• One of my pet campaigns at McCann for Microsoft, the Devsta Challenge, recently finished and the winners just got announced so make sure you check out the top apps
• A study by the Keller Fay Group says that Coke is the most talked about brand in the US
• Windows 7 borrows from OS X, avoids Vista
• Digital Marketing airport analogy
• Download the second Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Cross-posting for Advocacy, An Introduction to Effective Social Media Integration
• Obama’s 30 minute ad that cost him $8m to air on TV
• Apps galore on LinkedIn (finally)
• Youth says No to marketing on social networks but responds to email
• Wired: Paul Boutin reckons blogs are so 2004 with the broad offer in functionality and usability of social networks
• Julian has a leaked video about the Australian internet filter over a his blog Adspace Pioneers
• Last but not least I just finished reading Without Warning by John Birmingham and there’s a great review (with spoilers) on Duncan Riley’s blog

Right. Got back late last night. We drove from Perth to Exmouth and back. 9 days, 8 nights and 3,700 klicks. All up we saw some ridiculously cool things. Took me ages to catch up with my digital life, uploading pictures to Facebook, Flickr and my photo blog, catching up on email and thousands of updates in my RSS feeds.

Best of the best was:

Dolphins that come right to your feet at the beach in Monkey Mia:

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Drift snorkling with tons of fish, turtles and a reef shark at Turquoise Bay in the Ningaloo Reef (which some say is way better than the Great Barrier Reef as the coral is still thriving):

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Standing at a beach where around a hundred turtles were mating in the water and on the beach.

If you want to see more you can do so on my Flickr profile or over at my personal photo blog.

I’m off to Western Australia for 9 days to drive 2,000 klicks up north from Perth and back down again and see the famous pinnacles, swim with dolphins and so on.

In the meantime no posts so here’s a few collected links:

• Client Side Blog post on conversion counting more than ever In digital
• Campaign Brief Magazine online edition for free till end of the year (only July/August issue so far though)
• Will it blend? - interview with Tom Dickson
• Tourism Australia is happy with online sponsorship response
• Save cash on eBay thanks to other people’s typos with Fat Fingers
• Guns and toddlers are just not a good combo
• Minit - parent to parent advice
• 10 most sought-after skills in web development
• Forrester: New 2008 social technographics data reveals rapid growth in adoption
• PriceWaterhouseCoopers predicts that traditional media has 5 years left
• Last but not least: The first minute of Who’s Nailin’ Paylin (SFW but I wonder if there’s a McCain scene in this)

• Scientific study finds web search improves brain activity
• MarketingSherpa released their 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide - the exec summary is available as a free PDF
• Flashplayer 10 and Silverlight 2 have been released
• Sequoia Capital presentation on startups and the economic downturn
• Doritos banner takeover plugin campaign is a great idea but the website is not up - fail
• David Armano on unconventional marketing
• NASA says space smells like steak
• Kenya’s elephants send text messages to rangers
• Microsoft’s new website for web pros
• Facebook announces 25 winning applications to receive funding
• If you think your shoes are uncomfortable think again
• Twitter Search, useful tool to find out what people are saying about a topic
• The search for a good tagline for Windows 7
• And here’s the explanation why 7
• An article about Australia’s great firewall, courtesy of Duncan
• Brandweek on some study around marketers using viral video
• Dropbox - easy sharing between computers of all different platforms
• Interactive Dobpler LED wall from Norway
• Live Search Maps mistakes pond for Atlantic Ocean – Fail.
• Dell wants you to contribute to the first-ever crowdsourced whitepaper
• Facebook now stores a Petabyte of pictures and traffic peaks at over 300k images per second
• And then there’s Dell’s social media help for small businesses on Facebook
• TechCrunch’s post on Federated Media’s new way of measuring campaigns
• ‘I Am Under 18′ button clicked for first time in history of the internet
• Walt Mossberg on Google’s G1 phone
• Why Windows Mobile is in trouble
• Seth Godin lets you download his Tribes ebook for free
• 20 sites helping you to master user interface design
• And a free whitepaper on mobile advertising for newbies
• MySpace launches MyAds so small businesses can create their own, templated creative (makes you wonder why Google didn’t come up with this ages ago as part of AdSense)
• h+, a web-based quarterly magazine, available as a free PDF
• Guns N’ Roses hunt for an ad agency to promote their album Chinese Democracy

See it all on the Fail Blog. Courtesy of Wes.

High-res version over at the website of creators Webbmedia Group.

Australian marketing industry publication B&T just relaunched and in the inaugral issue in the new look (e-mag here) they feature an article by writer Brad Howarth on Australia’s Marketing Blogosphere (pages 35-38). As you can see I made #9 which I’m pretty proud of. Many thanks to Brad, especially that he got my positioning perfectly right. You can read an extended article of his research and thoughts in general about business blogging on Smartcompany.

Of course also a big shout-out to Julian Cole, Grand-Daddy of the Top 100 Australian Marketing Pioneers Blogs list, where I rose up to #10.