Washing machine vs. a nano: I’m glad it was this guy who carried out this unwitting experiment and not me. While he was lucky, I wouldn’t try this at home. However, I carried out a similar accidental experiment with a Griffin iTrip and the iTrip still works.

Google Maps zipcode mashup: Several folks have blogged this (http://maps.huge.info) today, but I couldn’t help myself. Type in your zipcode and you’ll see a red line showing its boundries. It’s the simple things that thrill me.

(Note to, well, you know who you are: wikipedia entry for mashup.)

(via: programmableweb which has lots more mashups and directories of services that with APIs that allow them to be mash-upable.)

Branding needs a new story: (From the October Fast Company) “Corporate America is obsessed with branding. But minus the hype, branding is really just commonsense strategy, rebranded.”

Perhaps due to the cowboy nature of many in marketing, “branding” is the worst business metaphor ever created. Never has a concept been so explained, yet so misunderstood. Anyway, wasn’t branding declared dead a year ago?

Why not come up with a new metaphor for business schools to obsess over for the next decade or so? I suggest Seth Godin’s “storytelling” metaphor as a potential “branding” replacement.

As a public service, here is the rexblog definition of corporate story telling: Your company has stories to tell. If the stories are true and you tell them well, people will listen and repeat your stories. They will make up their own version of your stories. Your stories will become legends. However, if you attempt to tell stories about your company that don’t match up with reality, then people will ignore them and you’ll wonder why that expensive logo and ad campaign failed. Your story will become a fable about how not to be a branding expert.

Why I miss Nashvillepost.com: Once in a while, a story will appear that makes me wish the website Nashvillepost.com was still around. Sometimes I miss David Fox’s knowledge and history of recent Nashville business history and the context such background can provide in helping to understand the significance of a new story. For example, this repackaged press release was just posted on the Nashville Business Journal website:

Quote:

A Milwaukee company has agreed to buy Link2Gov Corp., a privately held Nashville-based provider of online payment processing services to governments.

I’d like to know more.

Citizen pollster: Every few months, I will continue to say this. If you want to listen to the “numbers” of the Internet — to what the numbers associated with RSS feeds reveal, for example — then watch the way Patrick Ruffini creates tools to measure the conversation statistics. While he is a passionate partisan and his focus is often the shaping-up of the 2008 GOP presidential nomination (although, he can also be bi-partisan in in his research), I recommend that you study his approach and think about how it could be applied to other research challenges.