Well there's no need to exercise your pudgy fingers any more! Because now when you try to skip over a Domino's ad, it will automatically give you the option of ordering a pizza through your TiVo. This is a breakthrough in ease of service to our nation's cheese-laden bellies:

"We believe that interactive television ordering is the future," Mr. Weisberg says. "Why even get up off that couch now?" In traditional ordering, there are numerous "barriers to purchase," he says, such as turning up a competing takeout menu while looking for the Domino's flier or deciding to eat from your own refrigerator after going to it in search of a Domino's magnet.

Not sure how this fits in with the national obesity crisis. [WSJ; pic via]

The end result features folks making mundane, sarcastic or downright bizarre pronouncements, from "I'm a PC and I like the slimming effect of a purple striped shirt" to "I'm a PC and by that I don't mean politically correct."...

So are the people uploading pictures and videos actually real PC users, or are they merely looking for 15 seconds of fame? For its part, Microsoft doesn't really care.

You know what Microsoft's problem is here? They tried to make an entire ad campaign that's essentially a response to all the needling they've taken from Apple and god damn Justin Long over the years. But Apple went ahead and continued to needle Microsoft about its ad campaign, placing the onus on Microsoft to actually win the argument through some grand gesture. Instead, they believe they can win simply by placing every PC owner in the world in a television ad, one by one. Which doesn't work when none of them are attractive. [Ad Age]

What else could they possibly sell for ad space on subways? Well, how many flat surfaces are there?

—Panels in trains.
—Billboards in stations.
—Total wraps of the exteriors of subway cars
—Stairs.
—Turnstile structures.
—Turnstile arms.
—"Digital screens inside stations."
—Digital projection ads on interior station walls.
—"A large display, almost the size of a movie screen, mounted above a passageway by the 7 train in Times Square."
—L.E.D. displays on the interior walls of subway tunnels that make the "windows light up as if there were a television screen outside the window."

Commuters willing to sell forehead ad space, please contact the MTA. [NYT]

A company called IMMI is perfecting software that goes in your cell phone and catches every snippet of audio you're exposed to, then automatically determines which ads you heard. And more!

To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI's data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain.

"We follow the same person from end to end," says Tom Zito, IMMI's chief executive.

I would recommend that IMMI start working on developing a cute, non-threatening mascot right now, because they are frankly talking about some scary shit. People volunteer to carry these phones for just $50 a month. [Obligatory ominous Minority Report reference here].

The search giant has recently held discussions with several Madison Avenue agencies, including Wieden + Kennedy and the boutique firm Taxi New York, about new efforts to promote some products, according to people familiar with the matter.

In August, Google launched an advertising effort in Japan that included outdoor and online ads created by Wieden + Kennedy, which is best known for its Nike "Just do it" campaign.

Just what the world needs: a Google ad campaign that will make its logo as ubiquitous as Nike's. Will it be as spectacularly muddled as Microsoft's new campaign? Or will Wieden bring its trademark "Balls in your face" style to the internet world? Either way: why even start, Google? [WSJ; pic via Laughing Squid]

Guess what kids: four of Bill Keller's five recommended stories have appeared right here on Gawker. I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

"To make recorded music seem louder, engineers must reduce the "dynamic range," minimizing the difference between the soft and loud parts and creating a tidal wave of aural blandness...Ted Jensen, the album's "mastering engineer," the person responsible for the sonic tweaks that translate music made in a studio into a product for mass duplication and playback by consumers. Responding to a Metallica fan's email about loudness, Mr. Jensen sent a sympathetic reply that concluded: 'Believe me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one.'

Whatever. These whiny fans are forgetting that everything Metallica has sucked since the Black album anyway.

It's not just this latest "PUNCH IN 'FACE BOOK,'" as the Post eloquently puts it. The media has been warning us of internet dangers forever!

