In case you hadn't noticed, things have been miiiiighty quiet 'round these parts lately.

We've had so much work that this project has fallen by the wayside. A high quality problem, to be sure; but we love what we've been able to do with this little corner of the net so far, and it will be back in some form or another in early 2010. Until then, make good choices, kiddos. We'll see you in a bit.

When it comes to pop art, the following video is nothing short of astounding. It's the animated intro for the new video game The Beatles Rockband.

Pop artist extraordinaire, Banksy once said:

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Hate it or not the central statement there is, and for the most part always has been, true. Art has always had patrons, whether it be The Vatican, a video game studio or Hollywood may or may not diminish the art your mind, but you can hardly argue with the pedigree of commercial artistry in the video above. Personally it's why I like advertising. Gorgeous art with a purpose becomes design in my eyes. It's communication backed by reason, which I love. Art with no purpose is lost on me.

Make sure you watch the high-quality version here at the official site. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with The Beatles Rockband in any way. Although I am now lusting after an Xbox 360.)

Word of mouth advertising is powerful. So is a good parking spot...

Range Rover Lemon

From Daily Mail via Jalopnik

We are now reaching the end of the Stanley Cup finals. As the Redwings and Penguins battle it out, I thought this would be a perfect time to check out bushparty for a compilation of some of the worst logos to ever see a hockey game.

New Google Logo

Google's new logo mixes their serifs with their sans-serifs and pulls it off, in my opinion. Once again, Google minimizes minimalism with blue sans-serif lower case letters to brand all of their products

Check out the new logos already at the top of some of Google's web pages, including Google Labs, Google Moderator, and Google Code.

F is for Fail

An utter and complete failure in the customer experience design department from his local ISP (screwing up everything from web from usability/security to phone support) led Douglas Mezzar to take things into his own hands. After 3 months, wasted hours and dollars, he exploits a weakness in their web form to do something he should have been able to do from the start.

Although Douglas Mezzer’s housemate had moved out many months ago, there was one recurring reminder of his prior residence: the monthly DSL bill from iiNet. Though Douglas had been paying on time every month, Douglas thought it’d be best if the bills came addressed to him instead of his former housemate. He figured it’d be a simple change that could all be accomplished through the self-service account management website.

After logging in, however, he ran into a bit of an issue. While he could change the address, phone number, email address, date of birth, and several other fields, the Firstname and Surname were disabled.

Not a big deal, Douglas figured, they have the customer service number listed right there.

An hour and a half of customer service calls later, he finally got a hold of someone who could help with the name change. After verifying his date of birth, mother’s maiden name, and inside leg measurements, the rep cheerfully informed him that they could change the name on the account.

“Of course,” the rep added, “there’s a small fee of $59, but we’ll just bill that to your account.”

“Wait wait,” Douglas interrupted, “$59 for a name change!?”

“Well yes,” the rep explained, “it’s a standard fee. There’s a whole process, you understand.”

Douglas begrudgingly agreed. After all, he did just tell iiNet that his housemate moved out; saying “thanks but no thanks, he’s actually moving back in now” didn’t seem so believable.

A couple weeks later, the bill duly arrived with an additional $59 “name change” fee attached. Its addressee, however, was still Douglas’s former housemate. No big deal, he figured, I’m sure the next one will come to me.

The next month’s bill came and it was still not addressed to him. Okay, fine, he thought, they’ll waste my time. They’ll take my money. But apparently, making the ten-second change is too hard!? He had no choice but to call back; it was now a matter of principle.

When Douglas logged back on to the customer portal to find the appropriate service number, a thought popped into his mind. What if, he thought to himself, hmmm… what if they were incredibly lazy in putting this web app together? Could I just edit the fields myself?

He loaded up his trusty Firebug plugin and Inspected the Firstname field. He clicked “Edit HTML”, replaced Joe’s name with his own, and removed the “disabled” tag.

