Brand Central Station's Mike Bawden posted a great piece about the connection between innovation and brands on his blog last September, which I found again by accident yesterday. Here are some of my favorite passages:

On a recent post, I added a note about respecting media snackers. It wasn't until a few days later that I actually had the time to think a bit more about what it meant and why (or why not) I should be trying to respect snackers.

The doorbell rang, earlier tonight and a neighbor, wearing a harness filled with a little baby, asked me to come restart her mower. When I arrived, I quickly started the mower and proceeded to mow the lawn, not wishing to see the tiny mom with the tinier baby struggle with the mower. Within a few seconds, I started wondering how she had accomplished the one trip around the lawn before the mower stopped. Pushing the mower was shear torture. I rested at the end of each trip around the yard, wondering why it was so difficult. After completing about one-quarter of the yard, I stopped to rest, and commented that I'd never used a mower this hard to push. As she started to walk over to see what my problem was, I realized what my problem was: it was a self-propelled mower, which I had not yet engaged. With the simple push of a lever, the mower practically did the job itself.

One of the 25 has left the Red Sox. And it's a sad day on this site.

The Sox are releasing Doug Mirabelli. They have Kevin Cash, George Kottaras and Dusty Brown as backstops. Cash has caught the knuckler before in the minors, and last season when Mirabelli got hurt in August. But it will be interesting to see who the main backup to Jason Varitek (and more importantly, Tim Wakefield's catcher) will be.
Mirabelli just didn't have the stick to warrant being the Sox backup catcher any more. And on this, the second anniversary of this site, the man who was an Internet cult hero and the most popular post we've ever put up (the laugh-out-loud fictional day in his life) will no longer be a Red Sox player. Every time Doug played, the hits on this site would go up, and if he did anything special like hit a home run (a rare thing but it happened), the numbers would literally skyrocket.

We salute Dougie by putting up the link to "A Day in the Life of Doug Mirabelli" one last time.

Our site has been moved, again, to its own dedicated url www.ecochildsplay.com. There are still a few glitches to be worked out, but we are excited to be joining Green Options, while still maintaining our independence.

I'm in China this week, attending a conference on antidiscrimination law organized by the Yale Law China center and Sichuan University held at Chengdu in Sichuan province.

Speaking of discrimination, a law student who picked me up at the airport explained to me that he had heard of Balkinization in China but that, at least in Chengdu, the site was blocked. When I got to the hotel I checked and sure enough, he was right.

(I was able to determine that the site is still up in the United States by using a proxy server).

It is not entirely clear why Balkinization is sufficiently subversive that its content is blocked in China; however, Interent blocking schemes are often arbitrary.

With Christmas rapidly approaching, you may be doing much more entertaining than usual. If you're like me, that means you might also need a bit more help than usual!

Caught a post over on adverblog about the launch of a new social networking site for your virtual self, Koinup. The site allows you to connect all of your virtual world experiences in one network- your activities from Second Life, World of Warcraft, The Sims all in one location, where you can post content of your adventures (video of a recent SL trip for example) and browse through the virtual lives of the sites other members.

Yesterday was a bittersweet day of baseball for me. I was rooting for the Rockies to beat the Red Sox and try and make a series out of things. This was obviously a disappointment. However, upon finding out that Arod had turned down the Yankees, I was ecstatic and almost proud of him. I thought it was so cool that he was turning down the evil empire to go and play somewhere else. The only problem is in the way in which he did it.

The Mets unveiled a new patch they will wear for all home games in the 2008 season. It is to commemorate the 45th and final year of Shea Stadium, as the Mets will be moving into Citi Field, which is being built across the Shea parking lot as we speak.

I like patches that teams wear on their sleeves to remember special anniversaries and the like. I do like this one, as it shows two versions of Shea, with the New York skyline in the background, and the years the stadium was in existence on the front. I liked it so much I put it on my blog, right above the "Mets Links" section.

As I'm on the theme of the Poles, and Christmas just happens to coming up, how about giving a polar bear for Christmas? You can do so at the WWF's Polar Bear Central, a site which also has an amazing array of information on WWF's work in the Arctic, ecards, fun stuff to download etc.

Or check out Polar Bears International's lively website and gift shop.

From the moment the word got out yesterday that the Red Sox were letting Doug Mirabelli go, my Site Meter numbers started soaring. The end of the Mirabelli Era in Boston was great for this site, as Red Sox fans around the country (and especially in New England) wanted to relive the humorous post about Doug being a stuck-up, pain-in-the-ass narcissist.

And my thanks to the fine Red Sox sites Surviving Grady and Red Sox Chick who put up links to the July 2006 post.
I had over 400 hits to my site on Thursday, which is doubled what I get on a normal day. I guess the Red Sox should release Doug more often.

We also had a ton of hits from a picture of Clay Buchholz I posted here last September. I'm not exactly sure the reason why, as most readers found it off a Google Image search.

I'm pretty sure Clay isn't going anywhere. Right?

