The most inspiring ad I saw this February didn’t air during the Super Bowl.

OMG! Where's my Wiki?

Think what you like about SOPA, for those of you missing Wikipedia (and Google Guide), here's a way to find that information you just have to have now, now, now.

UPDATE 10/13
THITHER BlackBerry! Has regular service been restored for you?

As we noted this summer, RIM, the company that makes the BlackBerry device, was suffering from increased competition and was laying off workers. There was a plan to introduce new models to attempt to compete with the iPhone and its ilk, but now there's a new problem with the device: a trans-hemispheric service outage.

Is this the final nail in the coffin for the erstwhile go-to device for the world-traveling business person?

UPDATE [9/27] A New Yorker reacts to the new service/addiction.

First there was Massimo Vignelli's modern art evoking map of the New York City subway system. Now there's a version for weekend traveling with an app you can download for your iDevice of choice. Coming soon: Cell phone service on the world's least social transportation system. Are you ready for NYC Subway 2.0?

Okay, the "sky is falling" rhetoric that we're increasingly under unwanted surveillance has been with us since, oh, 1949, say, when George Orwell published his dystopic doomsday novel, "1984." In it, as we all know, or secretly believe, the citizenry cannot escape the gaze of Big Brother, the grim totalitarian governmental eye that ke

Al Gore's Climate Reality Project plans an event, "24 Hours of Reality", to "[bring] the facts about the climate crisis into the mainstream and [engage] the public in conversation about how to solve it." Which is a noble idea and one with millions of supporters worldwide. But to help CRP spread the word on September 14, the organization is asking Facebook and Twitter users to "donate" their accounts for the 24-hour duration of the event. Is this a valid way to engage social media for a cause, or is it just another way to spread spam?

What do you do if you happen to share your name (and coveted first-name Twitter handle) with a massive, devastating atmospheric event charging straight up America's heavily populated east coast? You give up your account for two days as your agency co-workers spend the weekend tweeting as if you were that hurricane. And you make it successful by adhering to a couple of basic social media rules.

Facebook isn't the first social media vehicle to broadcast a live event, but Friday marks the first time it airs a live soccer match, and it's the venerable Football Association Cup competition (the FA Cup) that gets to debut to what may well be an audience of 700 million. The game? Ascot United versus Wembley Football Club, featuring two semi-pro teams you'll never have heard of, and, a round or two further into the competition, you're likely not to hear of again. Budweiser UK is the sponsor on whose page the game will air.

Social media in the hands of young people helped fuel the various uprisings of the "Arab Spring" and, generally, we cheered their use of Facebook and Twitter to help coalesce various groups and individuals seeking change. Recently, however, in the UK, use of smartphones, especially RIM's Blackberry Messenger service, have aided rampaging youth learn the locales of their next fire-bombings and confrontations with the local constabulary. Smartphones and social media in the hands of thugs has been fearsome over the past few days.

But there are others who have been using these same social media and smartphones to attempt to warn and report the conflagrations throughout Britain. The trick is doing it responsibly.

It's not exactly news to us, but it's always nice when someone else's research points out how a partnership with a small agency can yield big results for companies of all sizes. In a study by the Horn Group and Kelton Research, CMOs want their agencies to challenge them and are looking for smaller agencies with whom they can partner. And that's not all.