Why isn't this a campaign already?

David Pogue twittered this photo of a squirrel in his backyard, theiving a little Skippy:

Click the photo to go to David Pogue's original post.

There's such an obvious marketing idea here, and I'm not just talking about Skippy and this photo.

A savvy brand would have the word out, right now, that they are paying $0.10 per follower for anyone who Twitters a photo with good product placement. For your mid-range Twitter mavens, the ones with a couple thousand followers, that's a cool benjamin or two. Certainly worthwhile, and since they'll be concerned with their own integrity as much as the cash, the photos are likely to be more authentic and entertaining than anything a brand manager could come up with - after all, "all of us are smarter than any of us."

Hop to it, world. You can send my royalty check when you pay out the first million.

Great design in the grocery store

img_0714, originally uploaded by jaysonelliot.

Isn't it amazing that all the money brands have spent on product refreshes and packaging redesigns have failed to produce much that can equal the power of a century-old staple?

Contextual to-do lists

img_0711, originally uploaded by jaysonelliot.

Index cards are my favorite way of capturing my thoughts, because they are random access, don't require me to structure my thinking beforehand, and can be endlessly rearranged.

I recently picked up a nice cheap set of metal shelves at Ikea, which I now use instead of a desk file stand or cubbyholes. With the shelves, I can see my work much more easily, and with an average of 8-12 projects ongoing at any time, I need them all "out in the open."

Thanks to some adhesive index card pockets from Smead, I now have brought the two systems together. Each shelf is for one project, and now each shelf has its own little index card holder, where I can put to-do items just for that project.

I can tell how much I have to do at a glance by the number of cards in each pocket, and how my overall workload is by stepping back and looking at all the shelves together. Horray!

Facebook is a scammers' heaven

As long as advertising like this appears on Facebook, it's going to be hard to trust them.

TheMindQuiz.com (I'm not linking that, for reasons that will be obvious) is a notorious scam, and yet somehow, Facebook has allowed them to "advertise" on their site.

The scam starts out innocuously enough, with this image:

It uses Facebook's standard fonts and colors, to feel as "official" as possible, and suggests that it's a quiz, another of the thousands of "fun" applications Facebook offers to help its users kill time.

I'd suggest that the presence of all those apps makes Facebook more like AOL 2.0 than Web 2.0, but that's another story.

Click the ad, and you'll get this page:

Click to read more ...

How many floppies?

How many 5.25" floppy disks (DD) would it take to store an Ubuntu install CD? One thousand, nine hundred and eighty-eight.

I've made a poster to illustrate this useless fact. Fun! Count 1,988 floppy disks. You can click the image below to download it and print it as large as you like for free, using http://www.blockposters.com
(it's a large image, 35" x 23" at 200 dpi - about 17mb), or I put it up on CafePress if you'd like a professionally printed one:
http://www.cafepress.com/floppyposter.347477083

Follow the "more" to get the 17mb hi-res file:

Click to read more ...