I am sorry I have been laxed in posting. A lot has been going on over the last couple of weeks. My mom, cousin and aunt came to stay with me the last week of February to help prepare for my baby shower. They were really sweet and helped keep the house picked up so that I didn't have to. The shower went off without a hitch with about 21 of our nearest and dearest friends in attendance. Baby got a lot of cool loot to keep him clothes and entertained. One of our friends actually quilted a baby blanket to look like the pieces from the Carcassonne game. Needless to say Dan was seriously coveting the blanket. He also was in love with the Organic stuffed monkey. The weather was really great that weekend so we went for a picnic and walk at Zilker Park. Later that night after we had all gone to bed my uncle called to tell us that my grandmother had passed away. My mom and I were up most of the night talking. The next day my mom and aunt were on their phones with my family up North trying to coordinate all the details of my grandmothers passing. They flew back to Arizona's to get some clothes and their husbands before flying to Detroit and driving to Ohio for the funeral.

This is totally awesome. Over 200 people, participating in an Improv Everywhere project freeze in the same instant in the middle of Grand Central Station. Check out a post detailing the whole thing (h/t: Boing Boing).

In some ways it almost feels like the mirror image of something I posted on last year: world-famous violinist Joshua Bell plying his trade for an hour as a street musician in DC and the reactions (or lack thereof) of the passerbys. There, hundreds of people simply rushed past some of the finest music they're ever likely to hear...

Hurrah!

I've made it onto the top 50 marketing blogs in Australia, even though I've spent much of 2008 talking about advertising to my mates rather than blogging it.

So even though my site was described by a fellow blogger as being on 'life support', I'd prefer to think of it as the Triple M of Aussie marketing blogs....not a whole lot of new stuff, but heaps of classics that go back through the years!

And no ads....just 136 blog posts IN A ROW!

Anyway, who says a blog needs to be updated every day or week. There's only so much interesting new news out there. With all the advertising theories, strategies, models, principles bla bla bla, I'm still trying to work out how to make an effective 30 second tv ad!

Thanks to Julian Cole for putting together the whole shebang.

United Hollywood has moved to a new publishing platform. Please check us out at www.unitedhollywood.com.

I recently heard about a great site that I felt compelled to share with my readers, a site that allows you to save money and save the earth at the same time. Pretty cool stuff.

iChapters.com is an online resource that sells eBooks, eChapters, and print textbooks. Even better: the site allows you pay ONLY for what you need, so students can really benefit from iChapters.com. Better still: iChapters.com can offer new textbooks at up to 40% off list price, eBooks at 50% below list price, and eChapters as low as $1.99 each. They also carry over 10,000 print and digital study tools, as well as online homework solutions such as CNOW, WebCT, and OWL.

So that's the bargain. But here's the real kicker: iChapters.com will plant a tree through Paso Pacifico, a non-profit partner, for every eBook and eChapter purchased through iChapters.com.

That's awesome.

If you haven't seen this yet, you need to.

Yes, I mean right now.

Another blogger alerted me to this article on Etsy and I just had to laugh and roll my eyes a bit. Cheating buy buying one non-handmade item? Sorry folks but I am not going to wear a hairshirt and flog myself for buying some people items from Amazon. Some people may not want or need something that can be purchased online. Handmade or not most people don't want socks for Christmas (except for me if they are super cool stripy knee highs).

pink bitz

This coming Friday night at about 7 PM, Professor Thom's will have a special visitor grace its premises. The 2007 World Series Championship Trophy will be stopping by for a viewing for all Red Sox fans to enjoy.

I'm not much of one to blog about blogs - it seems self-serving and hopelessly redundant - but this is an exception.

And that's because it's a blog about an exceptional person.

David Monroe was my friend and he passed away very suddenly on Sunday. A number of us have contributed our memories to a blog about him and how we feel. (Thanks to Greg Brooks from West-Third for pulling the site

Do visit a Calorie Counter.

It also counts protein, fat, carbohydrate, fiber, and lots of other nutrients the USDA has tucked away in their data base. Uncluttered, fast, informative - government agencies in charge of food could learn from a site like this. :)

The owner of the site also has a blog. His last entry on November 6th points to a spectacular table he just created that compares basic nutrition facts for some popular foods from over 20 fast food restaurants:

Fast Food Restaurants & Nutrition Facts Compared

We had one of the biggest days on New Year's Eve here at this site, as people from around the world came here looking for trivia connected with either New Year's Eve, New Year's Day or the year 2007. The site had 351 hits on Monday, and it was one of the Top 5 days we've ever had here.

Most people followed a link that sent them into the post I put up on Christmas Day about 2007 Trivia that was happening the next day. I put in a new line into it alerting those folks looking for trivia questions to go to my December 27th post that had the questions. I hope they were able to find them, and I thank all of you for being here yesterday.

It was in my second job, as an editor of a company publication for a large insurance company, that I first learned the power of truth. And what people will do to avoid it.

I was writing a typical article about a committee's marketing planning efforts. I asked what the team was doing, who was on the team and when they expected to finish the work, and I got a blank stare from the manager who was my source. She said she didn't want to put a date out there because the team might held accountable to that date.

That's when I first learned the truth about truth: it's a moving target.

And I think that's why so many brands are so bland. Company's say one thing and act entirely different. There's no accountability to the brand.

Apologies to the legion of readers (chuckle) that frequent this lil ol' corner of the internet for the distinct lack of, well, anything for the past month or so. All's been a bit busy what with Christmas, pitching early in the new year and the wife moving into the final throes of pregnancy and I seem to have lost the blogging bug a wee bit.

Well I'm determined not to let this site join the pantheon of neglected weblogs so normal service will be resumed shortly. Pitch on Wednesday first to negotiate though....