A fun clock that tells the time with synchronized dance moves. If you want to embed it into your own blog the code to do that is below.

<embed src=’http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/swf/blog_small.swf’ width=’200′ height=’150′ type=’application/x-shockwave-flash’></embed>

Enjoy, it should work on any blog or website posting.

Turner Embarks on Digital Shake-Up For 2008

A new website soft-launched last week, CartoonNetworkHQ, heralds the start of a new digital strategy for the Turner-owned brand, where the focus for its digital properties will shift from channel and brand promotion to making money in their own right.

“It’s quite different from the way the websites were treated in the past, being more of a promotional tool supporting the linear channel and everything else,” explains Turner International’s Asia-Pacific business development VP, YewMing Lau. “We’re now taking the websites and pulling it out from within the network and making it a separate business unit. The focus is very much how do you build the business.”

The move is the latest step on the path towards true media neutrality, after the company as a whole first started moving away from being to a TV business to branded environment business three years ago.

… http://www.asiamediajournal.com/press.php?id=295

APICTA is a network of 16 Asian and Australasian countries and economies whose common goal is to increase awareness of information & communication technologies, stimulate ICT innovation and creativity, promote economic and trade relations, facilitate technology transfer, etc. Their yearly awards are among the most coveted by all manner of IT firms in the Eastern hemisphere.

Outblaze won the award with its social media Video product.

For more details go to blog.outblaze.com

The 1 billionth photo of flickr, read more about it here.  What is amazing is how there are now over 1 billion pictures available on Flickr for public viewing and in some cases public consumption!

Congratulations!

Hello Kitty & Friends fan get a new makeover on Sanriotown.com the official home of Hello Kitty and her friends, there are some new things like the quiz section and some new games! Blog also has a new ranking feature.

Myspace is acquiring photobucket for US250 million according to TechCrunch.

Taken from the Business Wire directly:

Fox Interactive Media Completes Acquisition of Photobucket.com, Inc.

Recently Valleywag posted about a Blogger sellout where major well known bloggers such as Om Malik, Richard Macmanus and Michael Arrington amongst many others sold out to do a similar ad as displayed above. This caused a firestorm where people are talking about a blogger sellout to big bad Microsoft. Om Malik immediately apologized, Michael Arrington is unapologetic, who is right and who is wrong?  Many more continue to chime in.

It’s just an Advertising for crying out loud, relax you people. Everyone seems too fussed about how these bloggers sold their soul. They are web celebrities, that’s what web celebrities do! Michael Arrington put it best when he wrote:

So here’s my position on all of this: Go pound sand. People understand that if there’s text in an ad box, someone is paying for it to be there.

Indeed, how is this different than some business person endorsing a new drink, credit card or banking service? It’s the same as opening up a newspaper and it says in big bold writing: THIS IS A SPONSORED PAGE PAID BY THE ADVERTISER.

                        No difference.

With Valleywag posting up a storm on this issue they’ve proved one thing over and over again about blogging. It’s as sensationalist driven as the traditional media they blame for being too "sensationalist".

A recent spat between a startup CEO and a conference organizer came about when the CEO said he was going to go to a trip, apparently "lied" and got caught by his own tool which is similar to twitter in updating your status.

The CEO of the Next Web event wrote in his blog:

Ok, Reboot seems to rock after some dinner, beer and wine. Great. The amazing thing is not that Felix would rather go to Reboot. I respect that. The amazing thing is that someone would lie about the health of his children to be able to drink beer at another conference and then assume that no one would find out.

Seems pretty stupid to argue about, and Felix later on goes to say that he didn’t think it was a big deal, his Kid was sick and that the e-mail was of a day earlier.

I must say I´m really confused by the commotion. My kid was sick on Tursday and it wasn´t entirely clear wether I could attend thenextweb the next day. In addition did we have some issues with the new Plazer (http://blog.plazes.com/?p=157#comments) and Stefan, my co-founder was coming to Reboot on Friday. So for professional and personal issues I decided to cancel since I wasn´t sure at that point that I could make it. Boris forgot to mention the last part of my email:

“And to be fair to you guys I rather cancel now than trying until the last minute and then not being able to come afterall.”

More details on Techcrunch.

Comments were raging and flying, and of course all sorts of conspiracy theories, but in the end who won and who lost?

Plazes CEO Felix got some loss of credibility, albeit maybe there was some marketing benefit for people learning about how he got "busted by using his own tool".

A good story was made that got attention to Reboot, Next Web and Techcrunch achieved countless newsbites and stories, and thousands more are amused by the story.

Isn’t that news sensationalism, no different than what bloggers accuse reporters of skewing facts to suit their needs? Isn’t this, in the end, a private and personal affair between two individuals?

The difference here is that a blogger is not bound by an oath, or by a job, he can be fired for transgressing or going too far, but if you’re a blogger/owner you can play entirely by your own rules, your own loss being your credibility.

In the end, he/she is still looking for a story that will be read and discussed to make his/her site popular, so ultimately a blogger and a journalist are not that different in their goals, and if this true, we need to be wary of the "masses of blogs" just how we have become wary of what we read in the newspaper. It’s mroe about managing the information flow of individual agendas rather than "group agendas" but it’s still the same. Just because a thousand blogs say it’s so, doesn’t mean it is, it could be manipulated just as much as traditional media.

Google’s CEO has mentioned in an interview today in the FT that it is Google’s ambitions to have as much personal information so that one day when it holds so much personal information that it could tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

So we can stop thinking about what we do in our life and have Google tell us instead what we should be doing.

This is chilling and frightening, perhaps we don’t know ourselves well enough but should Google really be in the business of telling us what we should be doing or not? Personal preferences can give you suggestions, but to tell you what to do is the same as Google become your personal Boss! Once Google is in the business of ordering you around, you’re talking about a whole new level of global domination! The "new web" today is a lifestyle indeed, but ultimately it is a tool for the benefit of the individual, and the trends are very much about empowering the individual and isn’t that why Google became so popular and powerful? Because it provided tools to bring power into the individuals hands? Why would it want to take away that power by telling us what to do instead, that’s like Media 1.0 all over again!