Google wave. Boring, boring, boring.

I've been hearing bits and bobs about Google Wave and as with almost anything Google (or Apple) touch, seems that most people are like kids after too many sweets just thinking about the next new thing.
So I went to my favourite browser (Google of course) and searched Google Wave and went here. What greeted me was an excruciatingly boring 1 hour 20 minute video / seminar introducing the product.
For a company that seem to do so many things so well, it really shocked me just how crap this is. I suffered about 15 mins of it and am still non the wiser about why I should really care about Wave.
Maybe I need to trade my collared shirt for one of those "I'm a geeky kinda alternative dude" blue t-shirts to get my head around it?

The world's fastest nudist

This guy claims to be the world's fastest nudist. Watch him running around NYC. Turns out to be a very smart bit of viral marketing by Zappo's, an online shoe retailer. I think this guy has definitely been to the Will Ferrell school of acting. Watch the video, it's funny.

A thinner you!

This is a simple and I imagine very popular business idea - get skilled digital artists to alter personal photographs to illustrate what you would like like if you lost a certain ammount of weight.
It's a vain concept, but people are vain, so I think it will be popular. I think they should do 'a fatter you' as well, so that you get an image of youselef as you currently are, plus the thinner you as a motivator to lose and a fatter you as a deterrent to eat that extra cake. They could also overlay terribly depressing statistics about how your life expectancy, chances of getting diabetes, etc are all going to change by x% depending on whether you're fatter or thinner.
God, how depressing. I'm off for lunch now.
Thinner You via Srpingwise

Social media vs. Advertising analogy

John V. Willshire runs a great blog out of PHD London office called Feeding the Puppy. One of his recent posts includes an interesting presentation that manages to use every istockphoto image of a bonfire to build an analogy of how social media campaigns differ from advertising.

Advertising Fireworks, Social Bonfires

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

You should check out John's blog and keep it bookmarked, there's a lot of thought provoking stuff gets posted there.

Population sizes of virtual worlds from KZero

Here's a really interesting graphical representation from KZero of the population sizes (based on registered users) of many different virtual worlds. A wonderfully simple to understand chart that shows how long the world has been in existence, the size of the population base and the average user age.
It's clear immediately how popular these worlds are with kids and teens, with Habbo being the most popular overall world very much in the 10-15 year old market and sites like Poptropica and Club Penguin doing very well in the 5-10 year old segments.
A few years ago all the buzz in the market was about Second Life and it is interesting to see that their population of registered users is still relatively very small - only a fraction of the bigger kid focused sites.
This all has long term implications for how todays pre-teens develop their social skills and the 'norms' they become accustomed to. Mark Holden of PHD wrote a brilliant book recently about the future of the media agency and one of the things he hypothesises is that today's kids will have a complete blur between their virtual and real world identities, where they don't separate the two in the way that the 'analogue generation' do. You can read Mark's full ebook here.

What does 200 calories look like?

This feeds my fetish for all things visual as well as a mild obsession with food. A really simple but very interesting way to show the calorific content of different foods by showing an actual image of that quantity of food that delviers the 200 calories. From infosthetics and wisegeek

Infographics

I love infographics. It seems like such an amazing skill to have, to be able to take lots of complex data and graphically represent it so that people who often have little understanding of the complexities of the subject can easily grasp the core information.
In the world of media, there is a lot we could learn from this discipline to get us away from the endless charts and numbers.
Check out this slideshow on Flikr below.