AdVerve 60: Holiday Edition

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Aka, our Holiday Bonanza ’Stravaganza. Wrappin’ up the year like no other. (Not really. For a proper year-end wrapup, GET YOU SOME BEANCAST! Bob's two-hour special features John Wall, Ken Wheaton and US TRULY.)

We do a quick run-through of holiday likes and gripes, including agency cards, holiday traditions, films, ads and music. There's also a brief but beefy manifesto on why we hate flashmobs more than anything else made by man. It's a lot, so we stretch it out to 45 whole minutes. (Dig 45 minutes better than 30? We're kinda likin' it, but tell us what YOU think.)

Also, Bill goes off on a tear about hateables on Twitter. It's a riot times 10, and all the better for sending you off on your way toward 2011.

Link sausages:

- Stupid Dell XPS laptop flashmob in apathetic café setting.
- Burberry's bohemian holiday folk track.
- Modea's Buzzword Bingo.
- Help Luckie decide where to give.
- Have a half-assed crowdsourced Ducati Christmas.
- BONUS: A Christmas Story gangsta remix.
- BONUS: Chinese dude claims having sexual tryst with alien. (In French, but Google Translate that bad-boy.)

Image credit: Culturemob, for A Christmas Story: the Musical.

AdVerve 59: Psychedelic Curation Station

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Guillaume Decugis (@gdecugis) of Scoop.it joins us to talk about the curation age, what makes the HuffPo model “special,” protecting journalists while serving users’ desire to share, and Silicon Valley versus the French tech scene. (Email us for a Scoop.it invite: advervepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com.)

That’s a lot to cover in 30 25 minutes. Hold onto your hats, cowpokes.

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AdVerve 58: How (Not...?) to Get Ravished at Tech Conferences.

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Aka, tech conference date rape. We had other things on our minds what with the wrapping of LeWeb 2010, but as often happens one big topic dominated the score: those whose hands traverse the endless expanse of your inert spinal cord after a watered-down cocktail or two. What to do? Do you out them? Or do you play it cool, like Sam L. Jackson?

Second big topic: we WikiLeak all over the place on why Julian Assange is both hero and villain.

That, and myriad little else, in another superfast 30-minute show. (Are you liking this BTW? WE GOTTA KNOW.)

Linkage:

- Google tech conference dating fun.
- Julian Assange doesn’t like to pay?

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AdVerve 57: Putting the “Me” in Media

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And the I. That picture is the self-promotional Apocalypse, innit? Never have so many done so much with so little. We’re not hatin, we’ll take any endorsement deal. But ya gotta draw a line, no? Unless these three are just doing what we expect the rich and fabulous to do. NAMELY BE RICH AND FABULOUS.

Along the way we rail against the Man™ for not giving us the Super Funkadelic All-in-One Viewing Device so we never have to leave our couches. Angela dishes on her Scoop.it love as we go off on curators as the new... oh, and Justin Bieber’s manstache. We also try out a new shorter format. Think of it like AdVerve concentrate.

It’s got linkability too:

- Kevin Bacon’s Logitech Revue.
- La Senza bra choir.
- Michael Bay’s Secret.
- Kardashian Kredit Kard Kaput.

AdVerve 56 - Get Whirled with Joe Sabia.

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Joe Sabia of SF-based Whirled,  of Rockmelt demo vid, zombie speeding and Mad Men cigarette fame, joins us for some good clean all-natural fun. What’s the difference between Vimeo and YouTube? Why plug a manifesto? What makes Tumblr so awesome?

We get to the heart of what makes something catch an audience's eye, why mediocrity might not be so bad ... and why the internet may be the best thing that ever happened to really boring people. Also, Joe busts out the Morse Code chops. It's a riot in dots and dashes.

AdVerve 55: Tryptophan! Santabration! ...and Airport Frisks.

That yearly bacchanalia of peace on earth and goodwill to men.

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We get you in the holiday spirit with the curious origins of Thanksgiving and some pre-Christmas foreplay. Also, Bill manages to squeeze in a full-sized rant about the new TSA body scans while Angela tries desperately to reel the conversation back to tinseltown and the roots of the Christmas stocking. (Not what you learned in school! But probably even less true.)

We sorta do never quite do get around to making that “thankful” list. (Although Santa knows we tried.)

Also in the confession booth: the worst Christmas presents we ever got. Email us yours!