• Myspace: Log on and have your children raped.
• Facebook is filling up with creepy old people (who are probably rapists).
• Also Facebook will ruin your engagement.
• Flickr: A place where baby rapists look at pictures of your babies and masturbate to them.
• The government uses bloggers to hide its role in the Kennedy assassination.
• Nasty internet comments in England could cost you eleventy billion dollars.
• And dangerous hackers are hacking your email and looking for pictures of your children, which is why we should all be thrown in jail.

A bunch of meaningless crap, just like non-Christians! Gospelr should soon be worth billions.

[via Adfreak]

[McMullan] had just bagged a shot of Kelly Osbourne. “This is where a photographer is really a photographer,” he said, wiping some sweat from his chin. “You don’t have time to change the lighting. You have to get it, and then you edit.” He zoomed in on a dress with white ruffles. “Now, that is beautiful!” he said. “We may do a piece on ruffles, for example, if I’m seeing a lot of them. It’s a photo-driven magazine.

What else can you expect in PMc? "A tone poem about New York" (with special short, iPhone-appropriate sentences!) and relentless cropping of skeletal celebrities:

Merriam found his favorite shot: a picture, from the Marc Jacobs show, of Victoria Beckham’s back. If you zoomed in, and held the phone close to your face, you could read words tattooed between her shoulder blades. “Awesome,” he said.

Farrell pointed to some bony parts of Beckham’s back. “Can you crop it to get rid of that horrible skeletal shit? Because we’re not Us Weekly. We don’t want to scare people.”

A sure springboard to the A-list.

[New Yorker; pic via NYM]

Beneath the hum of an air conditioner in Cairo's upper-middle-class neighborhood of Heliopolis, Amr Ali, a dental student who is a devout believer, sits in his bedroom and types furiously on his Facebook page, We the Muslim Youth Can Change This World. The quest has become so consuming that Ali's father, an orthopedic surgeon who worries that his son might be unfairly tagged as a radical by security forces, disconnects the family's high-speed Internet line during exams.

"Secular and atheist groups are posting on my group, accusing Islam of promoting terrorism," said Ali, a slight man with rimless glasses whose Facebook group has nearly 22,000 members. "I'm very surprised at all the secular Facebook groups out there. I'm concerned. They are young people and they are lost, following misleading slogans. Some of them are totally against religion and all the prophets."

Really, why do we have wars? The LA Times has thousands of words today about the Islamist vs. Secular battle amongst Muslims on Facebook. On Facebook! This ideological struggle that will rend our world for generations to come blah blah blah is really just as ridiculous as everything we put on Facebook. Like so:

Let us unite in our common idiocy.

[LAT]

Each bean is fully dried before roasting, ensuring a more evenly cooked bean, which makes it less bitter.

That's right, you've finally lived to see the historic day when Folgers sells coffee grounds that are the product of a slightly upgraded pre-roast drying process! The future is now.

Also notable: Folgers' ad agency says this campaign is "the largest marketing investment in the history of Folgers.” So how big is it?

[It] is expected to be in the low six figures.

Starbucks spends that much every day on nutmeg, dude. America's not dead yet.

[NYT]

The "theme" of the new spots is the standard, vapid "Windows. Life without walls." Whatev. And Microsoft has decided to fight back against all those vicious Mac ads by co-opting the phrase "I'm a PC."

In the new ads, you will see: a John Hodgman doppelganger, and "everyday PC users, from scientists and fashion designers to shark hunters and teachers." And, of course, more random celebrities!!

Mr. Gates makes a cameo appearance in the new Microsoft spots, along with celebrities like the actress Eva Longoria, the author Deepak Chopra and the singer Pharrell Williams.

[NYT]

Not long after getting an infusion of capital in 2006, it was revealed that Heavy was inflating its traffic numbers by buying pop-up ads featuring Heavy content on other sites, and counting them as visits. Which is not something any advertiser wants to hear:

The concern over pop-up content goes beyond traffic numbers. Many advertisers pay premium prices to reach readers of certain Web sites. Through pop-ups, these advertisers may find their orders are being fulfilled with low-cost page views that users never requested and may never have seen.

