#nerd
Random updates van een beroepsnerd.
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Jean Shin
En jawel, weer een nieuwe kunstenaar voor het favorietenlijstje. Jean Shin maakt behoorlijk gave installaties van (zo goed als) waardeloze materialen:
Sound Wave, gemaakt van gesmolten grammafoonplaatjes.
Chance City, een stad gebouwd van loterijbriefjes. Hoewel ze enkel verliezende tickets gebruikt heeft, zijn ze ooit in totaal toch $32.404,- waard geweest.
Chemical Balance, stalagmieten en stalactieten van medicijnpotjes.
TEXTile, een interactieve sculptuur van 22.720 toetsen. De letters vormen een letterlijke transcriptie van het e-mailverkeer tussen de ontwerper en de makers van de installatie.
Meer op www.jeanshin.com.
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Schrijver Neil Gaiman over copyright, piraterij en de commerciële waarde van internet
“When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.
And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.
I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”
What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”
Bron: YouTube
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Zo kan het ook…
(klik voor een leesbare versie)
Bovenstaande afbeelding is een advertentie voor het boek “Geschiedenis van de reclame in Nederland”. Reclamemaker Antoine Houtsma schreef een op het eerste gezicht zeer onaantrekkelijke tekst van maar liefst 1287 woorden, en won er een prestigieuze reclameprijs mee. Zo kan het ook…
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De horror: een elevator pitch
Wat had ik tijdens mijn opleiding een hekel aan die zogenaamde elevator pitches. Opdrachten als ‘overtuig zakenman X binnen een minuut om drie ton in jouw plan te investeren’ zijn onmogelijk. Als het je lukt is a] zakenman X niet goed wijs of b] jouw naam Rasta Rostelli.
Gelukkig kan ik dat standpunt nu eindelijk onderbouwen met dit blogje van marketinggrootheid Seth Godin:
No one ever bought anything in an elevator
The purpose of an elevator pitch isn’t to close the sale. The goal isn’t even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project.
And the idea of using vacuous, vague words to craft a bland mission statement is dumb.
No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you’re with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over.Lief Inholland, wil je toekomstige studenten alsjeblieft leren hoe ze enthousiasme en passie overbrengen? En hoe ze resultaatgericht te werk gaan? De exacte details van het plan komen later wel ter sprake. Zorg eerst maar eens dat er een later is.
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It’s up to the audience, not the executive gut, to decide what’s worth watching
Ontzettend interessant stuk in de New Yorker: Streaming dreams - Will Robert Kyncl and YouTube Revolutionize Television?
“For the past sixty years, TV executives have been making the decisions about what we watch in our living rooms. Kyncl would like to change that. Therefore YouTube, the home of grainy cell-phone videos and skateboarding dogs, is going pro. Kyncl has recruited producers, publishers, programmers, and performers from traditional media to create more than a hundred channels, most of which will début in the next six months—a sort of YouTV. Streaming video, delivered over the Internet, is about to engage traditional TV in a skirmish in the looming war for screen time.”
Het is een behoorlijk lang artikel, maar zeer de moeite waard als je wat hebt met media, entertainment en/of online cultuur. In een kleine zevenduizend woorden lees je over de ontwikkeling van Youtube (in zes jaar van nul naar 800 miljoen unieke gebruikers per maand) en diens invloed in de verschuiving van massa- naar niche-entertainment. Wat dat betreft staat ons blijkbaar nog een hele hoop te wachten: YouTube/Google heeft grootse, grootse plannen voor de toekomst. Kom maar op. -
Expect failure but prepare for success: crowdfunding
Interessant artikel op techblog The Verge: Kickstarted - How one company is revolutionizing product development. Het is een mooi uitgebreid verhaal over crowdfunding in het algemeen en Kickstarter in het bijzonder, inclusief inspirerende succesverhalen. Heel gaaf om te zien wat je kunt bereiken met een goed idee, bergen enthousiasme en financiële ondersteuning van een groepje supporters dat er wel wat in ziet.
In het artikel komt naar voren wat wel en niet werkt, en wat de succesfactoren van verschillende projecten zijn. Met name het stuk over (re)presentatie is interessant:
Tell a passionate story
Passion is infectious. It attracts attention on Kickstarter just as it does in real life. Successful Kickstarter projects tell a story that connects with the reader at an emotional level. The pitch is personal, not corporate, and honest above all else. A smarmy tone will be vetted and expelled from the community for its impudence. A project built from a PowerPoint foundation will be met with a reflexive Command+w (or Ctrl+w, if you prefer).
