Brilliant.

Back from wonderful New Zealand. Felt a bit like back home in Switzerland but with a lot less cars and peoples. Truly amazing if you dig landscapes, animals and (lots of) driving. Above a few impressions, more on my Flickr photostream. We travelled from Christchurch to Lake Tekapo, then past Queenstown to Te Anau for a boat trip on the Milford Sound, back up to Wanaka, up the west coast to the Franz Josef glacier, over to the east coast for whale watching in Kaikoura and back to Christchurch. 2,200 klicks of awesomeness. Next time we must take more time though to do heaps of kayaking and hiking.

Here’s a few links from the past week:

• Common talks Softwear by Microsoft
• Woman finds Virgin Mary in her brain scan
• COED Magazine’s impressive collection of 225 demotivational posters
• Jack Daniels makers are thrilled with the state of the economy
• Bailout - Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2008
• Tutorial on how to batch edit images in Photoshop
• Socialcast brings social messaging to the enterprise
• Profy thoughts about whether blocking ads is the same stealing as downloading music from torrents
• NYT concludes that Canadians maybe have more friends than US peoples and CNN says happiness is contagious in social networks
• Wordpress competition from Microsoft with Oxite
• Girl vomits in airplane and the puke bag just doesn’t work upside down
• And last but not least YouTube added a terribly horrible search bar on top of embedded videos. Whilst I think it’s cool to search and watch within the video frame it should be party of the bottom nave panel and not in your face. Anyway, article about it on Profy.

Right, I’m off traveling again. This time it’s 5 days dicking around on New Zealand’s south island. To make sure I get to do good photos I just sinned myself into a secondary camera, to top up my Ixus 70, with the purchase of a Canon PowerShot SX10 IS with a fantastic 20x zoom. Here’s some web food from the past week:

• Video interview with Bob Pearson, Dell’s Vice President, Communities & Conversations, on their continuation of using social media
• Epica Awards winners 2008
• The real Shaq’s Twitter profile
• The Science of the Future of War (Wired)
• MediaPost interprets the stats of IBM’s digital media survey
• Jeremiah Owyang’s round-up of social networks site usage
• Gartner survey shows consumers predominantly use the internet for email and search
• Nokia Build phone configurator/designer (UK only)
• Joost pushes onto the iPhone but faces performance issues
• AdWeek asks if the end is near for display ads
• 20 strange and endangered species
• Yahoo’s top searchs for 2008 (same as 2007)
• Copyblogger’s ultimate blogger writing guide (which really applies to everything you write or say)
• David Armano’s 4 C’s of community
• Images of Peter Beste’s book True Norwegian Black Metal
• Mac internet share hits record 8.87%; Windows drops below 90%
• Nokia’s newly released N97 is taking on the iPhone (demo video at Mobile Crunch)
• Google launches a competitive research & keyword research tool
• Couponing in the digital age (Adweek)
• Gay penguins steal eggs from straight couples
• US research findings on target audiences for online games advertising
• Facebook launches their Connect service (TC) and Power.com tries to do the same
• In the meantime the end has come for once called Twitter killer Pownce
• Razorfish issues last rites for Web 2.0
• Adweek article on the two different agency spheres and balancing the billable day vs. the creative way
• Some inspiration to make creative use of your old books
• Wrestling is not always just a show, proven by Joey Mercury’s face that meets ladde
• Dog Photo Booth by Sharon Montrose (check the Border Collie puppy)
• Last but not least here’s help to pronounce names: howtosaythatname.com

Prepared by French consulting firm faberNovel.