Instead of being satisfied with what it was—a reasonably popular humor site—Heavy promised hypergrowth in order to attract investment dollars. The problem is, they've never had enough extra content to support the growth they wanted. Hence the pop-ups.

We also hear Heavy co-founder Simon Asaad tried to sell the site to Break.com, but the deal never went through.

So if even the "Heavy Men's Network" can't gin up enough extra traffic to satisfy those investors (and it would need some fantastic new plan to do it), Heavy—minus its best salesmen—could be on the way down.

[More details on Heavy's decline at Valleywag]

Google has filed a patent application for "water based data centres," which would be huge ships full of supercomputers floating seven miles offshore, using the motion of the ocean to power and cool themselves, nefariously:

The supercomputers housed in the data centres, which can be the size of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they do not overheat. As a result the internet is not very green.

They're simply starting their floating robot brigade in order to be green! Back to your mundane tasks, humans.

[Times UK via Radar]

Twitter CEO (nice business card, ha) Jack Dorsey says the teeny-typing service is a boon for reporters:

Dorsey: We've heard from a number of organizations — even as old as Reuters — that are building tools to monitor what's going on with Twitter to help conform what they need to focus on in terms of writing their articles.

Twitter provides a great man-on-the-street account of what's happening right now.

That's where you're wrong, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. You know what provides a great man-on-the-street account of what's happening right now? People on the street!

See, streets tend to be full of all types of people: all races, creeds, subcultures, and economic strata tend to utilize streets. But Twitter is full of—we're generalizing slightly here, but not too much—upwardly mobile white tech obsessives. It's certainly easy to shop for a quote on Twitter. And reporters love easy quotes, I say from personal experience! But it's the modern equivalent of asking your taxi driver in Mumbai what he thinks about the upcoming elections or whatever, except more likely to be delivered in 140-character increments. By an affluent tech nerd. A demographic which does not yet represent a reasonable cross-section of citizens for any story outside of, you know, tech stories.

It's a lot like our own relationship with our commenters. We love you, but you're a voluble minority, and if we guided the site based solely on commenter feedback, it would consist exclusively of live blogs and notices for commenter meetups. Which is fine, no backlash please! But we've seen the problem more important arenas, too: Howard Dean thought his massive lead in Meetup.com events would help him win the presidency. It didn't!

Reporters still have to leave their cubes to find the people on the street. They're outside, you see; out there, on the streets. And remember, Obama fans:

IWM: Who are some big-name Twitterers?

Dorsey: The biggest one at the moment is Barack Obama.

That's not necessarily a good sign.

[I Want Media]

But why would those folks want to convince yuppies with disposable income to spit into a tube and mail the spit to a research lab, where their complete genetic profile will be uploaded to the web to be shared with friends, loved ones, and curious sex partners? Isn't it obvious...?

Google exists for one purpose: to catalog all the information in the known universe, because information is power. Rupert Murdoch exists for one purpose: to disseminate all that information and make a fortune off it. But Rupert Murdoch can't live forever ... unless! Hear us out: 23andMe compiles a record of the most ideal chromosomes from the world's most remarkable genetic freaks (Usian Bolt's speed, Gary Kasparov's logical reasoning, Michael Phelps' giant flippers), melds them with Murdoch's base double-helix blueprint, and then installs the self-aware Rupert virus on a Google server farm. You know how this story ends:

Or maybe Harvey Weinstein just wants his pee to smell like asparagus. It could go either way.

When in Doubt, Spit It Out [NYT]
Ptooey! [NewYorker]
Related: Lots more on 23andMe @ Valleywag

What this means for web service Hulu, which streams some NBC shows for free, is unclear. Though I guess they could maybe exist together, as the dark Underspecies of people furtively watching Heroes on their iPods, while they rumble on a bus bound for Rochester, are not necessarily the same shut-ins who watch old episodes of New Amsterdam on their computers, holed up in their darkened spare rooms. And I guess that's really what America is all about. Diversity. [Variety]

Video games in the football broadcasts. This marks the failure of American P.E. teachers:

The network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, has spent the last year working on a new technology with Electronic Arts, the leading game publisher, that would allow ESPN commentators to interact live with realistic-looking, three-dimensional virtual players as they pontificate about coming matches during broadcasts...

