TheSpunker - by Ben Popken. Published by Gattaca, Inc.

CareerBuilder's new Microsite is Bananas

Leveraging its monkey equity, CareerBuilder.com launched a new microsite where you can build your own primate co-worker, boss or receptionist and make 'em say funny stuff. There's pre-recorded lines and text-to-speech, but you can also call-in or use your computer's microphone to lay down your monkey business. Here's one The Spunker made. Now you make one and post it in the comments. Microsites and virals usually bore us but this one is top potassium stick. Cramer-Krasselt created the fine work. via.

True Evite Crimes, Cont.

Mr. Curtis Coltrane, MTV Fashion VJ, throws a weekly hiphop party at his own expense and sends out silly evites. We already drew and quartered week three's, which provoked a retort from Curtis and, seeing as no good deed goes unpunished, also got us on his guest list. Hot on the well-designed heels comes this week's invite, which, besides apparently learning nothing from the our consultative advice, gave TheSpunker one of these "shoutouts" - a behavior in this so-called "hip-hop" subculture whereby one individual makes vocal recognition of another individual in a public forum. To wit, "This is it, the Caddy V-16, Purple Label Sweats, the Jordan 30's, the Alexander Nash Suit............ What do we all have in common? The fliest shit on the planet. GET FRESH FRIDAYS...! You know you shit is poppin when BLOG's start talking about you. All press is good press, unless you are Paris. Nahmeans?? check it out THESPUNKER.com." Hello to " Sneaker "Caviar" Steve, Sky-crombie-MTV, Rockwilder..., Beny "The New Body" (Fuck Buffy) and Michelle "PR" Huff " who may be two-stepping their way here today. Awesome. Do my Chucks and dirty jeans count as fly kicks and threads?

BMW Suffers "Google Death Penalty"

Adverblog: "In Germany, BMW has been trying to artificially boost the popularity ranking of its site. The mighty Google found out the automaker was cheating and apparently kicked it out of its index. As reported on [other blogs, notably outer court] BMW has been caught employing doorway pages to attract search engines spiders. While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value."

Don't you people get it? It's not 1999 anymore. All you have to do is have lots of great, relevant content and you'll get search engine hits. Want a better ranking? Make a better site.

Gaaagle

Go to http://gaaagle.com. It's a Google parody blog satirizing the Google China fiasco. It's set up like Google but provides a editorialized search results. Clicking on images delivers Google image results for "Chinese Freedom." Clicking Business Solutions gives you Google results for the "Greed." The real gems are the hilarious videos in their main blog section. They encourage you to submit your free speach related content in, which could end up looking very interesting if this gets traction. There's even concern that they themselves have been "Gaaagled":  We f[o]nd our home page listed when we search “gaaagle.com” and “gaaagle” in Google. Then,  the link disappears when we search again later. The search results for “gaaagle” and “gaaagle.com” dispaly a link to the Gaaagle.com home page and then, an hour later, the link is gone.  Try it yourself. Is this normal?  Has  Google Gaaagled Gaaagle?" Here's archived versions of the videos, Searching for Freebird and The Adventures of Confuscius in case they get further Gaaagled.

Stuff and Me

Wait! Stop the presses! A Million-dollar-homepage type site that doesn't suck! Bear with me here. Stuffandme.com. The way it works is you buy an ad on the front page, comedian Aric McKeown takes a funny picture of himself interacting with your product and then he puts it up into rotation. An ad for Running with Scissors Magazine shows him falling down stairs with scissors. One for the band Starlight Mints has Aric bleeding from the head on a dance floor. The ad pictured at left is for his improv comedy troupe. What's neat is he's providing editorial and unique content instead of just throwing up some lame bot. Mr. McKeown told The Spunker, "About 4 weeks ago I read an article about the million dollar homepage and thought, damn, that was a smart idea. I figured there must be another unique advertising idea out there. I came up with Stuff & Me about four hours of reading the article and racking my brain." Another plus?  "It's blatant narcissism, which makes me laugh."

Go Rocketboom Ads!

Oh my god, Rocketboom! The insanely popular and high integrity vlog has been ebaying their first ad space on ebay. Bids are up to $15,000. Currently, "Dave" and "Fivepercentcard.com" are the highest bidders. Fivepercent is, as you can probably tell, a crappy sign up for a credit card site. However, the inimitable Blogads network (which we're a part of) also placed bids up to 12,000. There's still 6+ days left so we'll see how this shakes out but Blogads is the one that deserves to win so far. I just hope they can pony up all the cash to compete with a 5% initial APR.

True Evite Crimes

So Bucky Turco, the Man behind Animal magazine,  and I were chitchatting back and forth and he wanted to know what I would think if I received the evite below from Coltrane Curtis, who is, as I later learn , the MTV Fashion VJ (bitchy critque follows the primary source doc). UPDATE: The evite's writer retorts in the comments. Word up.

-----
NEW YORK IS NO LONGER WACK ON THE WEEKENDS.... This is for all who will be in NY this weekend, and not dodging du-rags, chicken heads and bullets in Detroit.

Voltron is forming... With 2 weeks under our belt, this GET FRESH FRIDAY is really a good look. Pretty faces, industry heavy-hitters, eclectically sexy professional women, good looking well-dressed eligible men (pause) and great sounds (Soul)...!

