The crunchiest cereal in the history of cereal, has a new angle they’re using to market their whole grain goodness. I just came across this site, obviously targeted at men, more specifically, middle-aged regular working Joes.

http://theguysmanual.msn.com/

It’s actually pretty cool, and they’ve done a pretty good job making some web videos that are fun, and make you want to eat Grape Nuts (the make me want to them at least).  Will this angle work?  I haven’t had Grape Nuts in forever, but I’m definitely jonesin’ for a bowl now.

Since the beginning of time, Google has grown accustomed to handily disposing of its search engine rivals and competitors, but are those days finally coming to an end? Has Google finally met its match?

Next up in the contenders’ corner – Microsoft’s Bing. Check out a few reviews of Bing and a short video that illustrates how it feels it may knock off the Champ.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bigMoney/idUS183638463920090529

http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html

I’ve read this before from other big names in the social networking game.  Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, probably knows more about niche social networking than anyone.  Here’s what she said in a recent CNN interview:

Niche social networking sites are absolutely something people want to do. People clearly want to do this. . .[and] as people get more comfortable with social networking via Facebook, Twitter, they will look around and say, ‘I want a social network for this particular group.’

Read the whole interview…

There are several things that I’m seriously interested in. Two of the biggies are writing (obviously) and politics. Even if you’re not all that into either one of those things, this interview with political PR guru, Frank Luntz, is worth checking out for any business owner or marketing/brand manager who wants to know what really makes people tick (Hint: it’s all about the language). While technically he’s actually discussing “phrasing” vs. “writing,” the practical applications are the same.

Behold: The Wordsmith

I came across this the other day on a blog somewhere and thought it was a great example of clever interactive marketing: It seems Charmin has become the “sponsor” of a little site called sitorsquat.com. Essentially, this site (which has existed in some form since ’07) uses Google maps to locate the closest public restroom to an address entered by a user.

Now, thanks to Charmin, users can download free mobile applications for iPhones and BlackBerrys that use GPS to show you the way to the nearest public pit stop. Not only will you get location, Sit or Squat also lets users rate each restroom based on ick-factor (an average rating above 2.5 is “sit,” below “squat”) so you can avoid less than stellar accommodations (if you have the luxury of being picky).

Being a toilet paper company, this is obviously a great fit for Charmin, and it’s getting them a lot of buzz on blogs and other traditional media outlets-which is the point, of course. What’s so interesting about it though, is that Sit or Squat was a pre-existing site – the lesson being that you don’t necessarily need to be a corporate giant for a good, common-sense interactive site or application to pay off. Certainly, Charmin’s saving some cash by avoiding the cost of custom application development and Sit or Squat now has a corporate sponsor to finance their brainchild and tell the world about it. It’s a win-win.

Okay, so that’s just my overly-snide first-take on this article about iPhone apps.

My second take is that I can’t decide whether this is a positive commentary on iPhone users (i.e. they know useless crap once they’ve seen it and never look back), or a somewhat less flattering one (they have an endless and apparently purposeless appetite for the latest gimicky digital froth).

I dunno. You guys tell me what you think.

Full disclosure: The device in my pocket was purchased when you still called them “cell phones” and they all had hinges in the middle, so this post might just be my pent-up gadget-envy lashing out at my luddite wallet.

I admit, this post will be useless for most readers of this blog. But if you happen to be an Actionscript programmer… I had a minor epiphany today from which you might benefit.

Since I started writing AS3 code, I’ve generally viewed the mouseChildren and mouseEnabled properties of the InteractiveObject class (and by extension the Sprite class) as relatively superfluous. They existed as little more than a recourse for when something accidentally got ‘in between’ the mouse and a button that needed to be pressed. And in a sense that is true. But I realized today that those crafty AS3 creators had bestowed upon me a much more substantial tool than I’d first realized.

Fundamentally, these two properties are straightforward. Setting a Sprite’s mouseEnabled property to false tells that Sprite to not bother interacting with the mouse. In other words, to stop dispatching MouseEvents such as MouseEvent.CLICK. Likewise, setting a Sprite’s mouseChildren property to false tells the children of that Sprite to stop dispatching MouseEvents. By default, both properties are set to true.

