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The show Seinfeld starting out a bit rough, the characters needed to mesh together and the show in the beginning was too much stand up routine rather than creating situations where the characters got involved in ridiculous scenarios. This ad looks more like a rough draft, not polished and needs a lot of work. Don’t think this will challenge the Apple ads. I think there’s potential though, but more tinkering is needed. I just like Gates and Jerry in an ad together. They need Larry David to add some clever and funny angles to it. You know, a bit more Curb Your Enthusiasm. How much is Jerry getting paid, try $10 million per ad. Take a look.

Check out TechCrunch for more on the ads - an email that went out to Microsoft employees saying the ad is just an ice breaker.

Article about Wordpress founder: Mullenweg is the founder of San Francisco’s Automattic, which runs the blog service WordPress, home to 4 million blogs worldwide.

Some stats:

Daily, 175,000 blogs are created, according to blog search engine Technorati, which estimates the number of blogs at 113 million, with 7.5 million of them active. Meanwhile, 184 million bloggers are creating 570,000 posts every 24 hours, reaching 70 percent of Web surfers daily, according to a March study by Universal McCann.

Read more…

Try to check out some games if you can, you’ll be happy you did. In one of the most thrilling comebacks I’ve seen in some time, Turkey came back to defeat the Czech Republic 3-2.

The Turkish Comeback: Euro 2008

Amazing video - watch all the way through to the end, it doesn’t end like you’d think:

The “battle” happened in September 2004, during Mr. Budzinski’s first visit to Africa, at the Kruger National Park in the northeastern corner of South Africa. Mr. Budzinski, who works as a supply manager for Chevron in Houston, was riding in the back of a sport utility vehicle with his wife, two other tourists and a tour guide. The guide, spotting lions sunning themselves by a watering hole near where a herd of buffalo was walking by, decided to see what would happen. Before long the lions attacked the herd, singling out a buffalo calf and overwhelming it by the water’s edge. By the time a crocodile had entered the fierce fight, Mr. Budzinski said, he was thinking about turning the camera off.

The video has been made into a National Geographic documentary - read more at the NY Times.

I was watching the Lakers game and wondering if Pau Gasol and Kobe were harkening back to maybe some of their early days as soccer players. I could have sworn that Gasol said, ‘Nice ball’ to Kobe rather than, ‘Nice Pass’. The way that Kobe plays is so much like a soccer player, cutting and darting into open spaces. There was one moment where Kobe was up in the air to shoot, and two players rushed to block his shot, rather than shoot he bounced passed the ball to Gasol who was cutting to the basket. They play basketball like soccer and it’s beautiful to watch.

And there are more NBA players who played soccer growing up, Steve Nash and Jason Kidd to name a few. In soccer you use your feet like your hands and that just translates to all sorts of sports. If you got good feet then you’ve got good balance and the ability to move laterally with ease.

Here’s Gasol, Nadal and Ronaldinho in a Nike ad - Flamenco styled showmanship:

Microsoft must just hate seeing those Apple ads on TV or strewn across the NY Times.  Has Microsoft given in though, I don’t see any or haven’t heard any response from them surrounding those ads?  They’re sort of like the cave men in those Geico commercials, angry and upset, but can’t really do anything about it.  Now people are saying that Microsoft might come out with their new operating system early, just to overcome all of the Vista backlash.  There are people clamoring for XP to be resurrected and not discontinued, that’s some good news for them.  But speaking of ads, I think the best Geico commercial has to be the one with Mrs. Butterworth acting as the spokeswomen.

Talk about a smart purchase or early bird gets the worm–those who bought a few key one word domain names in the early 90s are being rewarded these days with big sums.  Now there are very few if any one or two word domain names left of any value.  What happens when a movie comes out and someone owns the title of the movie?  Do these people get paid off too?  More likely is the use of creative type of names or ad campaigns that incorporate a concept and promote the brand that way, but with solid one word domain names like Vodka or Pizza, the money is rolling in for some fortunate domain owners:

A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for $2.6m (£1.3m) - after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994.

Chris Clark, 43, accepted the offer from an anonymous bidder after a week-long online auction.

“It’s crazy, it’s just crazy,” Mr Clark, who lives in North Potomac, Maryland, was quoted as saying by the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

“It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure,” he added.

In January, Mr Clark decided to sell it after hearing that another domain - Vodka.com - was sold for $3m in 2006.

Read more…

Talk about getting some traffic, check out Yahoo’s new Digg like Buzz.  If a link gets enough plugs it can wind up on the homepage of Yahoo:

• Salon got so excited about a February 28 link from the Yahoo home page to this story that they issued a press release - they had 1 million unique visitors that day, the most ever to the 12 year old site.
• US Magazine was linked from Yahoo on February 27, and had the second highest traffic day ever. 32% of visits that day came from the Yahoo home page.
• Huffington Post reported 800,000 unique visitors from a Yahoo-linked story

Read more at TechCrunch…

Argot - A specialized vocabulary or set of idioms used by a particular group: thieves’ argot.

Don’t start watching the Wire if you haven’t already begun. It will take a few weeks off of your life as you have to go back and watch all the preceding episodes—you’ll want to. If you do though, go back and start watching all the episodes, it will be worth it. Actually, if you are going to watch the show, you have to go back and watch all the preceding episodes, otherwise, you’re doing the show a disservice and more so yourself. But be aware, it will stop you in the midst of what you’re doing and you’ll forget the next hour or so. You’ll be late to whatever you’re headed to.

I’ve always counted myself as someone who empathizes with other people’s situations, or tired to. I think I now, as I’ve gotten older, realized that it’s very hard to understand someone’s situation unless you’ve gone through something very similar, and even then you don’t know what it’s like, but you learn to try to understand and listen.

But the Wire, I don’t know, it gives you a feeling for what’s going on around you in a different manner. And it doesn’t disrespect you by dumbing things down, it let’s you figure things out—a conversation might be entirely in Spanish, and even if you don’t understand everything, you can look at the body language of the characters or piece things together based on the events before it—and your brain likes doing that little bit of work. Then there’s the language of the characters–their individual communities they inhabit, whether that’s the cops, the kids on the street, the politicians, the news room, it’s all their own and you’re not served a new version. You come to understand their speak and that makes you embrace them and their worlds more–they’re real, and it’s more fun and interesting.

What I wanted to write about though is how it puts a feeling into what’s going on around you. I was walking by a homeless man pushing a character the other day and I thought of Bubs. I picked up the newspaper this morning, yeah I bought the paper version, and thought of the news people behind it, competing for front page stories. These kind of putting yourself into the places or characters is not new of course, but the Wire does it better than all that’s come before it—that I’ve seen. No doubt.

Here’s a blog that does a genius job of giving you updates and insight. “Back to bidness, I see.” — Snoop

I came across an interesting article a while back, at first I thought it was about Asperger’s Syndrome but I was close. It’s how Curb Your Enthusiasm has become a tool for those with schizophrenia.

Then I saw a show on PBS, Today’s Man. A film about Asperger Syndrome, which made me recall the above article, it’s a documentary done by Lizzie Gottlieb, who’s brother has Asperger Syndrome. I only caught half of it but it is really quite wonderful or engrossing, and going to have to see the first part. She said the movie that reminds her of her brother is Elf.

Short intro:  Nicky Gottlieb was a child of extraordinary talents and odd behavior. At age 21, he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism.