La revista más importante de innovacion del país, “if…” incluye nuestra iniciativa en su sección de Ideas Fuerza! Me emociona…

The web of today is different. We are the web. Just watch:

Video by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.

You’re still reading, aren’t you…? Curious about what will happen next, right? Well you better are because there are a couple of things we want to show and tell you in the upcoming days.

But first of all: a big “THANK YOU” to all of you who collaborated in the execution, production, promotion, realization of this iniciative! YOU: the interview partners, the blogsphere, the online supporters who left messages, the on- and offline media and a special thank’s to the people of infonomia for the support and their inspiring “Why not? Just do it!” attitude.

Most of you out there understood immediatly that MySpace in Barcelona was the tangible object of desire that gave the campaign its “raison d’être” and that there was something more profund and serious about this (to some people) “innocent” proposal and the call for support. The underlying objective is (or was) to atract any interesting national, multinational company - the more innovative, unique, cutting-edge, creative, inspiring, job-creating the better - to Barcelona. How? Well, we tried to do it our way: showing the human potential of this piece of land, this unique mix of people and location that makes BCN (still) interesting.

You know what some people’s (and some institution’s) reaction was? 1. “MySpace is part of News Corp. and News Corp. is Rupert Murdock’s planet so why should we be interested?”. Or: 2. “Don’t you have anything better to do than bringing a North-American multinational to BCN?. Ad 1. Came on, don’t be hypocritical - if anybody thinks that this city can afford to select interesting entrepreneural projects by the ideology of its board of administration, go ahead. But don’t call us a bunch of innocents! And ad 2. Well, señoras y señores: Yes, we have better things to do: Actually, we should have started a campaign about global warming and the side-effect on Barcelona because 2 days ago I sat on the beach and it was 24 degrees celsius! But seriously, why shouldn’t a group of people start to try to influence certain decisions that seem relevant to them on a local scale using the Internet in a creative, connecting, global way? Isn’t that what the so-called web 2.0 is all about: connecting mind-likes?

Stay tuned, don’t unsubcribe form your RSS and let us know what YOU think!

And just to let you know, this Sunday (18-02-2007) starts the new lunar year in Asia and we enter in the GOLDEN YEAR OF THE PIG! This, by Asian believes means that it’s going to be a specially succesful year for newborns and newborn ideas!

Yesterday I tried to explain to one of my friends WHY we were doing all this: the campaign, the blog, these videos, trying to bring MySpace to Barcelona, why MySpace, why Barcelona,… and at one point she said: “You have a problem, you know! I don’t really care about MySpace and I don’t see why I should campaign to get them to Barcelona“.

Well, as the night went on and we poured more and more wine down our throats, I convinced her to leave a support message at least. Of course, she’s right. One does not care about things one does not know, and normally one cares even less about big North-Amercian multinationals even if they are part of the whole web 2.0 hype. No emotional connection -> no clear motivation to support the campaign, it’s as simple as that. MySpace is not a “Lovemark” over here so far and the fact that it’s part of News Corporation does not exactly help to make it one either. So, why the hell did we start a campaign to bring them to Barcelona? And talking about Internet companies, aren’t there others we’re more emotional about, like Amazon, Flickr, Secondlife, you name it. Shouldn’t they open their headquarters in Barcelona?

Let me just recall how this all got started in the first place:
At the end of November we learnt that MySpace is coming to Spain and they started to look for people to hire. People who started sending them CVs asked where they would open up their office but by then they hadn’t made a decision. I got a mail from them, saying: “We might go to Madrid but if we find out that the more creative people are in Barcelona, we’ll go there”.

And at that point the emotion clicked in. Emotion about Barcelona. And we thought: How can any international company planning to open market in South Europe, call it Amazon, Flickr, Google, IDEO, or MySpace NOT think about Barcelona? Especially when they need confluence of local and global creative energies.

So we started to call more people, asked if they would support an independent campaign in favour of Barcelona in order to bring one of the top five Internet companies (and the sixth most visited website!) to this town. You might think “Oh my god, wake up and start to think rationally. Companies go where the money is and that’s where other companies and clients are”. That’s a point, ok. But things are changing, companies go where the money is but they also go where creativity and innovation is and that’s where creative and innovative people and projects are. So this is a “Just in case you didn’t know about the unique potential of Barcelona’s people - campaign” - 100% emotional.

Good old TV still works, although it looks as YouTube’s winning mindshares over conventional (time- and channel-bound) programming. Anyway, thank’s to the guys from Silenci?. There’s just one thing we’d like to get right: we’re not a platform for Catalan creativity only, as mentioned in the show. Here, in this blog we give visibility to people who work, live and create in Barcelona, locals and foreigners alike. Here’s the clip, just in case you missed it:

But apart from our first TV show, many other things happend during week 5 :

1) MySpace went online with their BETA version in Spanish.

