let us now praise famous bloggers

Trying to catch up on all my feeds tonight and sharing the good stuff with you.

Anastasia over at YPulse does a little thinking about the creation of online communities centered around a brand after the announcement this past week of the "safe" Wal-Mart community site for young people. A's not so sure that Wal-Mart is the kind of brand that kids rally around (although my stepsister in Oklahoma might disagree). It's a topic of interest to me. Despite the fact that I have not necessarily found my community online, I'm fascinated by the ability that others have to build community around seemingly arbitrary commonalities. And it's also something that we're in the midst of doing for a client. Our advice to the client has been to avoid trying to get people to come together based on the brand, but more on what the users have in common. (I've got to be cryptic at this stage, but I promise to show it off once we finally launch this thing.)

Boing Boing has the latest Photoshop contest from Worth 1000. This time it is bad ads for existing products. I'm a fan of this one, despite my allegiance to Apple.

Billie Joe and Elvis serenade me. (Let a girl dream.) (Thanks to stereogum.)

My RSS feed for Post Secret hasn't been working for a couple of weeks now and I don't have the energy to bother going to the site. Sayonara, Post Secret.

Want to know what I think of John's latest idea? Head over to his site, because I commented there. By the way, the Eastern State Penitentiary will be on my itinerary for my next road trip. Dad's in the prison business and, as a result, it's been a lifelong obsession.