Maestro Michael Mistretta has a detailed write-up on the state of Fusion ads, the ad network I’m a part of. Money quote, “[Six months ago] our network served a mere 300,000 impressions a month… [now we're] serving 8,000,000 impressions a month.” Huge growth! And more than that, I enjoy almost every site that makes up the Fusion family. That’s just good business.

Online political pollster Nate Silver turns his skills towards messing with Texas by chopping it up into 5 hypothetical individual states (a privilege uniquely afforded to the Lone Star State by the terms of its annexation to the Union in 1845) and then surmising the political fallout of each. Fascinating stuff.

White Pages just launched a rebrand, and they have a few in-depth articles on the brand building process including site design, market research, visual identity, etc. Great work and insight.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
— Vladimir Lenin

BBDO CEO Andrew Robertson talking about ad agencies and the web sounds suspiciously like the leader of the “Most Awarded Agency Network in the World” being fascinated by what 15 year olds take for granted.

I think it’s great for agencies to start recognizing that new talent may have more knowledge than existing employees. But if I was a potential client with millions of dollars for ad buys, I’d be more than a little concerned with a strategy that essentially says “the techies can make it happen.” Especially when the “it” portion of that statement is a complete unknown to the agency.

Here we find NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd completely unable to keep her seething loathe under wraps while throwing lazy jabs at Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone (who deftly, without a hint of irony, humbly jab back.) I know it’s an op-ed piece, but just because Dowd doesn’t get Twitter doesn’t mean the rest of us are idiots for finding value in it.

Spotlight makes me smile.

Millions of people die every year for the stupid reason they are too poor to stay alive…That is a plight we can end…We have enough on the planet to make sure, easily, that people aren’t dying of their poverty.
— Jeffrey Sachs, economist and special advisor to the U.N.

OK, boys and girls (mostly boys), episode 8 of G.I.Joe: Resolute resolutely RULES.

Mrs. Blankenship and I are lecturing today on green living at Auburn University for a good friend’s Global Consumer Culture class. We’d be streaming the lectures live, but AU’s firewall says “haha, no streaming for you.” You can find notes and slides here or watch clips from the last time we did this here.

Despite all their marketing suggestions to the contrary, no [running shoe] manufacturer has ever invented a shoe that is any help at all in injury prevention…If anything, the injury rates have actually ebbed up since the [invention of the modern running shoe].
— The Painful Truth About Trainers: Are Running Shoes a Waste of Money?

Casey Dukes pointed me in the direction of this fascinating article about what (if any) benefits modern running shoes offer. The research and anecdotal evidence suggest a link between the invention of the running shoe and an increase in running injuries.

I especially enjoy the bit about a new Asics shoe that cost $3 million in R&D and took three more years to create than it took to make the first atomic bomb.

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s marketing at its best.

Speaking of social media, Google has profiles now. All your internets are belong to them. You can, of course, create your own. Purpose remains to be seen.

I think Twitter should hide everyone’s number of followers. I hate how social media quickly becomes a popularity contest. — Jeremy Cowart via Twitter

Let’s just get it out of the way: as of 11:00am today I have approximately 1000 blog subscribers, 1324 followers on Twitter, 137 contacts and 693 followers on Flickr, 387 friends on Facebook, 519 followers on Virb°, 38 followers on Readernaut, 2502 followers on Ffffound!, 57 connections on LinkedIn, 2 friends on Last.fm, and so on and so forth.

Copywriting choices aside (followers, friends, contacts, etc.), there’s something implicit in social media that all of those 6000+ people are connected to me in some form of “friendship,” however loose that friendship may be. But what does it all mean? Surely this isn’t community. Or is it? (I tend to think of you, the blog readers/commenters as a community, but I’m not so sure on the other circles and networks.)

I think I have enough relational margin in my life to truly know a handful of people. Thus anything beyond that becomes some measure of decreasing “knowing” akin to the spectrum of online friendship I posted earlier.

So the question becomes, is it actually social at all?

Jeffrey Zeldman’s Taking Your Talent to the Web is now a free downloadable PDF. It’s an 8-year-old book on making the transition from print design to web design, but it still holds up (and is likely needed now more than ever.)

If you ever wanted to see what it looks like to ditch 10 years of brand equity in favor of bland, lifeless sameness, check out Chipotle’s new visual identity. I wasn’t exactly a fan of the original branding, but at least it was simple and didn’t put them in the Taco Bell category. Sad.

I love this Spectrum of Online Friendship from Mike Arauz.

Adult Swim has unveiled G.I.Joe: Resolute, a PG-13 series of webisodes penned by British comic writer Warren Ellis, whose previous knowledge of G.I.Joe consisted of “drinking with Larry Hama.” Awesome. (via Opus)

The fundamental unit of the new economy is not the corporation but the individual.
— Thomas Malone

1. Preparing for Mrs. Blankenship‘s return (in other words, house projects)
2. Preparing for this weekend’s final interview with a potential web dev for NewSpring
3. Finishing this drawing
4. Finishing some HUGE Prom Night Fist Fight style vinyl wall graphics
5. Trying, and failing, to keep up with email

Dave [Letterman] makes a lot more than I do. Way more. And I’m number one. But that’s okay. How much pie can you eat?
—Jay Leno

Of all the things to hit home with thoughts I’ve been thinking recently, a Jay Leno quote was not what I expected, yet here we are.

I’ve been rather overtaken with a question of late, “How much is enough?” How do I define what most dictionaries call “an adequate quantity; a quantity that is large enough to achieve a purpose; adequate; sufficient for the purpose”? What is that for me and for my family? What’s the cut off? The baseline?

The church staff subculture makes much of the “negotiating your pay cut” thing transitioning from marketplace jobs to ministry jobs, but in relation to the rest of the world that’s like saying someone went from “rich” to “oh, wait, yep, still rich.” Sure, I took a paycut, but I bet I still make more money than 90% of the world does. You probably do, too.

And isn’t that enough? Or more than enough? If it isn’t, maybe I actually need to discipline my appetite instead of trying to get more. I mean, how much pie can you eat?

Holy lack of brand architecture, Virgin has a lot of logo.