He followed suit with the Surname field and clicked Save Changes. Surely this won’t work, he told himself, they’re an ISP; they wouldn’t be that stupid, right?

To his surprise, there were no errors and the fields now read “Douglas” and “Mezzer”. Figuring it was some goofy persistence thing, he logged out and logged back in. The account still said “Douglas Mezzer”. Could it have actually worked?

Yes, apparently. The following month’s bill was addressed to “Douglas Mezzer” and there wasn’t a “name change” fee to be found. Though, he did consider them sending them a bill for doing their job.

Get the full story, including screenshots, here: Connect Betterer - The Daily WTF

Voltage recently appeared in Men's Health magazine offering a few SEM tips on keeping a good appearance online.

Imagine you've met an amazing woman. You enthusiastically exchange info with her, but when you call a few days later, she doesn't pick up or call you back. What happened? She probably did what every modern woman does: She googled you. Thanks to debauched Flickr photos, a boneheaded blog remark, or racy posts on your Facebook wall, she's concluded that you're a cad.

Don't think women won't try to find the good, the bad, and the ugly about you online. A 2006 Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of adult Internet users employ search engines to check up on one another. "I think these numbers would be significantly higher today, especially with romantic relationships," says Harvard computer-science professor Harry Lewis, Ph.D., coauthor of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. Use these technological and psychological moves to look great online, and you'll have a much better chance of scoring offline.

Take out the trash
Your first step is to erase as much unsavory content as you can from sites around the Web that you may appear on -- crude blog entries from the past, embarrassing spring-break photos. If it's content owned by you or a friend, either pull it down or hide it from searches, says Lewis. It's actually pretty simple to do that, if you're reasonably Web savvy. Just create a file called "robots.txt" in your site's root directory, and then place the following two lines of code into it: "User-agent: *" and "Disallow: /". Most search engines will now skip right over your site.

If the junk sits on other people's sites, try to find their Web masters at whois.com and send each a polite e-mail request to remove the material, advises Internet privacy expert Kevin B. McDonald of IT security firm Alvaka Networks. It helps if there's a legal issue, such as copyright or slander. "In my nearly 15 years of experience, I've found that the odds of taking content back are a little less than 25 percent," says McDonald, who adds that men should sign up for Google and Yahoo alerts with their names as keywords. This will help track new garbage that may surface.

Secure your good name
The second step in your online image rehab is to control the pages women see when they search for you. If you aren't already using social or business networking sites, sign up for Facebook and LinkedIn. Both are popular and always appear high in search results, says McDonald. At the same time, visit rapleaf.com, a site that helps users track their online presence, to sort out where your name pops up (in accounts and registrations, for example). Then drop Friendster, which makes you look 45, and MySpace, which makes you look 13.

If you need to "de-emphasize" unsavory search results, sign up for additional accounts under your targeted search term (probably your name) at trusted sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Blogger, says Wade Meredith, a search-engine marketing account manager at Kansas City's Voltage Creative. The more new stuff you post and the more quality links you have heading to and away from your sites, the higher up those pages will appear in searches. "This content will be hoovered up by the Google bots and should at least clean your first page or two of results," Meredith explains. As a final security measure, buy your name at godaddy.com for about $10 a year, if only to keep some fool from nabbing it and posting photos of his beer bong collection.

Sharpen your profile
Your buddies may not give a crap about Facebook, but she very likely will, so populate your page with strong, positive content. "Talk about things you're passionate about," suggests Emmi Sorokin, who runs It's a Man's World, a Boston image-consulting firm. "Talk about your friends, your family, and your favorite activities, to present yourself as someone who is generally happy and contributes to the people around him."

Any posted photos should support that message -- so fewer party shots and bungee cords, more friends, family, kids, and dogs. Note: If someone else attaches your name to a dicey photo, click "remove tag" under the shot, and it'll disappear from the "Photos of You" section of your page.

