Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.
Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.
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)
Over the last two years, Apple has been trying to figure out the right way for the brand to live in online advertising. They couldn’t seem to get comfortable with the constraints of the online world; where the Internet can be a cluttered place and ads can get lost in the chaos. Most banner ads were small spaces on pages that were easily tuned out and ignored. It made the brand question how Apple could be Apple online?
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. Read more
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 
Dutch company Overtoom (sort of Office Depot) is back on radio with spots that still promote their claim on quickness. That’s simple consistent advertising. But now they’ve gone multichannel! In the spot a man can be heard asking for a ‘poeremetator’. This word doesn’t exist. Not even in Dutch… The story behind this is, that Overtoom wanted people (that listened to the spot that was on air in a high frequency) to Google the strange word. What you get is this: 89.100 hits at the moment of writing! Smart!
Rather good approach: “you don’t always die from tobacco”. That message is told a zillion times. That often, that it became blurry, non-communicative. Living with the consequences of tobacco-related diseases brings the story across rather strong.
