The past couple of weekends I jokingly started trading Silly Bandz among my twenty-something friends. Why did I even have these in my possession you might ask? Well first of all, my boss Ed beat most of us to it earlier this summer and wore a band that his kids gave him. In addition, my roommate is an elementary school teacher and buys them for her students. The final straw that made me give in was when I saw a Baltimore Ravens Silly Bandz pack at my gym. When my roommate purchased them, I begged her to give me Joe Flacco.

So here we are a couple of weekends later and I now have a penguin who changes colors in the light, Joe Flacco (he will not be traded), a yellow giraffe from a guy at a birthday party, and a blue dog. I will admit I don't wear each of them all the time, but when I do, I notice that something as small as a color-changing penguin and a purple rubber Joe Flacco tend to brighten my day a bit.

Are you wearing Silly Bandz?  Don't be shy, The New York Times dove into this trend earlier this summer. Check out the article here.

A recent Ad Age article discusses how Smirnoff is saying the company took measures to stop the "icing" site BrosIcingBros.com. Smirnoff's parent company, Diageo, claims that "Icing does not comply with our marketing code."

Personally, I've never seen such a phenomenon take off on social networks like "icing" has the past couple of weeks. I had not heard of "icing" until Memorial Day weekend when I was stuck in Baltimore and took a break from moving to see what my friends were up to in Dewey Beach. Low and behold, I kept seeing people on one knee drinking out of a bottle. Mobile uploads don't all have the best clarity, so it took a few pictures and captions to realize it was a Smirnoff Ice bottle. My friend even "iced" his roommate by leaving a bottle in the dishwasher full of clean dishes, waiting for her to unload it. My first reaction was surprise that this game existed, let alone was catching on in the perfect age demographic for this brand. A brand that most of us haven't had since…well…we weren't supposed to be having alcohol. My second thought was, Don't these people's teeth feel like they are going to shatter after chugging that sweet, tart-like drink? What are your thoughts about this?

Should Smirnoff take down the site and separate itself from this phenomenon? Also, will dentists see more action with more adults slugging sugary sweet drinks?

W3C Browser Stats – 7.1%

Stat Owl – 10.45%

Stat Counter – 6.62%

"According to web analytics company StatCounter, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 is now truly a relic of the past with less than 5% of market share in the U.S. and Europe."

I have a younger brother named Matthew who was once a stuttering, stumbling, klutz of a kid who couldn't make friends to save his life. It wasn't the way he dressed, his demeanor, or his smell that made making friends difficult. Matthew was shy and never learned how to communicate with his peers. One would like to think that social graces are taught in school, but that's not always the case. Anyway, fast-forward to the days of Halo and WoW (World of Warcraft), and the once bumbling bean is now a social butterfly. Video games provided him with a secondary education, one that may have saved his sanity. He and his friends play games regularly, run an auto-tuning garage on the weekends, and take trips to the beach all the time—they're practically family.

I once worked for a company that allowed us to play Unreal Tournament, a first-person shooter similar to Halo, at the end of the day. Everyone would sign off around 5:30 and we'd play for an hour or so. The whole team was involved, CSO to PM; everyone had a chance to blast the crap out of one another. Truth be told, it was something that we looked forward to every day. Less time was spent on facebook and twitter because ultimately it meant there'd be less time to play. Playing made us more productive and it reinforced the culture that made up our office. Most of the people from that team have moved on to bigger and better things; however, we all reminisce over the days of yore and how bad I was. Good times.

Here's my solution – ribbon piping.

Send us your solutions! I'm sure you've got a better one than golf balls and recycled tires!