Facebook's default is to broadcast just about every minor change you make to your profile without your really being aware of it. Fix this on your main page by mousing over "Settings" in the upper-right corner. Click on "Privacy Settings," then click on "News Feed and Wall." From this page, you can uncheck boxes so your friends aren't notified about every hot new friend or flirty wall post.

Keep it together
Even if you take all these steps and the two of you reach couplehood, there's still the potential for problems. First, a blog that mentions both of you could raise her eyebrows. Not only is there the chance she'll misinterpret a remark, but it also creates a forum where others can comment on your relationship in ways that she may also misinterpret. So focus on fun things you do together -- weekend trips, restaurants you've tried -- without going into detail. Basically, "you can blog about your relationship if you write about how great your girl is," says psychologist Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D., author of The Unofficial Guide to Dating Again.

Second, old images may pop up, and attractive women you know will "friend" you. Head off suspicion with forthright honesty. "Make it clear that those goofy photos are part of your past -- that was then, this is now," says clinical psychiatrist Mark Goulston, M.D., author of The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship. When it comes to new friends, just explain how you know them. "That way she doesn't have to go through that nauseating 'Who are these people?' feeling," says relationship expert Debra Burrell, C.S.W. If she can't deal, well, try not to lose any sleep over it. "You want a woman who can accept who you are," says Tessina.

Or at least a meticulously scrubbed-up and filtered version of who you are.

Take a look at the original article, complete with requesite hottie-at-laptop (it is Men's health after all) over at MensHealth.com.

Eric Karjaluoto has a great post talking about companies slashing marketing budgets during this recession. (Which many are.)

What baffles me about all of this is how people are choosing to cut their spending. I can appreciate reducing office space or negotiating a lower lease rate. I similarly understand reducing staff members or entertaining job sharing options. What I can’t quite grasp, however, is this tendency to narrow the pipe for incoming sales. When you aren’t getting dates, you don’t go home and watch re-runs of Matlock; you get out of the house and meet people.

It seems that most companies are in fact doing the opposite of this though. I talk to numerous people in key roles who look a little like they’re a moment from crapping themselves. When I ask what they are doing in terms of marketing they typically respond in the same fashion, telling me something to the effect of, “We know it’s something we should be doing, but we have to cut right now.”

A nice office space doesn’t directly drive sales. Office perks may heighten morale but they don’t necessarily bring in new clients. In times like these, all of us have to look at what keeps the machine running. As such, there’s one simple truth that I want you to embrace: your company has to accelerate its marketing and sales efforts...

...So, let’s just say you’ve taken a few moments to skim this article, and you think that I’m perhaps making a small amount of sense here. Well this then is the spot where I need to sell you on the notion that this whole “marketing” thing could actually work for you. Let me take the next few moments to push you off that cliff.  ;-)

When you’re half-way through a grueling run, feeling like you want to “puke your lungs out”, you tend to forget that you’re not the only one. Everyone else around you is likely feeling just about the same way, and it’s the one who can suck it up and push harder who wins the race. Although there are a few lucky ones who have managed to escape the pinch, I feel I can safely say that your competitors are hurting badly. So while they are retreating and licking their wounds, I want you to press the gas pedal and haul some ass. They’re vulnerable; isn’t this the perfect time to strike?

In fact, they’re running so scared that there’s less “noise” out there. When times are good, everyone’s clamoring to have their voice heard. Today, however, your marketing dollar has more bang, largely because fewer people are advertising, selling, and getting the word out. It’s ripe for you to get out there, bang your drum, and perhaps even grab a couple of your competitors’ clients in the meanwhile.

Read the rest of it: Stop Acting Like a Sissy and Market Your Company.

GM Pontiac Ad Loose Mispelling

There are 12 words in this ad and one of them is misspelled... Maybe they laid-off their proofreader? Not only that, but General Motors really piles it on as the car shown is a Pontiac, which is one of the divisions they're axing. Who's in charge over there? This sort of marketing is not winning hearts and minds of the (literate) American public.

From Graphjam: