As it turns out, Day 1 of the campaign couldn’t have picked a better social media property to feature as it’s homepage. Nobody loves to gossip and spread the wildfire word more passionately than Twitterers. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that they maximized their Day 1 exposure by featuring Twitter first, instead of Facebook or Digg or YouTube or _______.

The brilliance of the strategy starts to become a little more obvious now that the flash-in-the-pan craze so common on Twitter has faded, and Skittles.com Day 2 is featuring the less frantic Facebook page as its homepage. A little less rapid-fire, a little more dialogue (with ‘Skittles’ posting responses to comments on its own wall). They’ve used the 24-hour Twitter stampede as kindling for a fire that is now burning bigger today than it was yesterday.

This is the inverse of peeling back the layers of the onion. They’ve recognized the lifespan of buzz on various social media outlets, and are chaining properties together in the campaign to leverage one property as a build into the next.  This is a great example of leveraging the Snowball Effect of social media to make the overall impact of the campaign greater than the sum of its parts.

Twitterverse, don’t be so quick to evaluate the merits of this campaign. You are merely the first pawn to be moved in a much longer, more strategic game of chess.

CNET editor James Kim and his family are missing, so many bloggers are using their reach to alert the public in Amber Alert fashion.  Here is the link to the CNET post that includes information on the car the family was driving, when and where they were last seen, and who to contact if you have any information that might be helpful.

Let’s hope this has a more positive result than the last time bloggers tried to help find missing people.

I was only in hiatus for 6 weeks and I missed all sorts of celeb gossip.  Thankfully I’m not all that big on celeb gossip so there’s not a ton of catching up to be done.

For example, I couldn’t care less about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes getting married.  (I do however love the stupid immature shit that celebrities do though, like JLo saving seats for her friends on the private jet and John Travolta not going because Oprah wasn’t invited.  Gotta love role models.) I wrote sweet Katie off as soon as I heard she was kanoodling with that twit.  I was over her long before she even got knocked up.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be there to catch her when she falls from grace and is forced to do another semi-nude scene (like in The Gift and Thank You for Smoking) to save her nosediving career.

But speaking of doing audacious things to save a nosediving career, my favorite trailer-trash hottie is back on the singles scene after ditching Fed-Ex (the freeloader, not the courier).  What better way to announce that your school girl kilt is being tossed back into the ring than to show off your new body on David Letterman, paint Vegas red with Mario Lopez (amazing she didn’t get married again), and head out on the town partying with both Paris Hilton AND Lindsay Lohan?  This article was the inspiration for my post title since there’s nothing more fun than witnessing the British press coining of a new celebrity duo nickname.

It wasn’t so long ago (only two kids and two marriages since) that Britney was passed the baton as the new rock sex symbol of the ages when she and Madonna made Christina Aguillera jealous with an extra-long, extra-tonguey french kiss before the world’s eyes.  Not to be outdone in the competition for Brit’s BFF status, of course, Madonna wants Britney to sleep over for Christmas this year.

Imagine the hell of being Britney Spears’ publicist right now.  What a grand orchestration this all is.

Microsoft Zune or Apple iPod? 

Coke or Pepsi? 

David Miller or Jane Pitfield? 

Iraq or Afghanistan? 

Liberal or Conservative?

Where is the intelligent media?  Where are all the shades of grey?  Why is everything being pre-digested and simplified into A-or-B choices for us these days? 

We’re worried about social problems like obesity and smoking because you’re either fat or skinny, a smoker or a non-smoker.  We’ve become so binary in our thought processes.  We should really be worried about our brains going soft on us. 

We should demand more from our media.  And we should demand more from ourselves.  Read, research, listen, observe.  There are more multiple-choice and short-answer questions in life than there are True/False.

Can you tell I’m pissed at the Sunday newspaper today?  Stupid black-and-white.

As for the others… damn the jerk(s) who tipped my brand new scooter over and scratched her rear end; watch out entertainment lawyers who take 2 week vacations in the middle of a major contract negotiation because you think it’s a great "tactic"; sleep with one eye open Dog, because you’re getting dangerously close to Springer’s demographic; Agassi, that was a shady tactic to announce your retirement BEFORE your last tourney just so that everybody would let you win at the U.S. Open; people with fauxhawks…shit or get off the pot–faux anything is lame; the colour teal is stuck in the early 90’s I’m afraid, and always will be; and pizza pops–always either too hot and burn my mouth, or too cold and taste like the eraser on the end of a pencil.  Good riddance!

I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t speak first hand, but word on the street is that Al is pretty convincing and persuasive.  I guess I just wonder if a) his motives are pure, or if this is a great way to build some goodwill and press clippings for another presidential run, and b) his success is due to his undying passion for the environment and all things "global cooling", or the PPT jockey who whipped together his hypnotic presentation.