internet cool?!

I recommend anyone who uses delicious to try this. Kinda an eye opening experience to peer at a cloud of your web-wake from your internet travels.

It is like sifting through your own garbage or um…reviewing what you’ve eaten in a weeks time. Story-telling.

Go to Wordle.net to make yer own. See my full Wordle here.

Showing and not simply telling is the foundation to forming Rich Ideas and marketing as a service. This neat little ad is a Smart Car “vending machine” giving the user a choice between coupe or cabrio information. Pushing the button on the vendor doesn’t relinquish a car, but it does dispense a branded tube containing pamphlets on the new models, dealer information, and a sheet of Smart Car stickers featuring the available colors.

experiences not messages

Holding a full-size Smart Car, the faux vending machine is a nice idea that fits right into the Japanese love for instant gratification on-the-go. In not sure there are many other automotive brands that can pull this off (saving Mini perhaps). And in true Rich Idea fashion, the user walks away smiling - having felt different about the brand because it involved them in a valuable and information-based experience.

Fantastic idea conveying the quirkiness, size and simplicity of Smart Car ownership.

This is just another fascinating demonstration of the power of voice each and every one of us have. The same blog entries that can engage, inspire and unite can also ignite a scuffle, destroy an ad campaign, create a PR nightmare, shut down a company and even cause a divorce - the list goes on.

will it go too far?

It’s funny how “mass media” are regulated - dramatically. But the individual can say what ever they want. (Obviously the reason “people journalism” is so amazing to begin with.) This power is a double edged sword.

We (as bloggers and digerati) are also a headache and a nightmare for our very clients and brands we work for. There are already cases where the blogger’s that haven’t exercised self restraint have gotten themselves (and others) in danger. Will it go too far? In some cases it already has.

Netflix just “got rich.”

Somehow this seems cooler/more viable than the apple TV. The new Netflix Player by Roku (about 100 bucks) lets you watch movies and TV shows from your Netflix queue, right on your TV. Bummer that it is yet another set-top box I have to plop on my TV, (ditch my SlingBox??) but it provides instant access to a library of 10,000 Netflix movies and TV shows (Currently 10% of the library and counting.)

The player features Wired Ethernet and Wi-Fi, HDMI and Component Video, and comes with a simple remote control to boot.

what’s the rich idea??

Wait for it. Waaaaiiiit for iiiit… NO EXTRA COST. Bam! You just have to buy the box and have a Netflix subscription. Awesome.

Most times thinking richly doesn’t require a ton of code and a massive design team.

Here’s two sweet examples:

1. Weallhatequickbooks.com
A company by the name of Less Accounting set out to create a “Quickbooks beater.” Then they created a interactive billboard of sorts by taking a one page landing page titled and URL’d “We All Hate Quickbooks” and then piped every mention of Quickbooks (usually negative) from Twitter into the page. Not the nicest thing to look at, but I think it works really hard as a pithy and valuable landing page full of tips, collective consciousness and commentary.

2. Coroflot Job Feed
RSS on steroids. That’s pretty much how I’d sum this up. It is only been up a week and is already nearing 100 followers.

What if jet ownership were re-thought to a point where overall travel costs could be reduced to a level that’s actually comparable to first-class commercial travel? What if you could come and go as you please and take off from airports that still have parking spaces? What if you had access to travel the way it was meant to be?

What if you were friggin’ loaded? Well then, the creators of JetBlue (my favorite way to travel) might have yet another refreshing air travel idea for you. It is an interesting alternative to small chartered flying. JetSuite is assembling a fleet of 100 Embraer Phenom 100 jets, with the twist being that the company is lobbying private buyers to buy the jets. Did you catch that? You own the jets. Then, when you don’t need your aircraft, JetSuite charters it to someone who does. The new idea? Unlike the private time-share competition, no matter how much (or how little) your plane is flown, you’re guaranteed a monthly revenue stream.

How? JetSuite will pay the owners $25,000 per month in exchange for allowing JetSuite to use and maintain the jets during their down times. (You know, when you’re not frolicking from coastal golf course to strip club on the weekends. Sure, you’ll have to drop $3,000,000 but that $25,000/month could pay for your fuel costs to Cabo.*

Full disclosure: I have spent much of my career creating marketing programs, interactive ideas, brand launches and web redesigns for brands like JetSuite in the Travel and Hospitality industry. It is by far my biggest corporate passion. Couldn’t be happier to see a new idea like this in the wild.

*No it won’t

Newzflash. You can now add OpenSocial applications to your Orkut profile (kinda like facebook).

Currently the Orkut directory includes only a limited number of applications but one thing that Orkut has is the ability to congregate people into interactive sessions (like a physical chatroom of sorts - think network gaming).

One such app that I stumbled upon today is called TypeRacer - a typing game that lets you race your Orkut friends, in real-time, using your hard-earned keyboard skills and compare your typing speed with other Orkut friends in real-time. The faster you type, the sooner your car will hit the finish line. I’ll be honest - at first I thought this was a terrible idea. Until I used it. It’s fun and kinda addictive! What’s more, it kinda teaches you to type a helluva lot better than that Mavis Beacon crap back in the day. My own speed went up in the 5 minutes I was messing with it.

You start with a little car on the left side of the screen, and you type the given text to make your car move all the way to the right as quickly as possible. Your score will be saved, and your Orkut profile will show how you rank among all of your friends. You know, so they can know how fast you type I guess.

It seems you can add a maximum of 25 apps to your profile. Unlike Facebook, where you can clutter your own profile page beyond recognition with “It’s Brittany Bitch!” iconography. :)

Oh yeah, and if you’re like the rest of North America and not on Orkut, just head to typeracer.com to play for yourself.

This ad reminds me of ad I once thought of for the National Librarians Association. No copy. Just a button labeled “Learn More” :)

I Love this radical move: Radiohead’s new single “Nude” can be remixed in GarageBand. (Full disclosure: I still haven’t bought the album.) I know…I know.

The separate sections (bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums) are available for purchase iTunes in the same way that you purchase any other song.

Remix galore.

Finished tracks can then be uploaded to the Radiohead site where Radiohead faithful can vote for their favs.

Lather, rise, repeat. Cool!

I couldn’t be more of a High Fidelity-esque music geek. I love to make top-five lists and my music library seems more like a generational patchwork quilt than 31 year old’s typical music collection. Music surrounds my life..from friends bands to going to shows to playing guitar hero. It fits my moods, it makes my moods and in many ways defines the emo dork I am. I mean, who among us hasn’t turned to music when we’ve felt sad(or happy), or wished that Bruce Springsteen or Thom Yorke would talk to us directly like they speak to us through their music?

Growing up with music in my life was a huge deal for me and the mix-tape (and most recently “play-lists” always captured all of that and more. Recently I discovered Muxtape. I love anything that’s dead simple and useful. And you can’t get anymore simple than Muxtape. The online service does one thing — let you create and share mixtape-like MP3 playlists with friends. The signup is quick and the value is deep. Music geeks like me should definitely give it a spin.

One of my favorite actors is John Cusack. He sums Mix-tapes up wonderfully for me.

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter. There’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind,” but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.”

Mix-taping is an evolved form of messenging. So. What are your mix-tapes? Do you have rules? Does any of this make sense? Go whip something up at Muxtape. My username is Meat99. Rok.