Google - still searching for affection in our lives?
This was the Google advert shown during last night's Superbowl XLIV - simple as it gets (ever Google's USP), and strangely clichéd in it's iteration of 'We're with you for the journey' message.

This was the Google advert shown during last night's Superbowl XLIV - simple as it gets (ever Google's USP), and strangely clichéd in it's iteration of 'We're with you for the journey' message.

Hands up who knew there was a zombie cat oeuvre? No? Well, wake up and smell the catnip: superb (and not so superb) animations of zombie cats have invaded the web! Yes, scores of the unLOL walk the earth.
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Remember the beautiful Ukraine's Got Talent Sand Art video I blogged a while back? With that girl 'painting' with light and earth to the refrains of Metallica celloed mellow by Apocolyptica? Remember how Neil Gaiman had said 'If you are an ad executive planning to rip off this Ukrainian Sand animation for Coke or Sony, please die first'
Well, Neil - it's possible the Coke or Sony guys died before taking it on, but the Tea Team at Twinnings got there soon enough with no fatalities - except those of the integrity and beauty of the original art and idea. What I can glean from this though is that it is in fact that the Twinnings sand/tea art ad campaign was created with Ilana Yahav - a sand artist in her own right - quite possibly rocking the sand art technique for years before the Ukraine's Got Talent video of Kseniya Simonova went viral (currently on 11Million+ views, as opposed to a mere 1M+ for Ilana's biggest hitters like You've Got A Friend - below.) So whaddayagonnado? Is anyone being ripped off really? Kseniya gets the big hits and fame from her barnstorming performances on the Ukraine's Got Talent, but her (less seen predecessor) gets the Twinnings gig. Sand Art and its exponents get higher profile and the general public gets an ad that's far less offensive than most. Everyone's a winner, right? Well, maybe not Fontaneda Digestives...This ad reportedly used the 'sand art' technique in 2007, but with that video claiming a mere 330 views at the time of posting these digestives are hardly apt to be Boasters. So maybe these are the only creatives getting ripped off in the whole ad milieu? I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles. (Oh dear god, stop..!!!) I should also point you towards The Passion sand art of Joe Castillo - another sand artist tossing shapes in dirt long before Kseniya Simonova and Ukraine's Got Talent ever graced a Tweet. Ok. I'll stop now. Let's face it - if we never saw sand art again it would just fine. We'll always have ketchup and fries art to keep our souls beautiful... (2 Million more views than Ilana's sand art video. Go figure, friends. Go figure.) Keep th' faith,Comments [0]
I'm not a fan of Ok Go, but this is going up on general principle and protest at EMI's continued rage against... Fans, music, the web, the internet, love... God, anything that makes any bloody sense! OK Go's video for Here It Goes Again has received nearly 50 MILLION hits on YouTube - a hell of a lot from sharing and word of mouth. But EMI... Well they see that as just wrong; people shouldn't be able to embed the video into blogs and personal sites, as this represents... Something... Er... Something they just refuse to get their heads around.
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This is the recipe for hazelnut cupcakes by Yotam Ottolenghi, to be found in the Ottolenghi Cookbook. A friend asked for the recipe and I thought - you know, these are so damn fine, everyone's going to want a piece, so I'm blogging them.
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Do you love jargon? Do you find that the new digital obsession with SEO and user journey has led to a depletion of applied hard-tech gibberish and incomprehensible engineering terminologies?
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After Unfriend winning word of the year, we see the trend to disown the connections you may have spent the last five years making in web 2.0 social networks take another step forward. Introducing the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - a web app which, once you enter your passwords for Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn will set to erasing your existence from those social networks - changing your passwords and profile in the proces to deny you access should you have a sudden change of heart.

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2009 was an unfriendly year to live through it seems, as the word unfriend made a remarkable mark in the Oxford English Dictionary this year.
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On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me - an abacus, so I could calculate the fluctuations in the cost of true love at Christmas according to the price of the items listed in the famous yuletide song 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' and PNC's Christmas Price Index.
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