2) People started to send us their CVs and resumés. We are not MySpace, so if you want to work with them please, go directly to Trabajos - EU Jobs at MySpace.com and mention this campaign!

3) We got our first intenational support messages from Beijing and Vienna.

4) Oscar, the cat had its first appearance on the blog.

5) We gave away two free tickets for the Cabaret Club this Thursday but we still don’t know the identities of the winners: JackMunky and LGA, you have 2 more days to contact us; otherwise, the 2 tickets will be given to other users. Sorrrrry….

6) Jordi from La Radio del Alma looks for partners for his online radio project.

7) And… get prepared for this: Amazon, the pioneer of electronic commerce is currently studying to enter the Spanish market! So, people from Barcelona, any doubt we should start marking noise to get them here. Any rocking ideas?

5 weeks ago, this blog-campaign started off to make a lot off noise about MySpace coming to Spain and about how important we think it is for Barcelona to host them, and other Internet / technology companies like them. 2 Weeks ago we had our first radio show and tomorrow we’ll be on TV, featuring a section in a program called Silenci?, (silence) at 33, one of the channels of Televisió Catalunya.

Silenci? is a program on urban tendencies. In the end, it talks about the same things as we do: people and their projects. A common base we share: people in Barcelona. That’s why we’re so excited that they also talk about us. The show will be on tomorrow night, Wednesday at 10.30pm at 33. See you there!

The show always ends with an image of silence; so which image suggests silence for you?

Next week we’ll present you Pep Torres, a neo-renaissance man as he likes to call himself. And yes, when you meet him you get the impression he could be a Leonardo da Vinci of the 21th century: a thinker, a creator, an innventor, an “agent provocateur”, a media man, a musician from Barcelona. If you want to know more about him and his work, stay tuned because in a few days we’ll post his video-interview here. Or, if you’re lucky enough and live in Barcelona you can go and see his latest works in the exhibition FUTOUR at the FAD, Pl. dels Àngles, 5-6 (opposite the MACBA). But hurry up, because this Sunday is the last day of the exhibition that takes an ironic and sometimes dismal outlook on the everyday life objects of the 23nd century.

And, talking about the future, Zak has opend a discussion about the future of YouTube and asks why we tube and what impact our videos will have on the way we used to communicate before we started send a video instead of sending a mail or a letter (anybody still knows how to write them…?).

We at Barcelona wants MySpace tube because it’s the easiest way to present the incredible richness of the people of Barcelona. The reason why we do this is to convince companies like MySpace ,and all the others who might plan to start operating in Spain, that this city offers a special and potent blend of creativity and quality of life, ideal for hosting creative interactive activities, making it one of the most inspiring places to be at the moment. Not because of its past glories, but because of its future present, us the people.

The last week has been quite exciting despite the long holidays. Sorry, no Google stats today since Oriol is in Paris over New Year. But at YouTube we have transcended the magical number of one thousand views, to be correct our videos have been seen 1.070 times so far. The “reactable“ seems to be the digital blockbuster with 480 clicks in 16 days. Other sites like infonomia and Vilaweb decided to publish the video-interviews, too. AND Catalunya Ràdio invited us to talk about the campaign in their programme l’internauta !!! The show by Vicent Partal and Joan Jofra is a weekly broadcast on everything related to Internet and technology; the show is on this afternoon at 1.00pm. Here’s the podcast for download. What else…. ?

We are between 75 and 80 support messages in text, images and videos, and Jordi left two interesting comments yesterday: 1. that we should provide a list of (economical?) arguments why Barcelona is an attractive location for a company like MySpace that goes beyond the sun-beach-great social life-list. 2. that this blog should be available in Catalan, Spanish and English. Two good points:

Firstly, this iniciative (to try and bring a company to BCN) is spontaneous, collective, virtually organized, new, politically incorrect, far from being perfect, emotional and based on what we as a collective of individuals think. In the beginning, there was no strategic master plan, it’s more like a project in progress! It’s the people in our video-interviews who give all possible reasons, arguments, opinons in favour of Barcelona. Lars, Jordi, Petz, Pep do so as professionals who work, investigate, innovate, create, live in BCN and enjoy the city for one reason or the other; and if you listen to what they say you realize that none of them actually talks about sun or beach.

And secondly, we do not have the resources (time, people, money) to run a tri-lingual site. But we try to provide content in Catalan, Spanish and English whenever possible in a balanced way - we think this perfectly reflects the linguistic attitude of this city.

AND, we also have OurSpace at MySpace now - contents are in English and Castellano.

Feel free to comment in any language you like!