The piece itself is pretty good. But it’s the comments underneath that are the telling bit. It’s full of the usual nonsense and lots of people moaning that Twitter is this year’s Friends Reunited blah blah blah.

But you know what, to me it doesn’t matter. Twitter is a real thing. It’s something that people are using and enjoying, and it’s changing the way that lots of people spend big chunks of their connected time. Surely anything that affords change in this way can never be seen as a total waste of time?

This piece on Murketing makes some really interesting points about the point of pointlessness. Here’s a flavour of the piece:

Yes. Twitter freaks don’t want to say, “Look, I’m just messing around. I’m goofing off. Yes, it’s a waste of time, but that’s the whole point.” Instead you get the stuff about Twitter being more important than CNN, or about new forms of community, or truth-to-power revolution, and like that. And yeah those arguments can sort of be backed up by examples — but so can counter-arguments about banality and narcisissm.

If it is play, why not just say so? Why not just say it’s fun? After all, one of the reasons “play” is always in vogue in certain business magazines is that it really is important to creativity — taking yourself out of the routine makes your thinking less rigid, etc.

It’s worth a read. Really.

And finally this piece from Umair Haque’s blog at Harvard Business entitled Twitter’s Ten Rules For Radical Innovators gets across some of the bigger more important things that Twitter represents. There’s some typically ‘Harvard Business’ comments too, which are worth skimming. But in general I’m a huge fan of this piece.

I’m not going to spoil it by listing out the rules – go and read it.

I’ve not been a huge fan of Spotify. I can’t put my finger on why not. I love the idea. I quite like the interface and things. I’ve even come to terms with Jonathan and his ads.

I think that my problem is that I can’t find the music I want. Faced with an empty search box (when I know the results are going to be quite mainstream) my mind just goes blank. And I end up listening to things that I hate, just because they pop into my head quickly.

But a couple of minutes round sharemyplaylists.com and I’ve found:

• The most sampled breakbeats ever – a great collection of funk, soul and more.
• A history of Detroit techno
• A bunch of mod scooter classics
• Celebrations of some of the most influential indie labels, like XL Recordings
• And of course some whomping trance classics

I’m hoping that this might open up the floodgates to the world of Spotify for me.

All for Scrabble. Nice.

I was in the pea section of M&S last night and spotted peas from Gloucester, Kenya, Ethiopia and Guatemala. That’s a lot of Pea-miles.

3 guys, 1 Room. 7 Mario games. Mario Marathon.

These guys are working their way through every console Mario game and attempting to collect every star on every level. At this moment in time they’re 66 hours in and doing pretty well. They’ve raised over $22k so far. If you’ve never played any of the Mario games you’ll have no idea the enormity of the quest they’ve committed too.

Last night they had the 2nd most trending topic on Twitter, but that seems to have died down now unfortunately. But you can help to get it back up there by tweeting with the hashtag #mariomarathon – plus if you tweet with that hashtag you’ll be entered into a draw to win the contents of one of their “Mario Schwag ? Boxes”. Hooray.

The whole thing is being streamed live on ustream.tv. People who donate or tweet about it are getting shout-outs on the air. They’re mucking around. They’re having fun. A bit like Tim’s thing that I posted the other day. There’s something about this that just feels DIY and super-excellent.

Of course there’s examples of brands having done this kind of thing too. Diesel’s Heides campaign, and also the movieboy campaign for The Sun. But brands and agencies always seem to overcook it (just a bit), hell we’ve done it too. It’s only natural. We want it to look slick. To convey the values of the brand. To be laden with the clients’ lovely juicy messaging. We feel like we need to use ALL the social services. We overly worry about moderation and the list of mistakes goes on.

Mario Marathon is how the real world works. Stick it on a site. Use stuff that’s out there and away you go… FUN TIMES!

If you want to know how to put on a gaming marathon online, the Mario Marathon dudes have written a handy how-to. There’s loads of good advice in there. Seriously go check it out even if you’re not planning on running a gaming marathon this is chock full of online smarts…

My favourite piece is the table of costs.

$75 Video Capture Card
$50 Web Cam
$30 WebCamMax Software
$16 Cables, Adaptors, Splitters
$20 Universal Game Cable
$16 Desktop Microphones
$15 Web Domain Name

Gulp!

I donated some money last night and got a shout-out on the stream. It was nice. Have a look. Donate some cash.

I’m so jealous of this blog. It makes me feel so very uncool.

http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com

It’s an unfussy Tumblr that features the coolest people ever. Great photos and well chosen quotes. Simple and well, cool. I guess.

Dudes from the top: Walken, Thompson, Curtis, Camus.

Posted to Twitter by the impossibly cool @kallgard.

Helge lays down a seriously comprehensive overview of digital marketing (or post-digital marketing) – at 257 slides it’s long. But there’s something in there for every occasion. It’s when I see things like this that I realise there are people out there with brains that are almost too big.

Maybe it’s the medium of presentations, or maybe it’s because it’s Sunday, or maybe because I’m not smart enough, but it left my head in a bit of a spin.

His blog continues that trend: http://www.180360720.no/ go there and subscribe to his feed. At first I thought he had a silly URL, but it’s not, it was me being stupid 180 / 360 /720 makes total sense.

And if you look across all his Slideshare presentations you’ll find someone overflowing with plannery goodness AND has a decent eye for making his charts look dirt-hot too.

Via: http://www.asourceofinspiration.com/

This probably isn’t that funny to anyone else. But this morning I was mucking round with iPhoto’s face recognition function and trying to identify my good lady Sophie in a bunch of photos. As I was paging through them, iPhoto threw up this. It made me do big LOLs.

If you’ve not seen the original rant it’s here:

And I know you’ve all seen Techno Viking. However, I never tire of his wonderful adventures…

Thank you @paryshnikov – I needed to see that.

via: http://www.creativeapplications.net and @flipper01

Imagine the fun you could have with a Wham! interactive vinyl. The mind boggles.

Or Bon Jovi!

If you’re looking to buy picture discs have a look here, it’s where I got the images from.