Since the relaunch of the BIMA website it has been our intention to start to build the ‘Jobs’ section of the site into a real marketplace for jobs in the digital industry. Members continually tell us how difficult it is to find and hire talented people and the cost of recruiting continues to rise.

Although it will undoubtedly take time to establish a marketplace for our jobs, one that candidates from all types of company will naturally turn to when they think of a career move in digital, we hope you’ll agree that the goal of an effective recruitment site that is free for you to use is worth pursuing.

We can only attract and keep the interest of candidates if our ‘jobs’ section carries a good selection of interesting jobs. In the next couple weeks, in order to get the ball rolling, we will be contacting you to ask if we can copy any relevant jobs from your website onto the BIMA website. Once we have done that we will ask the PR agency to start actively promoting the section to make candidates more aware of it. We also plan to introduce a weekly jobs newsletter that candidates can sign up for and which will be emailed to them every Thursday.

Although we will load the first set of jobs for you we are asking members to load future jobs directly onto the BIMA website themselves. Please help us to make the website an effective recruitment medium for you and your fellow BIMA members.

To advertise please send your copy to – info@bima.co.uk and we will post it to the site for you. Jobs will normally remain on the site for 4 weeks but please do let us know if you fill the position or would like the job posted again for a further 4 weeks.

I waited a little to write my first post as a guest on this blog as I wanted to post something challenging and interesting. Whether this amounts to that I will have to leave to you!

Who likes Weebl and Bob? If you don’t know them then I suggest you visit the site right away for some very amusing and clever animations. They were the animators of Cadbury’s Creme Egg rip offs of film this year at Easter. Recently they did a version of the video for Destroy by Ladytron which was very funny. As a result of this animation I have got very interested in Ladytron, the song Destroy is great. I haven’t yet bought anything, no money has changed hands, but the chances were high that it would.

But now i’m not so sure. The site has been told to take the animation off by Ladytron’s management.

I’m not going to make any comments on the legality, appropriateness or otherwise of weebl and bob doing what they did but I will say that the digital industry and music industry have to start to have a proper dialogue about how IP is managed in the digital environment. It has to be a conversation that acknowledges that the world has changed and that business models need to change to keep up with it, to follow users, to be alongside them on the journey and find new models that might be even better than the existing ones otherwise the public and the innovators will find new models for them.

There is a great opportunity here for us because we understand the digital market place and online consumers and we are more likely to understand digital natives that genuinely see no problems in sharing music and have flexible expectations of how media mashes.

We also need to help them understand that in a digital world things that can be easily copied have little value, things that can’t (and are therefore scarce) have great value. It’s just supply and demand. Tracks have little value - Artists have massive value. Record companies have access to both of these assets, but they are sweating the wrong ones.

But don’t just take my word for it. I recommend you go and check out Terry McBride’s blog or this article on IP Democracy that will give you more insight into what a forward thinking music producer thinks about all this stuff. It’s an interesting and fruitful area for thought and digital business.

This blog is being hosted on Wordpress.com until the new BIMA Web site goes live in a few weeks. We’ve just paid for some ‘credits’ which basically allows us to edit the CSS which until now, has been outside of our control. So, please be patient while we continue to improve the look ‘n feel. All suggestions welcome!