fernandorizo.typepad.com

Stewart Brand (one of the founders of The Well, and the publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog) is the subject of The New York Times Magazine's Cribs "Domains" feature this week. He lives on a tugboat in Sausalito.

Item you need on a tugboat: You’ll always be glad that someone has stolen a shopping cart, so you can get stuff from your car to your boat.

• "Domains: Stewart Brand", The New York Times Magazine.

Also worth reading: an essay by Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom on the evolutionary roots of environmentalism.

more words to read

In case you were desperate to read more sentences strung together by me, the powers that be at my employer Ketchum have momentarily let their guard down enough for us to launch a new blog called The Crowd Source. The Crowd Source will primarily feature content written by myself, Gur Tsabar, Jon Bellinger, and our other Interactive Strategies Group colleagues. It'll be a journal about the Web and Web culture - an opportunity to showcase some of our agency's thinking. The top post at the moment (about the new social search engine Aardvark) is by yours truly. If that kind of thing interests you, give it a read, it's my most emotionally significant work to date.

If that kind of thing doesn't interest you, the good thing (I think) for fernandorizo.typepad.com is that there'll be a little less PR-related content, and a little more personal content. Though some of you may be terrified by that prospect. I don't know yet what the new editorial direction of this blog will be*, but as Potter Stewart once said about pornography, maybe I'll just know it when I see it. Anyway, I invite you to go check out The Crowd Source.

* did it have one to begin with? that's up to you, I suppose.

reverse engineering PR: dodge and dub magazine?

I think I may have stumbled upon a word-of-mouth marketing campaign for Dodge, or for DUB Magazine. Or for both. Here's what we saw.

Some friends and I were out around Union Square in Manhattan one night last week. There was a bit of difficulty choosing a bar that everyone found agreeable, and we ended up walking around for a while.

In front of the Regal there was a really eye-catching car. I mistook it at first for the new 2010 Camaro, but upon closer inspection it was revealed to be a Dodge Challenger. Bright orange, DUB Magazine badging. Gorgeous. Someone remarked that a pristine car like that shouldn't be driven, much less parked on the street in Manhattan (I tend to agree). We talked and gawked over the car for a bit and then renewed our search for a bar.

A couple of blocks away, on 13th St and University, we saw ANOTHER orange Dodge Challenger with DUB Magazine badging. A cosmic coincidence.

Working our way clockwise around Union Square in search of the Old Town Bar on 18th St (a compromise solution), we came across yet another Dodge with DUB badging - this one a white Magnum. And then my friends started doing what they do best: Harith started taking pictures, and Jon started being inadvisedly curious, touching the car and setting off one of the most enthusiastic alarms I've ever heard.

Here's the picture of the Magnum that Harith took as we beat a hasty retreat away from it.

We circled back to the Regal and Harith snapped some pictures of the first Challenger we saw.

Three beautiful cars of the same make parked on the street in downtown Manhattan on a weekend night. A car club meeting? Remarkable happenstance? Being a PR flack myself, I am completely immune to such flights of fancy and I detect the fingerprints of a word-of-mouth campaign. And for what it's worth, one that was completely effective on me, as here I am blogging about it after spending a couple of hours reading online about Dodge Challengers over the past week. Although living in Manhattan, I cannot imagine a scenario where I own an automobile. Sorry, Dodge. Hot car, though.

We never did actually go to a bar. That's another story.

• See some other pictures of the cars here.

• More of Harith's photography on Flickr.

Katy Perry's "Hot & Cold", as performed by Los Colorados.

I used to have the same beard that the drummer is sporting. Respect, brother.

information architects japan web trend map 2009

Information Architects Japan have posted their near-final Web Trend Map for 2009. As in previous years, the map is a visual evaluation of the relationships between different Web properties and influencers, grafted onto the Tokyo Metro. This year's is the most complex and visually appealing yet.

The map isn't just a pretty exercise in visualization - it documents the ebb and flow of Web culture. In the 2006 version of the map, Google was represented by the Metro station for Tokyo's ever-hip Shibuya district. This year that distinction belongs to Twitter, and Google's stand-in is now the more respectable Shinjuku station that lies beneath Tokyo's commercial center.

 

• Information Architects Japan Web Trend Map 2009 on Flickr
• Information Architects Japan