The video below is a sensible insight into how interactive screens can be incorporated into everyday life to enhance our own lives, facilitate greater levels of communication and build relationships.

The great thing about the video, is that it’s not revolutionary and radical, it’s realistic…and quite fascinating. Click play….and don’t drool too much.

Have you seen an iPad magazine app that is as good, or bettter, than Sports Illustrated? Leave a comment below if you have.

I’d consider going to see this one though…

Anyone remotely interested in the future of Australia will be aware that rather shockingly, earlier today the current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted in lieu of Australia’s very first female PM, Julia Gillard. Of course,  Australian and international online media is being swamped with commentary and opinions related to the event (in fact our new red-headed PM was rated in number 1 position in today’s Twitter trends). What better way to capitalize on such a hot topic, than to run a Google Adwords campaign for a completely unrelated business such as The Diet Plate. Check out the first “Sponsored Link” in the screenshot below for Memery‘s creative tongue-in-cheek use of Google Adwords to benefit their client.

If you’re interested in reading more about this campaign,  you can read it on Matt Granfield’s blog. Touche’ Matt, you’ll put me out of a job soon mate.

Pictured above is the Dow Jones movement overnight. It fell by a whopping 10%.  It had many Australian wiping their eyes in disbelief. I guess it’s what you might call falling out of bed.  There’s murmurs in the media that this disturbing movement is the result of human error somewhere behind the scenes, but I’m not so sure.

There could be some blood on the streets today…and more to come perhaps. What do you reckon?

For example, am I the only one that isn’t wetting myself with excitement now that I can embed an actual Tweet into a live web page? For example….

Wow, the wonders of technology huh. At this rate, next month Twitter will be sending men to Mars.

(If you really are excited about it, or just curious, try out this aptly(?) named piece of coding genious called Blackbird Pie for yourself.) And if you need help using the freakin thing, here’s a handy little Blackbird Pie how to guide.

Never forget the power of simplicity dudes.

After being stuck in quarantine for nearly two months, Aussie battler Christiaan Van Vuuren  decided to make good use of his ‘fully sick’ status and record a few entertaining rap videos, like the one below which has already reached 300,000 views on YouTube.

Just imagine how much trouble (or entertainment) guys like this would have caused in hospitals before Apple Macs and wireless internet were invented.  Nurses these days have it way too easy!

Digg.com has since become one of the net’s greatest success story, with some sickening amounts of traffic and revenue being generated from within the Digg community.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Digg, it’s essentially a real-time portal that lists the hottest topics on the internet at any given time.  Digg users simply “digg” any URL that they think is digg-worthy, and the more diggs it receives, the more prominent it’s position on the Digg.com homepage will be.  In addition, Digg allows people with niche interests to filter through the Digg results and find specific topics matching their interests.

Digg has just released this great video, which not only celebrates 5 years of Digg, but also sheds a bit more insight into the history of the company and the successes they have had to date. Well worth watching, I say!

I have heard many valid arguments for and against accepting your annoyingly-internet-savvy maternal or paternal figures as Facebook ‘Friends’.

And by all means, there is no right or wrong answer, as it is a decision left up to the individual based on their own circumstances and preferences. In fact, many people have specific criteria for Facebook friend acquisition. For example:

• - Over time it has become obvious to me, that some people choose to accept friends left, right and centre, to increase their friend stats in a meagre effort to portray their social standing (ironic, since one has have to sit at a computer alone for extended periods of time in order to achieve this).
• - Others accept friend requests for business or personal gain, in order to spread messages of relevance (pffft….losers!)
• - And then there’s those, (gulp), who connect with their ‘friends’ in order to do a little, ah, friendly Facebook stalking.  You know the kind I mean – the, “I wonder how Sam from my year 11 maths class looks, I mean is going, these days?…..(half an hour later and 14 boring albums of photos later)….Whooah, looks like she never shook that habit of ordering two meat pies for lunch.  Haha…..unlucky Sammy! “.  After all, that’s why Facebook was invented, right? RIGHT? (Why do I hear only murmurs of disdain?)

Of course, aside from an individual’s Facebook Friend acquisition strategy , there are certainly also other factors that influence one’s decision, such as…

• - emotional considerations
• - secrecy
• - guilt
• - geographical location
• - public perception (i.e. “eeek….what will my friends think”)

Personally, I believe a large factor in a child’s decision (and I use the word ‘child’ in the sense of ‘offspring’, of any age) on whether to grant their parents ‘access’ to their Facebook world, is based on their long withstanding relationship with their parents.  Kids who don’t encourage their parents into their ‘real world’ lives, are probably even less likely to accept their parents into their online lives.

Maybe I am just reading into it all too much, and we should all just bite the bullet and click the “Accept Friend” button. But then….what we have to talk about at the pub?

So it’s over to you Dad….what do you reckon about 2009 most talked about online predicament? From your point of view, is the decision to to accept a parent as a ‘Facebook Friend’ a moral dilemma, or merely juvenile concern?

(Stay tuned for the first round of the debate, or you can even subscribe to my RSS feed – as a response from my very own fatherly Facebook Friend will follow shortly…..)

