Being involved in the Ypulse Youth Advisory Board has given me an opportunity to create the "Our Side of the Screen" series, where I write about youth-targeted campaigns.  Since Ypulse is aimed at marketers who talk to ages 8-24, I try to express my reactions to the campaigns from a consumer s...

I will be going to SXSW again this year and doing one new thing (presenting/moderating) and one old thing (library meetup). NEW THING: I will be moderating and contributing to a panel entitled Kicking Ass with Controlled Metadata .  Also on the panel are Tom Conrad of Pandora.com and Tim Spalding o...

Other than for this very purpose (spreading it around the Interwebs) we're not sure why any company would put together a four minute and eleven second commercial. But if you are going to put together a four minute and eleven second commercial, this MAC Cosmetics + Hello Kitty ad is the way to do...

Apologies for the following rant. Over the past few months, as I’ve become a lot more immersed in Twitter, I’ve learned a few things.  First and foremost, the scary, creepy marketing people that your mom warned you about are still out there.  The kind that suggest sending an email to customers...

I like favicons. I like when people do clever things with them. It always seems a waste to me when a brand website has a generic favicon . So I liked this very very small idea that Markus sent me. I think that novelty is a powerful thing. When people haven't seen a brand using a space in just that w...

I thought it would be more. Waaaay more. That equates to 87 hours a year spent surfing for porn. A further hour and 35 minutes is spent looking at dieting and weight loss websites. The poll revealed teenagers spend at least three hours and 10 minutes a week researching topics for their homework, and...

Tomorrow is Blogroll Amnesty Day, which at first blush seems like yet another random traffic-generating scheme of somebody's, but it really has a colorful and tragic history. Jon Swift was alarmed to learn that 'amnesty' was a euphemism for 'delete.' Some major blogs did a Stalinist style purge of a...

Just how utopian is the Twitterverse? IT IS EXACTLY THIS UTOPIAN: So, yesterday, The New York Times's David Pogue spoke at a conference in Vegas. "The topic was Web 2.0," he writes, "with all of its free-speech, global-collaboration ramifications." Pogue figured that "the best way to explain Twitter...

Is it really a ’slam’ if the new administration (new administration!) has simply offered an honest account of how the previous administration (previous administration!) conducted itself during Katrina? Ok, given your status as “ground zero for inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom...

A couple of days ago I posted a blog about 10 really ugly game consoles.  Admittedly, it probably wasn’t my best work: I was short on time and thus the commentary wasn’t really all that funny.  But, it inexplicably blew up on Digg and was linked to from a major gaming site, leading to...