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Sire Records / Warner Bros Records recently got a lot of press about our Second life thing that we did for Regina Spektor. Much deserved I may add.

A joke people. Put out the torches.

A thing about my job (and I outlined this in various places) is that we’re constantly trying to out do ourselves in terms of how we market bands, music and content. I read lots of RSS feeds, I have friends at Universities keeping me up to date on the latest in digital art, and hell, I even get art magazines to find out what the most esoteric thing happening is.

The problem with this is that often times I’ll find technology I want to do something with, but I haven’t a clue on how to find a person to help us do it. The little known aspect of our company is we outsource everything. It helps us keep a diverse pool of talent, and helps us constantly best ourselves.

Anyhow, earlier this year I faced this with a little thing called Second Life. I’ve beta tested it (courtesy of Howard Rheingold’s recommendation to Linden) for a few years. I always had ideas on doing something, anything in it, and finally we had a place to try.

Problem: I didn’t know the first thing about programming in Second Life.

So I reverted to what I knew best: The Call.
The Call is something I got from art school, basically putting a Call out for papers, proposals, exhibits, portfolios, etc. It also comes a lot from academic conferences (and non academic ones as well).

I put it out, I got responses. I ended up working with Reuben Steiger and Millions of Us. It was successful, I was happy. All ended well.

I have since repeated this practice by posting on my blog, and fielding responses.

The power of this I think is that I immediately winnow down the possible talent pool, because honestly, I rather think a certain type of person reads this blog. As well, it helps outside of the current project, because (hopefully) people think, “Wow, WBR might be doing something interesting….”

Anyhow, all these job boards, all these siloed, self-inflated kingdoms of false prophets and martyrs had me thinking that the real power of the Internet as a tool and medium isn’t in the demographics of the mass reading one particular place, and that dimensionalized mass leveraged for a “job board” for fun and prophet (with minimal return).

No, the real power is that one person might stumble upon another needing something and be able to provide.

Remember: we are operating in a medium which takes human cognition, breaks it down through layers of protocol and abstract math, and manages to render cognition on the other end.

Lets not loose site that ultimately, behind the application, transport, internet, datalink and physical layers, there are these wonderful entities called People who only want to do something meaningful and produce something with meaning.