SONY has a touch for compelling advertising with unusual setups. This here is just another example. Of course, it provoces fantasies about dropping a bottle of soap into the next fountain.
But even more interesting is the fact, that SONY is one of the very few companies, using the spirit of Web 2.0 - sharing what you like - for its own advantage.
On this site SONY encourages you to share. Not by proxying via Youtube, no, you can use a first-hand ressource.
Has the time come for major brands to understand the power they can get, by encouraging its passionate friends and lovers to talk about the brand? To release some control, but gain a community build on loyality and passion?
In this comment on the MAINFRAME101 blog, I wrote about an opposite experience I made with LEGO.
I guess, SONY will get more media coverage for their bucks.
What a coincidence: Branding Strategy Insider touches the current state of the term media in its blog.

The quest for a semantic web has been around for years now and a lot of standards are the result of this quest.

Dublin Core and RDF are methods to assign semantic meta information onto documents. Computers can use these meta information to assign relationships between documents, authors, locations, time-frames, languages and intentions.

In february, Reuters launched a web service called Calais, that reads an unstructured document and returns semantic meta information after a thorough text and concept analysis.

An interesting question is, of course, why bother? What's the benefit to the internet world?

Information on the internet is usually published with a purpose. Most of the information, I suppose, are published to be read. The information is seeking attention. Your attention.

And there's the catch: as a large percentage of published information has a clear economic motivation (read: advertising), the battle for our attention has become more difficult.

Our prefererence for unhealthy foods (salty, fat, and sugared stuff), that are the result of millenia of starvation and the concept of survival of the fittest have an informational equivalent: a preference for easy and archetypical important information: who's the boss, with whom can I breed and who and where is the enemy.
That's information that appeals to our oldest brain parts. The universality of yellow press, which exists in every culture, continent and form reflects on the internet too.

See google zeitgeist's top ten in searchwords.
The semantic web however could be the digital equivalent to the now mandatory nutrition information on industrially processed food.

A search engine could filter the retrieved information for the sort of information you really are looking for. If you want sex, crime, and gossip, you'll get exactly that. That's not really different from google today. But if you need scientific, educational or quotable information, you could get those too.

Internet technology will stay exciting, as will there be new challenges for advertisers, marketers and publishers with these new technologies. Just stay focused.

Even in germany, Heathrow Terminal 5 is all over the news. To add insult to injury, viral online games already profit: Wee Willie Walsh in Terminal Panic.
Tourists already coined the term to be londoned. Overstated, overpriced and underwhelming.

I hope, it won´t come to that. After more than a decade of turbulent innovations, the measures of brick-and-mortar or analog business models are constantly beefing up. Torrents of legal actions against normal people block justice systems in most of the western countries and pile up further costs.
Fans get sued or receive harsh take-down notices for posting their favorite songs, publishing fan-videos with background music.
With modern technologies, broadband access, digital omnipresence and an always-on mentality, it's a sometimes just a mouseclick's distance between a secured computer with totally legal mp3 files or a filesharing hub.
Yes, copyright does exist. Yes, record companies built a complete industry on the premise of having a good - the license - to sell.
But if they stay on a course of actually fighting their potential customers - an exponentially growing number - this will deepen the perceived gap. The concept of not owning a record, but only a license, of being restricted by artificial region codes is hard to grasp.
Fighting, suing and insulting your customers seems like a bad idea. And on the internets, the competitor is just a click away. Even the economy of scale will widen the distance between enforcing these licenses and breaking them.
And this war is a big waste of time. Time, better spend on improving an industry founded on creativity, art and out-of-the-box thinking.
Let's see, if Douglas Merrill, one of several technical directors at google, will make a dent. He's becoming a president of digital at EMI Music.
This struggle won't be a problem of a lack of technological innovations or availability. All that's needed is a cunning business plan, it's bold execution and the willingness to innovate.

For a sharp and focused product strategy, the product has to make sacrificies. And tell about those.
The differentiation for a product is not only about what it does, but also about what it does not and never will. That gives some reliable information about the expertise the product, its developer team and the sales and consulting cloud have.
Convergence, on the other hand, is about merging orthogonal functionality, requests, and technology into an amorph conglomerate. A big blobb.
The mine field however is in the market. Customers vary greatly in their needs for a perfect solution and can stretch the functional requests on a product far and beyond. We at Pixelboxx tend to cheat there and engage our current and coming partners. We don't try to start singlehandedly at the decathlon of customers requirements, integrational efforts, or platform issues. Simply we come with a team of ten excellent sportsmen and aim for maximum points in every discipline. With a specialist. As a team.
That's the way we do convergence. Without sacrifices.

Use a giant laser to post your message on the moon.
Ok, this is fictional yet, but I suppose this is coming up in a major brand marketing brainstorm once a month and one day you'll be surprised.
PS: marketeers: wait for a full eclipse!
PPS: Only green lasers rock.