Linkle-toes:

- The alleged origins of the Christmas stocking.
- Muslims Wearing Things.
- Full-body scanarama! A gift from a grateful nation.
- There used to be two Black Fridays.
- Deep-fried Thanksgoodness!
- Watch out for fire though.
- TSA scanner man.
- Battle: Los Angeles.

AdVerve 54: Monster Media

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(Or right-click link to open in new window with controllable player.)

Culture journo Carolina Miranda (@cmonstah), the magnificent brains behind C-Monster.net, WNYC's Gallerina and the Perfect City documentary, joins us for some high-meets-low culture fun and games. She chats us up about the scariest road in Peru, what she looks for in a would-be tourist attraction, the changing face of compensation and expectations for writers in the tech age, and journalism’s no-fly zone... if it even has one anymore.

Plenty of twists, turns and giggles along the way. Miss it at your inner wanderluster's peril.

Image from Carolina's photo diary: When Classicism Meets the Northern Peruvian Coast.

Linky do-dahs:
- Keith Olbermann gets a mini vaca.
- Carolina on the future of freelance journalism.

- Her Huffpo/Slate response. (Scroll down four or five comments.)
- More scary road fun.

AdVerve 53: Q to the A, Take 1

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Here’s something we might do every so often, particularly when the Almighty Internet seems to be burning with curiosity. This episode we took your questions. Any questions. All of them.

So here we tackle visa issues, what dream guest we’d have on (with no option of refusal), whether we need digital advertising, the drivers license test in Sweden, bullies, Cheez-Its versus Cheese Nips, whether the nature of the machine corrupts potentially good Presidents, if product placement has become the creeping Kudzu of all potentially cool things ... and why we don’t have a Facebook fan page. (Yet? Dunno.)

Also, we tell the one chocolate-peanut butter story you shouldn’t tell if you want to make friends at ad:tech.

It’s a marathon gamut. For next time, send us more of your questions.

Linky doo dahs:

- Whirled. That’s the agency that did “Every Cigarette Smoked in Mad Men.” (This is also the agency of Joe Sabia, who interrupted Angela on gchat mid-podcast with something to the effect of, “GIVE ME A SHOUT-OUT! YOU WON’T, YOU’T,” followed by what he promised would be a haiku but was actually just a bad joke. ;P WE LOVE YA JOE.)
- Humanoid robots rehearsing kiss scene.
- Interview with McDonald's head chef.
- French visa information for residents in or around San Francisco. (That’s where Angela started her process.) To live/work in France, contact your local French embassy, as all processes will vary by region.
- Donut cheeseburgers. That had nothing to do with anything, actually. We just had to share.

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AdVerve 51: Ignoranima

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No guest this week, so we springboard in 58 different direction as we often like to do. We kick off with Maureen Dowd's article on how Sarah Palin makes ignorance chic, fertilizing the warm podcasty earth for the blossoms of debate: portrayals of women in power, patriotism and American governments/companies, fameballing on the coat-tails of Steve Jobs and all those goddamn strikes that are always happening everywhere (but especially in France).

We also steamroll our rage tractors into The Social Network, the Zuckerberg factor, and if Aaron Sorkin is man-biased.

Take that venty venti latté to go, kids. It's wild in this here West.

Wünderbar linkaroos:

- Making Ignorance Chic
- (...speaking of,) Chelsea Kate Isaacs tries repositioning self as drunk sexy vlogger. A new ego's born every minute, and this one's full-grown!
- Aaron Sorkin responds to Ken Levine's review of The Social Network, and assertions that it was misogynistic. (His response is in the comments and worth the read.)
- The Niqabitches

AdVerve 50 - Evaporatively Cooling SocNets

Douglas Coupland, warning you about Street Map-infused dreams.

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Deb Wiseman (@wisey) of Media Monitors revisits us from Down Undah. We play 5 x 5 x 5 and explore such existential topicality as dystopic futurists spinning social media into a hell-bound handbasket, Australian do-overs (including this show, which we tried and failed to record two weeks ago), Gap's logo takeback, cyber bullying and out-of-closet suicides.

There's also a little bit of politicking and this whole evaporative cooling thing, deftly applied to Silicon Valley and then hippies.

Link badness:

- Douglas Coupland's Dictionary of the Near Future (NY Times)
- A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next 10 Years (Globe and Mail)
- The Evaporative Cooling Effect
- Ben Elton's Blind Faith
- TwittaBling