The question over the last 12 months and beyond has been, how this slightly gimmicky Augmented Reality technology can be harnessed for mass consumption?

Well, it seems that the world is making progress on the application of Total Immersion technology. I was delighted to recently find out that Topps, a well known producer of American sports collector cards which I haven’t come across in nearly 15 years, has found a way of using augmented reality to revive.  Sure, gone are the days when die-hard sports fans memorize their favorite players stats from the back of a sport-card (now, we simply Google for real time player statistics), but this adds some new and unforeseen appeal to the humble sports card.

As the years move on, I have slowly began to realize how important these few words are.  To learn, is to keep your mind active, to keep your outlook on life fresh, and to prevent becoming a stale and dry like an old piece of pita bread left in the cupboard for a week (if you’ve ever seen my pantry you’ll understand the relevance of that comment).

Sometimes you get caught up in routines and occupations that are so process-driven or time intensive that opportunities to learn new things are placed out of arm’s reach.   After all, you need at least a few minutes spare each day to learn something new, right?

Wrong! Learn something every day allows you to quickly absorb an interesting and valuable fact every day of the year, through it’s visual and entertaining layout, pictured below.  And if you are absolutely smitten with any of the facts you learn, you can even buy a tshirt adorned with your newly learned fact!

So now you can follow the advice of a wise man, and learn something every day without interrupting your day job. Live long and prosper my friends!

However, sometimes there is no option but to be blunt when responding to unreasonable client requests. Being a creative industry, being blunt can be also be a little bit of fun, as this hilarious example of an unreasonable client’s email interaction with a potential service provider illustrates.

Here’s a little snippet as a teaser:

You can read the rest of this email chain here (a word of warning, some of the language is as colorful as the slices of the pie charts).

When I first glanced at this list, I was immediately skeptical that the list was more of a “top 50 sites that the author of this article owes favors to”, as coming at number at #2 was a site I have never heard of before, California Coastline, with hugely popular sites such as Facebook nowhere to be seen within the top 30.

On closer inspection, after investigating sites such as the aforementioned California Coastline, I realised that the author has done a great job of  thoughtfully collating a list that not only contains mainstream high-usage sites, but sites that represent great value to users.

California Coastline, for example, contains thousands of helicopter images of the Cali Coast,  indexed through a searchable interface, as well as integrated with Google mapping technology.   This site is like a private extension of Google Earth, the difference being the entire project is funded out of an individual’s own pocket, which is really great to see  ( … and not only is it great to see that, but now I can spot all the best surf breaks in California thanks to this great aerial photography! ) . There are other sites likes this within the list too, sites that are the hard work of private individuals, rather than just a bunch of links to high profile, high budget corporate-backed websites that are over-hyped and offer little long-term value.

My only criticism, is that the Best 50 Website of 2009 list is quite U.S. centric, which I assume is because Time Magazine is of course a publication hailing from the Unite States.

To give you a bit of a taste, here is the top 10 websites of 2009, as nominated by Time Magazine.

1. 1. Flickr
2. 2. California Coastline
3. 3. Delicious
4. 4. Metafilter
5. 5. popurls
6. 6. Twitter
7. 7. Skype
8. 8. Boing Boing
9. 9. Academic Earth
10. 10. OpenTable

You view the rest of the top 50 here.

They new concept falls within the existing concept of Google Maps Favorite Places, but incorporates the use of QR Code stickers (those crazy looking black and white speckled squares of code unreadable to the human eye).

These Google Maps QR Code stickers are plastered onto the windows of selected outlets chosen by the Google team due to their popularity within the Google Maps application, and can be scanned by any internet enabled device with an internet connection (such as an iPhone) to gain more information about the store.

To see the QR codes in action, it’s probably easiest to watch the video below.

If you want a chance of receiving a  Google Maps Favorites window sticker from Google, you must first make sure you are registered in the Google Local Business listings registry. If you’re not, I suggest you click here now to register your business with Google!

The Digital Brand Experience report, which you can view below, highlights some extremely useful statistics which any marketer worth their salt should be considering during their upcoming digital campaigns.  The report also reveals a couple of the international brands who have successfully promoted their brands using digital channels. The report is written entirely from the perspective that for a brand to be successful in the modern age, it must be experiential in nature.

One of the highlights of the report for me, is the statistics surrounding Facebook users welcoming brand advertising  within this popular social networking platform, provided their is some sort of experiential incentive to do so. Personally, I was beginning to think that plastering your brand into a Facebook group was a waste of time, but the statistics in this report show that Facebook can be used to benefit your brand, provided you put some thought into your strategy and objectives.

Another key point I gleaned from this report, was that 97% of internet users have searched for a brand online. So it’s a no-brainer that every brand should have an online presence!

One final important point that I noted from the presentation, is that digital channels should be used as contributors in creating your ‘experiential brand’, and should be tied in with offline campaigns such as events (like Red Bull’s extreme sporting events), or with tangible response-based incentives, such as a Facebook poll to choose the next flavour of Baskin Robbins ice cream. I guess the point I am trying to make here, is that digital channels will never be the be-all-and-end-all of your marketing campaigns, there still must be some ‘real world’ tangibility to any online campaign you undertake.