Hasta La Creative!

(TrendHunter.com) These bags are perfect for those moms who like to brag about their kids’ supposed artistic inclinations when, most of the time, it is just plain (and very normal) doodle. Scribble Couture will allow those mothers to show off their spawn’s scribble on their bags by having the doodle stitched onto lea…

(TrendHunter.com) Ice, teabags, concealers, cucumbers, botox and a whole lot of other products that promise to get rid of those icky, dark circles and lines are just too stubborn. The new Crystal Clear Eye Pen doesn’t promise long term results, but it does offer a quick and effective way to rid those circles.

The…

(TrendHunter.com) Sexy lingerie for my cell phone? Yoohoo! Real Underwear Miniature Cell Phone Straps are really funny little panties and bras that you can attach to your cell as a strap. The Erokawa straps measure approx. 5.5 x 12cm/ 2.2″ x 4.7″ and they are tacky as hell, but still an absolute riot!

(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?