Indeed the fruits on the covers of the kid sweet packages do seem to be awfully friendly. Simpkins describes the embrace of the lemon and line as a “carnal” encounter and added that “The lime, who I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face. ”

Haribo has explained that the wrappers have been in use in Germany since 2002. The news comes too late to help Mrs Simpkins who became do distressed that she had to sit down when her husband began a heated exchange with a shop manager over the wrappers.

What do you think? Are these fruits having sex?

The excellent song is a parody of Don McLean‘s ‘American Pie’ and is sung as “The year the media died”. In it the big traditional media owners and buyers succumb not just to digital marketers like search agencies (to which the lyric “Algorithms got me cross-eyed” and the title of this post comes from) but to the changes in user behaviour.

There’s now a winner and rather cleverly from Bing’s marketing team it’s a controversial winner. It’s a surreal little ditty but is it even a jingle?

Here’s Bing Goes the Internet

What do you think? A worthy winner or not?

Web comics were one of the first thriving internet communities. Long before Facebook or Bebo the internet housed bustling forums where artists, writers and fans discussed each new episode, blogged, linked and started to accrue significant traffic. Many of the communities which offered free or cut price hosting to web comics (often in exchange for banner displays) survived the dot-com crash and are still going today. Kovalic’s Dork Tower isn’t the only web comic that’s made it from online to the kudos reaping status of in print – this author still has copies of Tycho and Gabe’s Penny Arcade kicking around in his flat.

John Kovalic’s RSS strategy is driven by a genuine appreciation of the blogging fan base he enjoys and by the willingness to let gamers enjoy his insightful art for free – and it is also a very clever strategy.

Simply put, Kovalic allows the daily updates of Dork Tower to be given away for free. Fans do not even need to make the drip to Gamespy, who host the comic, to read it. The full comic strip is available via RSS and fans can read it in Google Reader, Bloglines or on blog communities like LiveJournal where users can add RSS feeds as ‘friends’. There is an element of honour in the ‘viral marketing’ strategy here (a strategy which keeps Dork Tower on most gamers’ lips) as each daily update as a call to honour in which gamers are asked to buy the book or simply shop at Warehouse 23 – Steve Jackson Games’ retailing website. John McHahon (FuzzFaze) the enthusiastic blogger who complies the RSS feed even gets a credit and a plug for his blog at fuzzface00.livejournal.com.

The music industry is beginning to copy this strategy. We have artists like Price and Radiohead who’ll give their music away free and concentrate on the more lucrative touring business. Just a quick scan of the web turns up insightful comments on the strategy, we’ve the PhD student Valentine Zacharias, the media students of We See The Light discussing the trend and even sites like the NY Daily News and Jose Martinez pointing out that Police’s reunion tour was 2007′s top earner.

What do you make of it? Refreshingly new, not for you or perhaps even a little off? Quite a few people we’ve showed the picture too thought the design was pretty funky.

The commends at CraftZine less welcoming though and commentator Ellen even asked, “Could someone screen these ideas? Tasteless …”

It’s about time we start seeing some Jedi action on the Wii.

However, it may be Dale Nole’s comment at Destructoid which gets my vote as the most insightful. Gale says;

While Nintendo is going out of their way to make the Nintendo Wii peripherals safer and less damaging, others are fashioning them to look like a light saber. Great.

We’ve seen this happen before. Apple the iPod launched a whole economy of products which accessorised the accessory. Will the wii create a similar industry?

SteadyMed is an Israeli company with a clever product. Their PatchPump is a little device that acts as a portable drug dispenser. It dispenses the drugs directly into the patient. This is ideal if the patient needs to take the drugs at a very regular intervals (where pill taking can sometimes be a little less regular) or when an easy subsutaneous delivery system is needed.

The PatchPump is just one example of a growing tend in highly portible healthy living hardware solutions. Unlike the PatchPump, the majority of these hardware solutions are more lifestyle based and less medical – perhaps the most common these days is the pedometer.

Over at Minimins.com Daisydee reposted a pedometer FAQ which starts with basic questions like “How does a pedometre actually work?” and “My pedometer doesn’t seem to be counting every step – what’s wrong with it?”.

In fact, the rise in the popularity of pedometers can be seen almost everywhere. The police news site PoliceOracle has a report that North Wales police offers and Community Beat Managers used pedometers to record the distance travelled in an average 10 hour shift. Bloggers like Stacie Naczelnik are happy to compare pedometer models on their health blogs.

Hi,

Fake accounts are a violation of our Terms of Use.
Facebook requires users to provide their real first and last
names. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited.
Unfortunately, we will not be able to reactivate this account
for any reason. This decision is final.

Thanks for your understanding,

Aubrey
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

Whoops! Needless to say, Jon blogged about this and attracted the attention of Robert Scoble, Dennis Howlett and Steve Rubel to name but a few.

It worked. The next email he had from Facebook reads as follows

Hi Jon,
Upon further review, we have decided to reactivate your account. Our Terms of Use, to which all users agree when they first sign up for the site, stipulate that you must not “impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity.” However, since others on the site seem to know you by this name, and since you don’t appear to be using the name to impersonate or to hide your identity, we have determined that you are not violating these Terms. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Please let me know if you have further questions or concerns.
Thanks for your understanding,
Jerry
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

Remember Friendster? Over at WebProNews yesterday Robert Scoble asked Will Facebook Get “Friendstered”? and notes the following similarities between the two sites.

1. They didn’t take care of PR and didn’t take care of bloggers. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing. Several people at the dinner tonight noted that Facebook hasn’t responded to claims that Facebook’s employees are spying on data that the public doesn’t have access to. And that’s just one PR complaint.

2. They kicked people out that they didn’t like. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing.

3. They didn’t respond to new competitors who took away their coolness. Facebook? They are about to meet their biggest competition yet.

Facebook faces a mountain of expectation now. Could that be its undoing?

We all know that sometimes the speed of the service doesn’t quite match our expectations but another issue is how long it takes to get the broadband connected in the first place. If you’re a Sky customer then you are likely to wait over three weeks to get connected. Ouch.

Still. Jan Harris, writing for The Telecom points that that Sky Broadband has secured over a million customers.

Broadband option rates continue to grow so should we be surprised we have to wait to get it installed?

The truth is that in almost every country there will be problems in getting your internet fix. SylvieKid at the BritishExpats forum has a similar tale of woe when it comes to sunny New South Wales.

The Register thought the story had some weight – but how did the blogosphere react? It wasn’t such a big story for the internet community. The original Digg picked up only 5 votes and the “fight back” posted on the MoneySavingExpert blog barely made 4 diggs.

Moneyballs2 was responsible for bringing both stories to digg. It seems, at least, that the Register and us weren’t the only people to think this was big news! Moneyballs2 agreed with us as well.