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.

British Airways brand experience - it's the little things that make the difference

I had to fly to London from Beijing via Hong Kong overnight last night and straight into the office in London. I'm lucky enough to get to fly business class and am a bit of a geek about comparing different airlines. The BA flight from Hong Kong to Heathrow was on a brand new plane with their new Club World cabin. It was interesting that half the seats in business are rear facing - one of them mine. I've never sat facing down the back of the plane and as we jetted off, it was a bit strange. The flatbed seat was the comfiest I've been in and I managed to get quite a bit of sleep, but what really made the flight was the breakfast. I think for anyone Enlgish, especially if you live overseas, there's something symbolic and indulgent about a full English breakfast.
I'm not usually too hungry when it comes to airline food, but this breakfast was fantastic. As I was enjoying it we flew over the british coast as dawn and they might have well piped "Rule Britannia" thru the cabin.
There was a lot of nice things about the BA product, but the small thing of getting the breakfast just right - and serving it with HP sauce - really made it a great brand experience.