George W. Bush singing "Sunday, Bloody Sunday"

Did you think GW could sing? Neither did I. But here he is "singing" the song Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Enjoy.

From: video.google.com

A meditation on the speed limit

Who was it that sang "I can't drive 55"? A Meditation On the Speed Limit is a project launched by a group of college students who wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous speed limit.

I like this because I myself do the same thing, which is to drive the speed limit regardless of what speed the nutballs behind me want to drive. They are in Atlanta, and did this on the perimeter highway, getting four cars together to cooperatively drive the speed limit. And by cooperatively driving the speed limit, they could block all lanes and keep everybody at the speed limit. And, they filmed everything posting the result to the web.

They wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous limit, but for me I think highway speeds are ridiculously fast. My thought is that at highway speeds death can come very quickly. Which just shows I'm in a different place than they are.

What was astonishing (well, not really) is the offensive reaction they got and the dangerous driving others got into. Apparently american drivers are addicted to driving fast on the highway. Watch the video for more details.

Corporations podcast their marketing nets

It's not just corporations adopting blogging, but some are toying with podcasting. Large corporations generally have some audio or video production crews already, so it's a natural extension for the output those crews make to be distributed on the Internet using the podcasting mechanism.

In Corporations podcast their marketing nets we see an overview of what's going on with corporate podcasting. It really runs the gamut.

It names Johns Hopkins Medicine, General Motors, IBM Investor Relations, Sun Microsystems, The BBC, President Bush, and Senator Barak Obama.

The article also discusses how some attempts, e.g. GM's, have come across as too much like a cheesy marketing piece rather than an authentic podcast. Okay, fine, whatever. Podcasting is just a medium for distributing content, and that medium can be used for whatever some webmaster wants to use it for.

I suppose the point is that for someone to listen to a podcast they have to find it useful. Would you want to listen to many minutes of marketing schlop? Well, okay, I think the answer might be in all those infomercial programs on television. For some reason people watch them even though they're obviously biased.