Boiled down, the complex technology, which will make its debut this Sunday on ESPN’s popular “NFL Countdown” program, involves using an Electronic Arts’ title — say Madden NFL 09 — with specialized digital camera equipment in the studio. Presto: Both real and virtual people move around the ESPN set to demonstrate plays and possible situations.

The NFL never should have allowed this. Kids already prefer video games to real sports. You're just encouraging them. Hope you like announcing Madden XBox tournaments, ESPN. That's your future.

[NYT]

Dunkin Donuts is putting ad screens on its checkout and pickup areas telling you to buy things and come back soon, respectively. Some stores are sticking video screens on the shelves, which flash ads at you based on what item you pick up off the shelf. Which seems like it would quickly get annoying. But the creepiest is the effort to read your face:

The company powering the screens for Dunkin', YCD Multimedia, is in the midst of deploying facial-recognition technologies that can classify people into certain demographic groups by identifying their approximate age and their sex.

Companies in the securities industries have been experimenting with facial-recognition technologies for some time. The technology often works by capturing an image of a person and using sophisticated algorithms to analyze features like the size and shape of the nose, eyes, cheekbones and jaw line — against databases of face information.

Hopefully you think this was cool in a good way:

[Excellent story by Emily Steel in the WSJ]

But on to the question most of the geeks have been asking: Can you rip out the cover and use it for your own projects?

Griffin says it should be possible — "We look forward to seeing what people do it" — although there isn't any discrete input on the custom-designed circuit board that will control the e-paper. The data will be baked into the circuitry. Figuring out how to reprogram the e-paper controller or installing an entirely new one will be up to the hackers.

It's a good thing that geeks are the target audience for Esquire magazine.

[BoingBoing]

Experts have discovered that Americans no longer go to work to perform actual work; they simply go to work to send and receive email about what would happen if they theoretically were to do some work. When they're not doing this, they're mentally recovering:

According to a report to be published in October by the New York-based research firm Basex, interruptions such as spam, other unnecessary e-mail and instant-messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day.

On top of that is what Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira refers to as recovery time — the time to get back to where you were before you were interrupted, which Spira says is 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption. These interruptions account for up to 2.1 hours per worker per day. Multiply that by 56 million knowledge workers in the U.S., he calculates, and the cost is $650 billion per year.

By my calculations, that means that after you spend your 2.1 hours per day using email, you spend—on average—another 31.5 hours per day recovering from these hectic interruptions. Email is therefore responsible for a full 33.6 hours per day of your time.

It's certainly getting to be a problem.

[LAT]

Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Though the Mundaneum was shuttered after the Nazis invaded Belgium, a young grad student in the sixties discovered it and now it's a museum that no one ever visits (probably because the Wiki tells you all you need to know).

“The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?”

Card catalog!

More futurist over-reaching: The Telectroscope as early YouTube.

[New York Times]

1. It's scientifically impossible. Snopes already covered a similar hoax about cooking eggs with phones. As Snopes explains, the energy emitted by mobile phones isn't nearly powerful enough to sufficiently raise the food's temperature. A British TV show debunked the myth when it failed to even warm an egg under a pile of a hundred phones. And a YouTube commenter explains further: "A 1 kilowatt microwave takes around one minute to pop its first kernel, and that's in a closed environment. A cell phone transmitter operates from 0.1 to 1 watt, but this video shows these kernels popping almost immediately."

A poor grasp of science leads people to fear the technology around them. Everyone's vaguely aware that phones use radio waves, so they misapply the concept. The phones in the video are merely ringing, which only means they're receiving the radio waves that are always around us. If those waves popped popcorn, there wouldn't be an unpopped kernel left in the U.S.

