Cultivora is more than just a carefully curated list of the best musical festivals across the US. The New York Times likes to think of it as a destination guide for music lovers. Each festival listing has tips such as best ways to get to and from concert grounds, places to stay, top restaurant options, shopping, nearby attractions, and where to find the best after parties. I definitely recommend the site for first-timers or people looking to get a quick snapshot of what each festival has to offer.

It always makes me happy to see companies make bold moves and shake things up a little. Back in February, I posted about Netflix debuting its show, Lilyhammer, and embracing the concept of “all-at-once watching.”   Their next flagship show, House of Cards, debuted yesterday under the same model. No premiere, no wait for episodes, just everything all at once. GQ did a great interview with Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, to shed some light onto the thinking behind this new take on original programming.

Sarandos describes the company’s pitch as being one that is particularly alluring to filmmakers and show creators. Netflix doesn’t require TV pilots — a single, introductory episode intended as a proof-of-concept — for creatives to prove the viability of their wares, it commits to full seasons upfront, and it offers a real budget for show creators to play with (House of Cards itself had a $100 million budget). “The goal,” says Sarandos, “is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”

You can read the entire interview over at GQ.

Bonus: Netflix and Dreamworks developing kids TV show: AdAge

I’m a little late on this one, but I just stumbled onto Google Consumer Surveys. It’s a pretty nifty survey model that utilizes content providers and people trying to access the content. At a glance, it seems like an smart, affordable option for businesses who can’t afford traditional focus groups in multiple markets.

The pictures above are from a current exhibit hosted at an open gallery space in Soho called Recess. I’ve passed by it hundreds of times on my way to lunch, but today was my first time stepping inside.

Rutherford Chang is currently hosting his exhibit, We Buy White Albums, inside the space. In this exhibit, Chang explores the idea of exhaustive cataloguing through his collection of over 650 first-pressings of the Beatles’ iconic White Album.

Chang essentially created a record store that only stocks the White Album. People can come in and listen to the records and even sell Chang a copy if they have one, but nothing is for sale.

Each copy played will be digitally recorded and photographed. At the end of the exhibit, Chang will layer the recordings and photographs of the album covers to create a composite that contains all the unique wear and tear of each individual record. 

Can’t wait to see and hear the final result. You can visit Rutheford Chang and his record collection from now until March 9th. 

Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because he/she figured out a faster way to get things done.

– Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework

Love these projections by Javier Riera. via Culture of Me

Karina, a member of the strategy department at Big Spaceship, spoke about the abundance of advertising jargon and how to avoid it at an AAF luncheon in November. Below are three tips she shared. You can see the entire deck she presented on Slideshare.

1. Pretend like you’re talking to your mom: Don’t make assumptions. Your mom doesn’t know what CPG stands for. She doesn’t know about transmedia storytelling or propagation planning. And it’s not because she’s not a smart lady. She’s just not entrenched in industry BS. It’s good practice to talk to people from other agencies and even disciplines in plain language that someone like your mom would understand. A great example of this are the recent conversations about the word “user” and “consumer.” Sometimes, people are just people. Not “momfluencials” or “citysumers.” Just people. Stripping out jargon according to this rule will result in more than just better words. Think of how helpful a segmentation or persona document would be if we stripped out the cheesy Getty Images and fake “quotes” and embraced the blurriness and bad grammar of real photos and tweets.

2. Ask the tough questions: If you’re holding yourself accountable for avoiding jargon, you might want to do the same with the people your are working with. Don’t be afraid to ask what things mean rather than secretly looking them up on Wikipedia later. When a meeting is going around in circles, it might be time to stop and ask the room to define what exactly “a big idea” or “responsive design” means to them. While there may technically be a correct definition for terms like this, many times it’s unclear or subjective.

3. Get on the same page: Getting rid of buzzwords completely may be an impossible task. Especially working on big projects with hundreds of stakeholders. Sometimes, the words don’t matter. As long as everyone’s speaking the same language. A good place to start is to acknowledge when words are getting in the way and do a little something about it, like making a glossary for the front of a big presentation or spending the first 5 minutes of a meeting agreeing to semantics.

About time someone took it to the next level. These flyers with embedded links and interactive content really add some context to the event. Just scroll your mouse over the flyer onto the icons to see the interactive content. via NYNightlife

Haha. Thoreau’s Walden re-imagined. See whole strip at Incidental Comics

“If your elevator pitch is a hyper-compressed two-minute overview of your hopes, dreams and the thing you’ve been building for the last three years, you’re doing everyone a disservice.

I’ll never be able to see the future through your eyes this quickly, and worse, if you’ve told me what I need to know to be able to easily say no, I’ll say no.

The best elevator pitch doesn’t pitch your project. It pitches the meeting about your project. The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it.

It’s not a practiced, polished turd of prose that pleases everyone on the board and your marketing team, it’s a little fractal of the entire story, something real.”

-S. Godin

Former Art Director, Linds Redding, wrote a pretty accurate post about how the speed of advertising has affected the current mindset of creatives. The post starts off with Redding longing for the days where he had the luxury of using the “overnight test” to sleep on ideas and reflect on them with fresh eyes the next day.

“Pretty soon, The Overnight Test became the Over Lunch Test. Then before we knew it, we were eating Pot-Noodles at our desks, and taking it in turns to go home and see our kids before they went to bed. As fast as we could pin an idea on the wall, some red-faced account manager in a bad suit would run away with it. (…) We now fell back on experience and gut-feel. It worked most of the time, but nobody is infallible. Some howlers and growlers definitely made it through, and generally standards plummeted.

The other consequence, with the benefit of hindsight, is that we became more conservative. Less likely to take creative risks and rely on the tried and trusted. The familiar is always going to research better than the truly novel. And research was the new god. The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks.

It takes a certain amount of courage, thinking out loud. And is best done in a safe and nurturing environment. Creative Departments and design studios used to be such places, where you could say and do just about anything creatively speaking, without fear of ridicule or judgment. It has to be this way, or you will just close up like a clamshell. (…) Then some bright spark had the idea of setting everyone up in competition. It became a contest. A race. Winner gets to keep his job. Now of course we are all suffering from the same affliction.”

It really gets me down to know that there are people who feel uncomfortable to share ideas. Here’s hoping that things slow down a little. If you have a few minutes to spare, you should read the whole post on Redding’s website.