When developing a PR plan for a client, it's crucial to consider these different platforms and use them to your advantage. This article from journalism.org goes into more detail on the topic, but here are my main takeaways:

• Each social media platform has its own personality and function—bloggers tend to gravitate toward stories that elicit emotion, concern an individual or group rights, or trigger ideological passion.
• Twitter has a heavy focus on technology, and the information that is passed along via Twitter is typically breaking news or updates.
• Twitter is less tied to traditional media, while blogs still heavily rely on traditional press. A handful of traditional outlets account for a majority of all links on blogs, including BBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
• YouTube has a strong visual appeal (obviously) with a "Hey, you've got to see this!" mentality. Unless your client has something that is worthy of sharing, don't rely on this medium to gain a tone of traction in your plan.

To check out the whole article, click here.

Educate them on what they're missing and create a simplified version.

The tiny text says:

Oops! It looks like you’re using an old version of Internet Explorer to browse the Internet. 
Our site will work just fine for you, but it will look much prettier if you take a moment to upgrade your browser.
Don’t worry – upgrading only takes a second, it won’t damage your computer, and you won’t lose any files. Best of all, you’ll probably find lots of other web sites load faster and look better after you switch.
You can upgrade directly from Microsoft here or just remove this warning.

Well played Bluesky, well played.

The roundup this time around focuses on Flash, HTML5, and Javascript. Some unique things about each of them, and examples in which they work together. This is a mixed bag of tutorials, scripts, libraries, interesting sites, and interesting tools that have to do with each of these.

HTML5

What does beautiful HTML5 markup look like? Click here

HTML5/JS

Molecules! 

JS Cotton
A library for animating and drawing using html5 canvas. I have had limited use with it but the code is clean. 

Modernizr
Offers functionality for fine-control over what people see depending on what HTML5 features their browser supports. An example: you can put "If Statements" into your CSS.

52 Framework – HTML5 JS Framework. 
Allows you to easily implement a lot of the features of CSS3 and HTML5 in most browsers using built in hacks.

How to Make an HTML5 Iphone App 

Flash -> HTML5

Exploring the HTML5 Canvas for Flash Developers

Using HTML5's geo-location with Flash

Sprout – Serve up ads with either Flash or HTML5, depending on the format. 

Javascript

Yahoo Pipes 
I am way behind on using yahoo pipes, but after playing with it for a week now and learning just how it works I am having a lot of fun. It's a pretty powerful little tool that has a great interface.  The great thing is, the actual tutorials for yahoo pipes, are patterns of pipes themselves that you can play with.  For example, if I wanted to combine my own blogs rss feed with some search results from twitter, then I can do it in this interface.

- To go along with this there is JSPlumb, which helps you to link thinks together just like Yahoo Pipes does.

Twitter API Explorer 
A useful tool for experimenting with the twitter api on the fly before bringing it into your own projects. 

Some nice JS Libraries:

JS Storage
Javascript library for storing user data on the client side. "jStorage makes use of HTML5 local storage where available and userData behavior in Internet Explorer older versions. Webkit SQLite is not supported"

Require JS
A great tool for managing large JS projects, loading scripts at the proper times, etc.

Open Faces
"OpenFaces is an open-source library of AJAX-powered JSF components, an Ajax framework and a client-side validation framework. "

iProcessing
"iProcessing is an open programming framework to help people develop native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for iPhone."

JQuery Lint
Nice little library that sits on top of Jquery and helps with error reporting.

Flash

Adverputt  nice 3d putting game that incorporates advertising)

The Johnny Cash Project - Users rotoscope a jonny cash vid in flash

Berghaus – Climb Mount Asgard  (cool little mountain climbing game)

Bio-Bak - Crazy Experimental/Exploratory Flash Site

All Of the Above

Zing Charts
Charts that provide results in HTML5 and Flash.

JQuery Transmit
"Welcome! Transmit (jquery-transmit) is a sophisticated jQuery plugin providing an elegant multi-file upload utility. At the core of the plugin is a small SWF file which provides single or multiple file selection and upload services. Getting started with the plugin couldn't be easier"

Trimming in Actionscript – Jquery Style
Just a nice little tutorial on how to use jQuery style string trimming in AS3.

SVG

SVG Wow
Demos from the SVG wow session in 2009 that showcase what can be done in SVG using HTML.