Hasta La Creative!

(TrendHunter.com) Here’s an educational rap about web design by Poetic Prophet. Listen to the lyrics and pick up some tips about how to design your own web page. Marketing rap is big, but I’m so out of touch with hip-hop that I will have to leave this type of lesson to the geniuses among us like Ayman. Right On!

This just in: Adland will kill us all!

And how apropos the news is reported from CHICAGO where at least ad agencies seem to be dying lately:

He said the first victim was a young man who had a web design job at a communications department, and worked for a well respected university. “He was perfectly fine when he went to work,” Rathburg said in a telephone interview.
“After about 15 minutes, he had an acute case of gnarles barking cough and collapsed on the floor. The autopsy clearly indicates he died from exposure to adland,” said Rathburg, who would not disclose the man’s name or the precise place and time of his death for privacy reasons.

Contact with, or even being in the proximity of adland is known to trigger acute farty residue, screaming whoopers, and a deadly soup of bacteria called gumbo that shoots out of your nostrils

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(TrendHunter.com) While I find the idea of embedding any devices in your body very weird, this Bluetooth Microphone Dental Insert that utilizes Nano Electronics certainly makes sense for those who work at call centers or are just addicted to talking on the phone.

According to the distibuter Chinavision, “an extremel…

I appreciate that Misha Cornes of Organic has stuck her neck out by declaring that she’s “over Twitter.”

Her reasoning is sound:

Most people are not that interesting.

There, I said it. Overall, the culture of self-promotion embedded in most social media applications bothers me. I know that listening to “life between blogs post and emails” is supposed to bring me closer to my Twitter friends, but I don’t want to hear about their minutiae any more than I want to report on my own. The time you spend away from people is what allows you to be interesting to each other again.

Twitter takes bite-sized content about three bites too far.

Have you ever read the transcript of a Twitter conversation? It’s like reading the notes that get passed back and forth in class. If blogs are bite-sized versions of newspaper-length articles, tweets are one-liners. And as Gertrude Stein quipped, “literature is not remarks”. I like to get the benefit of people’s reasoned opinions, not their spontaneous outbursts.

Twitter feels distancing even as it connects me to others.

I think the main positive benefit of Twitter – promoting weak social bonds between loosely connected groups- actually allows people to maintain their space and reduces real intimacy. In this great article about the parallels between behaviors like friending and more ancient forms of oral communication, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch notes that there’s a “fundamental distance” to social networks. “That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.”

With Twitter, each of us shouts into the void to the community at large, rather than taking the risk of speaking directly to one another. Tweets, if you can consider them personal communications at all, are a declaration of existence rather than an invitation to engage in a conversation.

If we are to buy into Wesch’s “fundamental distance” theory of social networks and Cornes’ three-part analysis, the game’s up. I know I’m tempted to buy it. Where are you in this debate?

Tribune Company, the largest employee-owned media company in the nation, today announced it has changed its name to ZellCoMediaEnterprises Inc. or ZCMEINC. Zell, who made a fortune in real estate before deciding he’d like to dabble in an industry completely unfamiliar to him, announced the change in his record-setting 437th email to exhausted employees this year.

“Hell, I put $315 million into this thing, and we’re on the hook for $13 billion — the least I ought to get is my name on the company’s stationery,” said Zell, who remains chairman and CEO of the newly named enterprise.

Picking up on the news. The Wall Street Journal notes that Tribune’s corporate Web site, www.tribune.com, has been temporarily replaced with a version including a running “DEBToMETER,” a “TipJar” labeled “Hey buddy, help a paper out?” and a rotating sequence of dog photographs—a wink, perhaps, at a controversy Mr. Zell stoked by uttering an obscenity at a staffer who suggested that the push for profit would replace serious journalism with puppy photos.

(TrendHunter.com) The most I hate about keychain lights is their short lifecycle. The Mini Tritium Glowring Keychain wins my heart by having the ability to glow continuously for 10 years!

It’s perfect. Completely contained and self-powered, with a compact design and an ultra bright green glow (hello night clubs). An…

Here’s a new Heineken commercial featuring a green-clad clan of “cops”

It took me a few a seconds to ‘get’ these Jocky Underwear ads, then I just couldn’t stop laughing.

As women appreciate the help of a sports bra while doing physical activities, guys also need an appropriate protection to prevent their family jewels from popping up.

The ‘Stay Put’ campaign shows yo…

Gas prices are out of hand and there’s no ceiling in sight. We’ll be looking at $4.00/gallon and up before GWB and his oil men buddies depart Washington next January.

The Washington Post has more…

“On April Fool’s Day, the biggest joke of all is being played on American families by Big Oil,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., as his committee began hearing from the oil company executives.

“These companies are defending billions of federal subsidies … while reaping over a hundred billion dollars in profits in just the last year alone,” complained Markey, chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Regulation? Taxes? NO WAY!

“Our earnings, though high in absolute terms, need to be viewed in the context of the scale and cyclical, long-term nature of our industry as well as the huge investment requirements,” said J.S. Simon, Exxon Mobil’s senior vice president. Last year the oil and gas industry earned 8.3 cents per dollar of sales, only a little higher than the Dow Jones Industrial Average for major industries, he argued in prepared testimony.

(TrendHunter.com) Marilyn Monroe must be one of the most recognizable and used faces in our culture. And although dead stars have been unnecessarily used in ads before, Monroe fits perfectly in Color Bar’s “Become Someone” campaign promoting their make-up line. She is joined by none less than the legendary Elizabeth …