The magic comes by virtue of the fact that these two properties work independently of each other. If a Sprite has children, setting that Sprite’s mouseEnabled to false does not prevent the Sprite’s children from dispatching MouseEvents. Similarly, setting the Sprite’s mouseChildren to false doesn’t prevent the sprite itself from dispatching MouseEvents. Why is this cool? Let me count the reasons:

• Sprite ‘flattening’. It used to drive me nuts that that a button made of multiple sub-elements (label, hilight, border, icon, etc) would have an indeterminate MouseEvent ‘originator’. That is, the target property of the MouseEvent would be ‘label’ or ‘highlight’ or whatever depending on the exact pixel over which the mouse rested, rather than simply ‘myButton’. I found myself putting invisible ‘mousetrap’ layers in my buttons to sit on top of everything to fix this. It turns out I don’t need to. By setting myButton.mouseChildren = false all the button parts become a single unit, collectively dispatching MouseEvents with a target of ‘myButton’.
• Group disabling. Need to disable a whole group of buttons? Make them siblings and set the parent Sprite’s mouseChildren to false.
• Event-bubbling simplification. By setting a container Sprite’s mouseEnabled = false but leaving mouseChildren = true, you prevent the ‘middleman’ from sending unnecessary MouseEvents to high-level MouseEvent handlers. Imagine a calculator, with multiple keys, a display screen, a surrounding ‘case’, a nice little Texas Instruments logo, whatever. If I add a MouseEvent.CLICK listener to the high-level calculator object, I will receive all of the various key clicks, but I will also receive events from the other child elements… the display, the case, the logo. Even if I set those elements to mouseEnabled = false, the calculator Sprite itself will still trigger its own MouseEvents when I roll over them. By following up with calculator.mouseEnabled = false, the high-level listener will now only receive events from the children that matter, and will not be encumbered with ‘false positives’.

Given this greater understanding, I almost wonder why the AS3 creators chose to set the default of mouseEnabled to true. After all… aren’t there generally far more ‘passive’ display objects on the stage than interactive ones? I’m sure they had a reason, and it’s probably one that I could find by Googling around a bit… but enough is enough. Hardcore geek session over.

I like to peruse the blogs over at U.S. News & World Report from time to time, and I came across something today that I think is really interesting and directly related to what we’re often trying to communicate to our clients. In a post today, one of USN’s career bloggers, GL Hoffman, says that HR departments generally give your resume 20 seconds to grab their attention. He follows up with some advice on how to be sure yours stands out, but what is really interesting is the little bit of info he tacked on to the bottom:

I did an experiment over at WhatWouldDadSay.com, where I asked readers to create a SIX-WORD résumé for themselves. Given the widespread fascination with Twitter and its 140-character limitation, I thought it would showcase good writing discipline. Not that you have to make your own six-word résumé, but notice how effective some of the (personal or otherwise) entries were:

• “As I live, so does Apple.”—Steve Jobs
• “Solving complex problems efficiently and elegantly.”—A personal entry
• Another personal entry: “I stand alone, next to me.”
• “Fire it up. Ready to go.”—Barack Obama
• From a real estate staging person: “Staging it better. Selling it faster.”
• Here is one of my favorites that combines two movie characters: “Now reverse in aging am I.”—Yoda Button

This may seem to be a worthless exercise—and it is certainly silly—but it’s not worthless if it only makes you realize that a lot can be said in a few well-chosen words.

That last paragraph there really hits it on the head. In my opinion, in the majority of instances- and almost always when you’re talking about web or ad copy- quality trumps quantity.

That said, anybody want to take a crack at their own six word resume?

I’ve got two kids, and while they’re not quite Facebooking it just yet, I’m sure they will be soon enough. CNN recently had an article about teenage usage of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Nothing most of us don’t know, but they make one point that I rather liked:

Beyond keeping a watchful eye on risky interests and pictures, parents should also use social networking sites such as MySpace — which had about 120 million users as of this summer — as an opportunity to learn about their childrens’ favorite movies and hobbies, as well as their top friends, she said.

“You so often hear parents say ‘I don’t even know my kid anymore.’ Here’s a very easy tool to get to know your kid again,” she said.

Here’s the whole article: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/05/myspace.teens/index.html

Last week we sent out our holiday e-card to all of our clients, vendors, and anyone else that we can rightfully email to without being called spammers.  We did, however have a couple of people report that our email ended up in their spam boxes anyway. So in case you missed, it here’s the link:

http://www.thoughtprocessinteractive.com/holidaycard

It was a collaborative effort for sure, but expert snow-manimator, Abram, really made the magic happen.  I hope you all enjoy it.  Happy Holidays!