Die heb ik gevonden in YAPB (Yet Another Photo Blog van Johannis Jarolim) en het thema Grain (van Markus Mayer). Draait soepeltjes. Nu de oude foto’s nog overplaatsen en het thema wat meer ‘eigen’ maken.

UPDATE 1 juni: De eerste aflevering is geplaatst. Een ‘gesprek’ met ene Jess. Monoloog valt mij een beetje tegen. Geeft wel een inkijkje in een nogal tragisch leven. Gitaarmuziek aan begin is bloedstollend mooi!

Yesterday I visited the first SST on crowdsourcing. The organisors (Sogeti’s VINT and CreativeCrowds) lined up two speakers: Menno Douwes (director legislation of the Ministry of Justice) and Jeff Howe (author of the book and ‘inventor’ of the term crowdsourcing). While Douwes’ talk was rather boring in form, the content was rather interesting. The Dutch government is going to crowdsource all it’s future legislation. To be clear: the normal procedures in which a new law is formed will not be altered. But in the consuling phase, crowdsourcing already proofed to be a welcome addition to other form of consulting.

Jeff Howe was the typical American keynote: relaxed, jetlagged and a good storyteller. One of the insights I gathered from his speech is one of the important things in crowdsourcing: the diversity of the individual members in the crowd. Also, his answer to a question was interesting: while asked if crowdsourcing was about finding the five needles in the haystack, Howe answered: “It is more a thing of not knowing wether or not you need a needle to solve a problem. Then looking at what kind of needles show up in the process.”

Compliment to the people who organised this meeting. Please read on at the appropiate places:

MeetUp
SocialStrategyTalk (Dutch)

They had to challenge the conventions of online. To do so they tried an experiment. Apple worked with a few big sites and asked them to allow Apple to try a whole new way of doing ads.

Apple wanted custom sized units – really nice ‘real estate’ where they wouldn’t get ignored. They wanted the units to work together as one idea that interacted with each other. And they wanted placement on pages where editorial content was relevant to the ad topic. 100% share of voice was needed on each website which meant in some cases, even on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, redesigning the site itself, and also the way in which they placed ads. All this was precisely the kind of challenge that Media Arts Lab, Apple’s communication partner, was designed to take on.

Apple wanted to treat online with the same intention they have for TV: go big or don’t go at all. They wanted to feel present. Even while Apple knew this flies in the face of how people typically use online – where the ability to be niche to every audiences is part of its power. But the Apple brand didn’t need that. They needed that iconic, ever present feeling that the rest of Apple’s media has.

With new terms in the works, they created specific ads coming from the Mac and PC campaign: “Sign” and “Quote”.

The experiment paid off. Apple found a way to be Apple online — where the presence was noticed, the execution elegant. And the online audience seem to agree. Many people posted and many others watched the ads on YouTube which meant they achieved as much ‘earned’ media as they did paid media. “Sign” had over 700 thousand You Tube views alone. These ads are being lauded for their approach to a medium that isn’t typically very artful.

Source: MyTBWA – corporate TBWA Intranet

Personalizing direct mailings is thé thing for many years. The more personal you can get, the better the results. New technology is in place to make it possible to create handwritten messages (or other representations) including a person’s name. But this initiative of www.strandnaam.nl is very low-tech. And charming nonetheless. How it works? Via the (Dutch) website of strandnaam.nl you can order a photograph of someone’s first name handwritten in the sand of Bamburi Beach at Mombasa (Kenya). This writing is done by Moses Onoo and his family. In total 8 families profit from this initiative by Dutchman Pim Bottenberg. During a visit he facilitated them with a camera and teached them how to photograph and use the PC in a nearby internetcafé. For 10 euro you can get this personalized piece. Now that is what you can call digital development!

source: NRC.Next – Olga van Ditzhuijzen

The last few days I was ill. Nothing serious, but a rather severe case of sinusitis. While laying in bed, I remade my photoblog SilentShutter. Instead of using MovableType as CMS, I switched to PixelPost. The latter is more focussed on publishing photos. Also the amount of comment-spam I received with MT was that bad that I switched off the option of commenting. But I started SilentShutter (also) in order to receive comment, so this was a bad situation… I tweaked an existing template (changed some things in the CSS-files) and loaded some old and newer photos. It is up and running now and I am happy with it. Some more work need to be done, but this will probably need to wait for another illness

While everybody was condemning the show (ethical mainly) I was never under the impression that this was for real. I could not imagine that this kind of television actually was goiing to happen. I thought of the whole initiative as a rather creative way to raise awareness for the ongoing problem we have in The Netherlands when it comes to a shortage of organ donors. Despite numerous campaigns done by the government and several ‘good causes’ during the years to alter this situation. None were successful. But now we had the whole country (and the world) talking about this topic. While the real issue was covered by the ethical discussion, I am sure that the common public is now more aware of the situation that ever before. In this respect the hoax can be regarded as a huge success. People actually were forced to really *think* about their point of view on being a donor or not. It is rather impossible now – after this hoax – to NOT have an opinion. Saying “I do not (yet) know” on the question “Are you going to be a donor?” puts you in a rather peculiar standpoint: either you are a convinced donor now. Or a convinced non-donor. The time spent in the Dutch government speaking about the moral ins-and-outs of this initiative, could – in my opinion – better be spent on discussion about solving the problem. As BNN puts it: “The problem is real, the waiting lists are real and the three candidates waiting for a kidney are real. The show was a fake. We deliberately caused a stir to raise awereness for this big problem”. Mission accomplished as far as I concern. Pity the ones that still talk about the means and not about the goal.