2. It's got the same hallmarks of fakery as other viral videos.
Remember the viral Levi's ad and Ray-Ban ad? The actors in these videos have the same fake camaraderie. I always doubt a video's veracity when I hear someone say "Tell me you got that!" Strangely, no one ever seems to say that in real stunt videos: They know the cameraman got it, that's his damn job.

Okay, so who's making these?
These videos don't take much effort — just four phones and some time in Adobe Aftereffects. So anyone could have made them. But who would bother? Googling some of the video makers reveals they've been spamming blogs promoting their video. It's just one of the many annoying tactics born of YouTube, but at least it reveals that our creators are gunning hard to get a lot of attention for very little work.

That might be the behavior of a bad viral marketer. And I mean really bad — would any phone company actually contract videos like these? Can you sell phones by convincing stupid people that they'll fry their brains? Seems a bit counterproductive, but I'll admit it would be satisfying to see this uncovered as history's worst viral campaign.

Thanks to Cajun Boy for the tip.

Mainly the government wants to keep ads equally loud to the shows they surround, not louder:

The new British rules take account of this, saying that "broadcasters must endeavor to minimize the annoyance that perceived imbalances could cause, with the aim that the audience need not adjust the volume of their television sets during program breaks."

Still: volume button? Anyone? Regulators? Times? Advertisers? I admit to being partially asleep right now and not that bright overall, so help me out here. What if your asshole neighbor just plays their freaking TV too loud? It should be legal to shoot them. Governments are so weird.

"Some Internet experts believe the next generation of the Web — Web 3.0 — will make tasks like your search for movies and food faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. In our example, you could type "I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?" The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you." [HowStuffWorks]

Kraft's feedback from consumers indicated their food "wasn't easy enough." So they're rolling out a big marketing campaign to unveil fantastic new obesity generators in their product line:

Take, for example, Cool Whip, which comes in a large tub that must be kept in the freezer. Consumers didn't want to have to take that trying trip to the freezer every time they wanted a dollop, so they'd either skip the topping or went with a canned brand. Kraft's solution: a Cool Whip aerosol, so consumers can reach into the fridge and easily squeeze out a topper for their cookie, brownie or piece of fruit.

There's also frozen cheese-filled bagels, a newer, easier way to pull cheese slices out of the package, and "Goldfish Mac N' Cheese crackers, shaped like macaroni noodles but in cracker form." And what about those new single-serving packets of Jell-O powder—just add to milk and stir in. It's educational!

Janet Myers, senior director-Kraft Kitchens, said the product is aimed at moms who want to make after-school snacks for their kids without having to wait for the Jell-O to congeal in the fridge. There is, however, some work involved in the preparation — but, luckily, the kids can do it. "They like the interactivity of the stirring," she said, noting that the individual packs aid in portion control.

[via Ad Age—and a special shout out to reporter Emily Bryson York for achieving a reasonable level of disdain in her tone in this story. Well done.]

"The sender of the first junk e-mail message was Gary Thuerk and it was sent to advertise new additions to DEC's family of System-20 minicomputers. It invited the recipients, all of whom were on Arpanet and lived on the west coast of the US, to go to one of two presentations showing off the capabilities of the System-20.

"Reaction to the message was swift, with complaints reportedly coming from the US Defense Communications Agency, which oversaw Arpanet, and took Mr Thuerk's boss to task about it.

"Despite Mr Thuerk's pioneering spam it took many years for unsolicited commercial e-mail to become a nuisance. It took until 1993 before it won the name of spam - a name bestowed on it by Joel Furr - an administrator on the Usenet chat system. Mr Furr reputedly got his inspiration for the name from a Monty Python sketch set in a restaurant whose menu heavily featured the processed meat." [BBC via Slog]

Now we celebrate!

"This sort of design is a long way off from being plausible, but I can't wait to see it happen."

[BoingBoing]