Chicken run
As viral marketing campaigns go, Burger King's Subservient Chicken is one of the weirdest. The site takes the fast food giant's famous "have it your way" slogan to its most extreme conclusion: via a "webcam" you can view a man dressed as a menacing-looking chicken, who is none the less waiting to obey your every command.
Type "do a handstand" in the command box and he's balancing on his wings before you can say chicken nuggets. He will also do the funky chicken and ballet. Not surprisingly, it's all the result of clever pre-recording and programming. Still, it's one viral ad that's bound to spread: TWiki already has a Subservient Chicken Request list, so you can see which commands work and which don't.
www.subservientchicken.com
http://dev.magicosm.net
G-bombs
What do waffles, clowns and weapons of mass destruction have in common? They have all been used as Googlebombs. The latest attempt to skew the results of search engines such as Google by linking to a website using a particular phrase is targeted at US Democratic candidate John Kerry. Pro-Bush law student Ken Jacobson is using his blog, Esoteric Diatribe, to spearhead a campaign to make Kerry's site the first link listed when a user types in the word "waffles" into their search engine. Googlebombing isn't just the domain of Republican pranksters: George Bush has been the subject of a couple, while Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi found his site Googlebombed so came up when searching for the word "buffone" - Italian for clown.
Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology, is fairly relaxed about the issue: as he recently told USA Today: "Our philosophy is that there's no need [for Google] to do anything." After all, anyone really searching for waffles online is likely to realise fairly promptly that John Kerry's site is not the place to find the best recipes. If you have missed out on the Googlebombing phenomenon so far, Wikipedia has an excellent page charting its history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebomb
www.esoteric-diatribe.blogspot.com
www.johnkerry.com
www.kerrywaffles.com
Big on Macs
All things Mac-related will be under discussion at Wired's new weblog, The Cult of Mac. Leander Kahney, a reporter who covers the Apple Mac beat for Wired News, is behind the blog, which is surprisingly only the second official Wired blog: the first is Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond. The Cult of Mac joins a whole raft of Mac-related sites, each with their own following, but Wired's considerable cachet in the tech news world should secure Kahney's blog a slice of the Mac faithful's attention. http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac
http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac
Meet Microsoft
"How therapeutic would it be for people to meet us?" That was the question posed by five Microsoft developers in setting up their new home for holding conversations with customers and other developers: Channel 9. Perhaps the best place to start looking at this site is the video of the five guys in question shooting the breeze about what they want Channel 9 to be. It's all a tad forced but it could be an interesting forum.
It's impressive that Microsoft has given its employees what appears to be such a free hand, and Channel 9 is a truly multimedia affair, featuring videos of interviews with other Microsoft workers, wikis, moblogs and discussion boards all playing a part in building a conversation with users. Whether the site will prove just a little too worthy for Microsoft users to really let rip with their true feelings, only time will tell.
http://channel9.msdn.com
Reithian value
For the first time, the BBC is offering the annual Reith Lectures, in DRM-free MP3 format for free download on its site. This year's lecture series takes the theme The Climate of Fear and is presented by Nobel prize-winning playwright, poet and political activist Wole Soyinka. The first two lectures are already on the site as transcripts and audios, and the remaining three will be available in the next three weeks. In past years, the lectures have been available to listen to via RealPlayer, but the MP3 format allows the lectures to be listened to and passed on to anyone. You can also join in the discussion on the Open University's Open2 online community discussion boards. www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004
www.open2.net/reith2004
New & noted
Globally Sweet
Kinja - the weblog guide
Air America Radio
Six of the best: Science news
Eurekalert.org
www.eurekalert.org
AlphaGalileo
www.alphagalileo.org
The Why Files
http://whyfiles.org
SciDev.net
www.scidev.net
Psci-com
www.psci-com.ac.uk
Association of British Science Writers
www.absw.org.uk
