wasting bandwidth since 1999

Tag: oddities

In Search of Boring Facts

Google

I doubt that many visitors to this site use the search box. It’s just not something you normally do on a blog.

But it seems a few of those who stumbled into this corner of the web did search, at least according to the “top searches” recorded by the plugin that keeps track of such stuff.

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Are You Following Skittles?

By way of MediaPost comes the story of an interesting change in corporate marketing.

The makers of Skittles, those little rainbow-colored, sort-of-maybe fruit-flavored sugar pills, have abandoned the idea of actually maintaining a web site for the brand.skittles.jpg

Instead all that’s left is a little widget that ties together their article on Wikipedia (now the “home page”) with content from their Facebook page, Twitter feed, flickr photostream, and other references from the social media chatter.

You might think the candy maker is taking a risk by letting the public determine their brand image.

Here’s the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

Skittles.com isn’t exactly a top destination online. Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends respectively report the most recent month’s Skittles.com unique visitors as 18,000, 15,000, and too few to track. To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, Skittles.com’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

What does it say about social networking when Skittles has more fans on Facebook (nearly 600,000!) than they had monthly visitors to the site?

Probably nothing. Just another odd and interesting piece about the ever-evolving saga of life on the web.

Re: Your Brains

The Consumerist blog thinks they’ve found the worst food product ever.

With one serving providing 1170% of your daily allowance for cholesterol (there’s no missing decimal in that number), it’s certainly a contender.

Not to mention the name and contents of the can.

However, it’s still very hard to beat this entry in the competition to create the lowest example of modern food technology.

Spooks 2.0

Not too long ago, I taught at a high school that is right around the corner from the CIA.

Driving down the road you wouldn’t know it was there since there was no indication that anything unusual was going on in the compound labeled as belonging to Department of Transportation behind the high fence.

But even so, we all knew exactly what it was and where it was.

Things change, however, even in the world of spies.

Now there are large signs directing people approaching from all directions in the area to the “George Bush* Center for Intelligence”.

And the National Intelligence Agency now has an RSS feed on their “flashy, newly designed public web site“. I guess we’re only days away from the announcement of their blog.

Welcome to spooks 2.0.

[* That’s Bush the elder.]

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