, and how this report will make us feel even better than we already did. As dxtr says in reply to Torrentfreak’s post on the subject: ‘Wow! I never knew that I had been contributing to the growth of my country’s economy since age 10! That is so cool!’

More

• Read the original Torrentfreak post on the report by clicking here.
• Read the full report (142 pages – and in Dutch), register and  download it for free by clicking here.
• Read how EA’s view on piracy is changing – and how they’re trying to emphasize the non-piracy prone aspects of their games, by clicking here.
• Check dotbejamin’s ‘Failing Industry’ post, which accompanies the picture shown above ().
  

Now taking applications for a six-month post of “island caretaker”, starting 1st July 2009.

Soak up the sun, swim, snorkel, sail, and generally laze about for a living.  Requirements: you must be over 18, a fantastic and charismatic communicator, and speak and write English – so you can report your hard work via weekly blogs, photo diaries and video updates.

The successful candidate will be employed for 6 months. Pay: 150,000 $AU (about 100,000 U.S. dollars).  Secondary benefits: free airfares from your home country to tropical Hamilton Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and a multi-million-dollar three-bedroom beach home – rent-free.

In its bid to boost Queensland’s $18 billion a year tourism industry, the northeastern Australian state is going to great lengths to stress that it’s a real job.

No need to tell hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts from all over the world: inundating the website that advertises the job, they managed to crash it for a day. It’s up and running again though, so you can visit it to submit a 60-second video explaining why you’re the ideal candidate. Think about it – you have until February 22nd to apply.

Fantastic piece of tourism marketing, if only for all the people sending in video’s and raving about the job. But also a great way to call out to potential candidates – and a shame not all work can be made this enticing.

Read more on Expatica (thanks to Meg for giving a shout).

(image the best job in the world by me)

Very clever, extremely humorous, and free to watch (donations happily accepted). Click play on the screen below, and/or read on for a textual nutshell.

Beware of People

Society has become cultural industries’ biggest competitor. Copyright law – and especially all its subsidiaries (many of them lobbied into life because of the Internet), is working extremely hard to prevent this competitor from moving around in a free market.

People now have cheap access to the tools that used to be reserved for heavy-on-equipment, professional creators. This allows almost anyone to be a producer of culture instead of a mere couch potato.

But the kind of creativity this spawns is dangerous for the well being of the established industry model. So its moguls call out to their exterminating agent: copyright law.

By suing the fans, the industry hoped to make set an example to all the downloaders and remixers out there. But, for one, bald chickens make for bad plucking: they don’t make any money from what they’re doing; they don’t have the money to pay the required fees for what they’re doing; and if they did, it would take someone like GirlTalk – musical cut, edit, mix and mash up genius, about 50 years to clear all the rights for what he’s doing (click here for my personal selection of the late greats of 2008, including a GirlTalk track).

but more importantly, it doesn’t work. If anything, it’s destroying what little credibility big creative industry companies still have in fostering cultural development. So where’s the fun in that? What’s it helping anyone?

The only one making a ‘better’ living through all of this is the lawyer who gets to spend his expensive hours suing twelve-year old girls.

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Reality and Love the Remix

If you know where you’re music’s being played the most, you’ll better be able to decide where you should be on the stage. If you sell a live registration of your concert, to the audience, immediately after your performance, your studio work is but a marketing gimmick for the real thing – the real experience connected to a specific place and time.

So instead of going after downloaders and the remixers, to try and punish them so to set an example for the rest of us (or: to fence in what’s turning into common cultural practice), entertainment moguls should really be looking at them as a source of business model inspiration – or even as partners.

Emerging cultural forms of production are the R&D-labs of cultural industries. Not only do they provide insight into what’s driving potential consumers, they’re brimming with enthusiasts promoting someone’s work for free. Such developments are an opportunity, and seeing this allows companies to rethink what makes their business. Yet few are able to let step out of the comfort zone, to nurture this new practice, and make it work for instead of against them.

‘You can’t be taller than me and shorter than me at the same time. You go ahead and take the high-end of the market; let us play elsewhere. We’ll happily occupy that space.’ This film is remixed poetry – in images, music, and words.

Thanks to Rolf @ Loupe for letting me know.

(photo IMG_0729 by mecredis)

But for industry professionals fearing empty cinemas, Upload Cinema comes to the rescue (albeit not in a way they’d envision). For its feature length programs in the Uitkijk cinema in Amsterdam, Upload Cinema relies solely on the web’s immense and freely accessible catalogue – not on Hollywood distributors.

And in true crowdsourcing fashion, the organisation asks potential visitors to submit films they think deserve a place on the big screen. This month’s edition (‘Yes, also we are list-addicts’) comprised the best web videos of 2008. ‘No theme, no rules: just the most outstanding, creative and crazy web videos produced.’

From over 200 entries, Upload Cinema selected 36. All of them were a feast for eyes and ears, with this Star Wars a cappella tribute baffling and cracking me up the most:

And one of my favourites, Bert & Ernie’s Gangsta Rap (which I ripped and used for one of my own), also passed the screen:

But Upload Cinema is no cheap excuse for a Hollywood no-brainer. Taking a contextual approach, ViralBlog’s http://www.viralblog.com  Paul van Veenendaal (replaced by his boss due to sickness) was invited to talk about viral marketing, and about the marketing industry’s slow-but-sure embrace of web-users as partners.

But will their productions snatch Youtube’s prime-space away from the people it was intended for – you and me? That’s not so clear-cut: viral’s production value – or rather: ‘unproduction’ value – is one of its main assets. Knowing that the brilliance you’re watching was created (and/or mashed-up) by some 15 year-old, not by a team of highly paid creative industry professionals, only adds to your viewing experience.

And marketers trying to make participatory culture work for them may only end up making their clients look bad – as the good people at Chevrolet found out the hard way:

(They’ve built a hybrid now)

But crowdsourced, unproduction value is not the end-all, for now at least. For the web boasts some prime examples of professional creativity, as demonstrated by Zune’s spec ad (less suited for broadcast tv, because not for the faint-of-stomach):

As of writing, Upload Cinema hasn’t archived this month’s selection yet, but it’ll probably be up there soon (without the Chevvy ad – I got that one from Michael Wesh’s excellent ‘Anthropological Introduction to Youtube’). Next session: Monday 2nd February.

Photo Live At Upload Cinema in Amsterdam by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.