Just received a job offer with a major online investment company offering me a minimum salary of 3,000 Euro per month. Yes the standard spam message, but look at the email address it was sent from:

David@panhandle.rr.com

Wal-Mart has launched The Hub aimed at school kids. The site allows “Hubsters” to create a page on the site and upload videos for the chance to win prizes and appear in a Wal-Mart TV commercial. There are fashion tips, which are effectively just advertising for clothes you can buy at Wal-Mart.

Bloggers have not exactly given the site rave reviews and perhaps it was a little misguided for Wal-Mart to try and take on MySpace, however I think it is a good sign that such a major retailer is at least including online social networking in their marketing plan.

MyCoke.com allows users to create a V-Ego, blog, your own ringtone via a music mixer, and of course share all this with other V-Egos. It is a very bold site, and must have cost a fortune to build all this functionality. When I logged in, there were 968 other V-Egos online, so not going to cause MySpace much concern for the time being.

I am encouraged that major brands are investing in this medium. Their approach might not be perfect but they are at least willing to take the risk and reinforces that consumer generated media and social networking is an essential part of the marketing strategy.

Technorati Tags: cgm, consumer generated media, mycoke, social media

The Tribble Ad Agency site is a parody site set up by search engine marketing (SEM) firms to poke holes in how traditional agencies tend to handle interactive projects. Here is an example of what you will find:

“The print media industry has been in decline for years as well as TV viewership among key age groups. However, we here at Tribble feel that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. We make our clients feel secure by telling them that the internet is NOT as big as it seems. It’s just a lot of “fluff” and is actually on the decline, in fact the Internet is just a fad. We love to spend our clients money in this way. It’s great for the ad agencies like ourselves because you can’t really track ROI with the print media strategy, so the client can’t tell how much we are wasting. It’s a wonderful feeling to see our clients’ budgets get blown out the water and yet the client believes that we did something, well something postive that is.”

Ouch! But hey…the truth hurts.

This is an interesting idea from Shift Communications in the US. They have come up with this Social Media Press Release Template which takes advantage of the myriad of fantastic Web 2.0 options for sharing and linking information. The old press release is probably well overdue for an upgrade and so I support this. Brilliant move by Shift in terms of their positioning and exposure. Thanks to Andy for finding this.

Technorati Tags: puppy, Web 2.0

Check this out. This would allow me to charge my iPod Shuffle and BlackBerry if I had this next to my bed. I think I’m going to get one.

This is a very cool AJAX based clone of the Google Personalised Home Page concept. Start.com is the unofficial Microsoft one. Too many choices. Thanks to Will for sending me this link.

www.pageflakes.com

This is apparently a new trend in Consumer Generated Media. Ninja photographers sneak up on couples in cars with steamy windows and post the photos online. You have been warned.

This was clearly some geek’s idea of a joke when they wrote this code. Here is the connection URL and class name for JDBC connection to a MS SQL Server 2000 database:

jdbc:microsoft:sqlserver://SQLSERVER;DatabaseName=DATABASE;selectMode=cursor;
com.microsoft.jdbc.sqlserver.SQLServerDriver

For the new MS SQL Server 2005 JDBC driver:

jdbc:sqlserver://SQLSERVER;DatabaseName=DATABASE;selectMode=cursor;
com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver

Spot the difference yet? The new connection string URL doesn’t have microsoft in it, and the new class names has the jdbc and sqlserver switched around.

jdbc:sqlserver://SQLSERVER;DatabaseName=DATABASE;selectMode=cursor;port=1433
com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver

Good way to drive a developer crazy for a little while when migrating their application to SQL Server 2005. I think this is Microsoft’s way of messing with you for using Java instead of .NET for your application.

These guys have developed a Skype client for cell phones and have a wide range of handset support. Unfortunately they don’t support my Blackberry yet so I can’t try it out, but it looks to be very good.

A genunine SWAROVSKI ® Crystal Icing Pepper Spray of course. I am not kidding. http://www.crystalicing.com/.