The most effective way to tell a story on Kickstarter is with video. In fact, video is the first thing potential backers see when they open a project page. If it doesn’t set the hook, if it doesn’t connect, readers will never consider clicking the “back this project” button.“The language of Kickstarter is video, text is secondary.” En zo haalden deze jongens met een goed idee én een goed filmpje in een maand tijd ruim $137k binnen, terwijl ze initieel gingen voor ‘slechts’ $10,000. Bizar.
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Supertof arty project van Cãoceito + Burdman: I need nothing - a nearly useless odyssey.
Korte uitleg: liedje ‘doughnut’ van The Parenthetical Girls kreeg een nieuwe video, waarin je door (customized) bekende albumcovers bladert die de lyrics illustreren.
Zien is beter dan vertellen, dus kijk even op de website, klik de video aan en zie waar het om gaat. Als je tijdens het afspelen van de video langzaam naar beneden scrollt dan blader je zelf door de albumhoezen.
Stiekem toch nog wat uitleg:
Repositories of stories and its enriching emotions, the covers, that accomodate the existing panoply of musical genres, are the motto for this exibition. The focus is made on album covers that often conquer our memory even when music slightly reached our ears. Major graphic disasters or deified, unduly ignored or zeitgeists, covers provide listening with a touch and an image, with the act of collection and share. From cover to cover, going thru all the stories (and histories), we wrote a new one to the sound of a song that repeats: I need nothing, I’ve everything I need.
Cool.
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Het dak van Rotterdam
Wat supervet dit… Op www.dakvanrotterdam.nl kun je een virtuele tour maken door de Rotterdamse skyline: 360 graden panoramafotografie vanaf de daken van de lokale hoogbouw. Superheldere beelden, heel cool!
(klik foto voor vergroting)
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Mooie advert voor het Vancouver Aquarium
Behoorlijk gave print dit, jammer dat de rest van de campagne een beetje saai/same old is. Meer hier.
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The most important page on the web is the page you build yourself
The internet is an engine of connection. It has been from the start (email, chat, forums, blogs, social media…).
One reason that so many of the most popular sites online are those that permit people to express and expose their ideas is that those are the pages we care most about. We go back to see how people responded, how the traffic is, what we can do to improve the page.
Lifestyle media isn’t a fad. It’s what human beings have been doing forever, with a brief, recent interruption for a hundred years of professional media along the way. That interruption is fading away, and lifestyle media is resurging. People publish. Instead of denigrating user-generated content (what an obscure way to describe human stories), marketers need to understand that this is what we care about.
We shouldn’t be surprised when someone chooses to publish their photos, their words, their art or their opinions. We should be surprised when they don’t.
(Source: sethgodin.typepad.com)
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Gaafste kerstballen ever.
Pantone Christmas ornaments made by Studio Badini Createam.
ed: Now THIS is a brilliant product.
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De zoveelste mooie quote rondom Google
When Google released its search engine in 1998, its search results were significantly better than its competitors’. Many people attribute Google’s success to this breakthrough technology. But there was another key reason: a stubborn refusal to accept the orthodox view at the time that “stickiness” was crucial to a website’s success. Here’s what happened when they tried to sell their technology to Excite (a leading portal/search engine in the late 90s):
[Google] was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, [Excite’s CEO] explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using Google’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” … and we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” - Steven Levy
Famed investor/entrepreneur Reid Hoffman says world-changing startups need to be premised on “accurate contrarian theories.” In Google’s case, it was true but non-contrarian to think users would prefer a better search engine. What was true and contrarian was to think it made business sense to get users off their site as quickly as possible. The business model to support this contrarian theory wouldn’t emerge until years later, and by then Google would already have become the world’s most popular search engine.
(Source: cdixon.org)
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Gratis advies van opa Seth
Blog: Moving beyond impressions
Internet advertising is so cheap (particularly Facebook and run of site network buys) that just about anyone can afford a million impressions, and a billion isn’t out of reach. Pretty soon it turns into noise. An infinite number of impressions is dangerously close to no impressions at all.
The conversation media reps have with advertisers quickly devolves into, “how cheap can I buy a million impressions?” What a waste. That number, out of context, is nothing but a crutch, a poor stand in for the insightful analysis that media buyers ought to be using.
Far better to focus on two things, both leading to the real goal:
(Source: sethgodin.typepad.com)
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The entrepreneurial generation
In de New York Times van gisteren een mooi artikel over jeugdcultuur: the entrepreneurial generation. Ik lees vooral veel negatiefs over de jeugd van vandaag, dus ik kan de insteek van dit artikel wel waarderen. Ze noemen met name de houding en het ondernemerschap van veel jongeren en jonge volwassenen:
The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly.
[…]
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms. Call it Generation Sell. Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.
Erg interessant artikel, aanrader als je iets met jeugd doet.
Eva Brands ('87) uit Rotterdam.
