There's all kinds of time-wasters people can play online and there's innumerable ways for people to win money. There's also hundreds of mindless advertising awards show that offer up nothing more than pretty statues to collect dust in your office. Why not combine all this into something that's fun and involves people outside of the industry as well.
Dubbed existential advertising, Lost (the site, not the show) is a place where people can join, invite others and get creative in doing so. Instead of link-begging (which is all we're up to at this point, sadly), players are urged to come up with creative ways to invite people to the site. For each person that accepts an invitation, the inviter gets a point. If they don't get any points withing a 30 day period, they lose and they are out of the game. If them win, they get $5,000. Give it a try.
Damn, we just got over all the Super Bowl 2007 hype and now we have to start thinking about Super Bowl 2008 all because three guys decided to launch a Million Dollar homepage-style site, called MyBowlAd, that promises advertisers space on t-shirts the three will wear in a :30 they hope to place in the game with the money they raise. Thanks guys. We were at least hoping to get through the Summer and now we have to create a Super Bowl 2008 category ten months before we normally would have. Anyway, they promise Internet celebrities will join them in their effort. Perhaps they'll hook up with Lonelygirl15.
If the project gets legs, we're destined to hear about companies and products we never knew existed like premiere sponsor Table Shox, a device puts car-like miniature shock absorbers under a table's feet to cure wobbliness. We just can't to see who signs up next.
Curiouser and curiouser. Australia-based graphic artist Jason Nelson throws together an odd piece of work called Hermeticon, which uses bits of '80's toy and candy ads to create sound and video collages that spark to life when you type things out into a grid. He calls the results "ad-driven spells."
It reminds us a lot of all the ad generators already flying around except less coherent than usual. That's okay though, we dig it.
It might just be because our childhood connection to Rainbow Brite sparked back to life when she appeared for a moment - just a moment! - on the grid. We can't help but admire the emotional range of a good nostalgic mash-up. That's why we sit on in the dark watching "I Love the 80's" reruns at 2 AM.
We've all dreamed of being scouted by someone who happens to notice the pure geniosity of our existence. Most grow up to chock this dear wish off to fancy, but the fantasy actually became reality for Matt Harding.
It's a weird story. The 30-something gamer travels the world with a few buddies and does a goofy dance on tape at every stop they make. Probably because of people sitting at desks all day, the video goes viral. Then it's picked up by Stride Gum, who likes Matt's dance so much they're sending him around the world again.
We dig Matt but don't know how the jig will help hock gum. Will he be chewing and dancing at the same time? We see some liability issues there - some people can't walk and chew gum at the same time. The risk of injury is in fact so vast that chewing gum was banned in Singapore.
We all need our checks and balances. And when the ever-watchful public eye has set its sights on you, the checks can come in torrents. Such is the case with Rosie O'Donnell. For that Chinese "accent" she recently performed on "The View," Rosie's receiving a hailstorm of nasty response from the Asian community.
One that's generating some serious traffic on Youtube is the eloquent and forceful rebuke by poet Beau Sia, whose cool definition of "accent," and snarky "plus-sized lesbian" remark, rang like a slap in the face - and we're not even the targets.
We're not sure what's worse: Trumpster in a spitting rage, or the growing majority of the world's population raging poetic justice against you.
What happened to the funny and gentle Rosie, circa Harriet the Spy? Bring her back. We are scared of this manic new one.
Thanks to Bill for the tip-off.
Sinless, who by now we suspect spends an unusual amount of time trolling The Fame Game, shares a very white rendition of 50 Cent's In Da Club. Bad rapping and emo glasses aside, we couldn't stop staring at the tassle swinging helplessly from one side of the headliner's hoodie. We are easily mesmerized by little details like that.
"White men can't rap..." our Fame Game-loving friend observes almost wistfully, and even if that's so, they can sure trumpet and clap hands in a cramped space quite decently. When we do our song-and-dance, we normally need a wide berth.
A cross between a collaborative rubber band ball and a chain letter, this piece of "potential art" has been bouncing through the webosphere, inviting collective creative design for an ever-growing montage.
Drawball zooms into a spot about 1/4096th its size, which is where users can leave their mark. The result isn't just a mishmash of arbitrary graffiti; it includes americana logos like Coca-Cola, new pop culture icons like Digg and representations of various subcultures.
Like Wikipedia.org, the Drawball project proves surprising to some: people left virtually unregulated will work together to build something meaningful, even if the meaning can only be seen in the aggregate.
To witness the evolution of Drawball from beginning to end, check out Drawball Playback, where a year's work of collaborative art unfolds. It's a little like watching the progression of mankind in hyperspeed, as various image colonizations and social eclipses take place over the life of the project.
We wonder if human colonizations are this provocative from a distance. Maybe that's why God never intervenes.
Sinless points us to The Metallers, a pair of awkward fame-seekers who remind us why heavy metal was so good for the furniture industry. And maybe also the Ritalin industry.
We covered The Fame Game when it first came out and were intrigued back then at what kind of entries appeared. After the long "we-want-your-stuff!" marketing craze, and the small CGM gems that appeared in the Super Bowl, one forgets that for the most part pure consumer-gen will consist mainly of bedroom dancing and awkward pillow-tossing.
Never cross a Linux lover. Especially if you're Microsoft touting a new operating system called Vista. Linux lovers eschew Microsoft and many other companies claiming there way of computing life is far better than the rest of the world's which uses Microsoft...oh and Apple too. It seems some Linux lovers don't appreciate Microsoft's recent plastering of the world with its Vista marketing launch and took a blade to one of the campaign's posters cutting the word "Linux" into the board. Vandalism? Consumer Generated Marketing? Geeks on a rampage? You decide.
For a marketing trend to be legit, Nike jumps on board and makes it legit, letting everybody else make mistakes before it swoops in with its gigantor marketing team and victorious hear-me-roar worldview.
To illustrate, they improved on Dove's decent but docile Real Beauty campaign, not just representing imperfections but embracing them with manic ferocity, even writing little manifestos about the merits of thunder thighs - which would be crazy-lame if done by anybody else but Nike.
So it's apt that they call their take on consumer-generated ads The Second Coming. And instead of begging for whatever you can pull out of your ass (a method yielding only ironic or lackluster results), they've wrapped an iron fist around the potential outcomes.
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