The shit that I really love, is that folks were dressed, looking good. LOOKING DAMN GOOD....! Sneakers, frames, heels, good denim, handbags, watches, were all in the building. We got started a lil late, like 11:30, but we rocked till my NewEra and Scott Langton shit got sweated thru (Shameless plug....!)

 Off top, big shouts and mad love to, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE (Little big guy and Senor curly, thank you for your support), Pole Dancers, Young Hollywood, Twin Hype Lisa and Alex (lol), Drea @ Akademiks, Fifi, Coffey, Dao-Yi, Max-imum Miami, Natalie, Aixa & crew, Jessica and Jessica's Amazing Birthday Soiree.---snip---

This week, Bombay Sapphire in the spot, FOR LADIES ONLY... fellas, don't even fix your lips to ask for a drink ticket. REAL TALK....! ---snip---

 GET FRESH FRIDAY'S
@ PINK
199 Bowery
11pm- Until
DJ SOUL
__
COLTRANE CURTIS
MANAGING PARTNER / CREATIVE DIRECTOR
EPIPHANY / MARGEOTES,FERTITTA AND POWELL
411 Lafayette   Street
6th Floor
New York, NY
10003
Tel 212.460.0522
Cel 917.714.5101
Fax 212.475.3932
[email protected]
[email protected]
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE: This e-mail message, including any attachment(s), contains information that may be confidential, protected by the attorney-client or other legal privileges... ---snip---
- - - - - -

SPUNKER: Hmm, I would think... Pretty design on the flyer but who the fuck is this funny fat kid? Most importantly, what kind of music is playing? It takes me a while to figure out its Soul. That should be pretty high up there not all this other hootenanny and oh by the way we’re playing Soul. I would think why does this dude spend so much time talking about how good looking the party is? When I party, I want the music to be good, the drinks to be cheap and the people cool, not some fashionista “heavy hitter” scene. And then I would check out his email addresses realize this is MTV’s Fashion VJ and so that’s his whole thing and I would be like, oh ok this is kind of funny then. But his websites are shallow so he gets points off. And I would think it’s silly to use “W3” as your shorthand for world wide web. The title of your attachment is another branding opportunity, don’t waste it. And spending half your evite on shoutouts is lame. As is having a confidentiality notice. And I don’t give a whoop that you were sponsored by Bombay Sapphire, don’t put them in caps. So overall, unless I knew the people throwing it or otherwise had a really good reason, I wouldn’t attend.

ANIMAL: You're good. I was kind of feeling the same way. This mentioning of the clothes etc is what bothered me the most. And of course, it being way too fucking long. I kept thinking, can't this kid cut this banter down to 2 sentences?

SPUNKER:Yeah it’s like “First we looked good. Then lightened up after having enough sponsored drinks. Then we had some fun and got stinky in our good looking clothing. But first and foremost, we were good looking.” The *list* of accessories is pretty classic. Shit man, look at all these words you made me write. I should niptuck this whole thing into a blog entry.

ANIMAL:Yes you should, laf. (that may have been the point, I don't know myself, but sometimes I can be sneaky like that).

SPUNKER:Yeah aren’t you involved in the promo juice behind this? I thought I remembered coming across something like before.

ANIMAL: Fuck no. Please. Ugg. I should burn your email for even suggesting.

SPUNKER: Good. I’ll take my lighter away from the little framed certificate on the wall that says “respect for Bucky” as well then.

ANIMAL: No way. Ok. If you keep up the certificate I will forget your insinuation of me being behind such a terrible event, laf.

SPUNKER: The certificate stays!

Cool Squiggly Stuff Animation

James Paterson makes tight animation and his flash is sick! Check it out here. It reminds me of my friend Stieg Retlin's cool work. We just hired on a new web designer, Stephen Mahadeo here at Gattaca (The Spunker's publisher) and he turned me onto Mr. Paterson's stuff when we were brainstorming about redesigning The Spunker. I'm thinking it's gonna be like Extreme Makeover/The Swan meets A List Apart meets Robotripping Swiss future-retarded-awesomeness.

Neil French's Parthian Shot

Neil French composed a full reply, finally, to October’s sexist comment scandal. It’s awesome and done up in his classic copywriting style and will be published in the Trade Press. He retrenches, but he’s definitely chastened and even apologizes, but not for what you think. You get to learn a new word, anoraked, meaning “hooded,” as in “those dastardly cloaked bloggers.” Good for him for making a full response but demerits for waiting and seeing how it played out before doing so.  Truly revealing, however, is the intro prefacing the ad on his site...word to Mr. French, they're called it's femi-nazis, not feminist nazis...  via. archival version.

Google: There's a Good Kind of Evil in China

One of Google's main tenets is to "Not be Evil." When they launched Google.cn in human rights oblivious China, it was a censored version heavily biased towards displaying results in sync with the party line. Criticism was immediate and fierce. Google responded on the 27th, saying censorship is bad, but not when it's for a good cause. They're right. Google.cn is an important communications inroad. Although censored, the proliferation of any non-government sponsored information is an important inroad for the oppressed peoples of China. Encouraging the use of Google enables people to find the information to help them form independent ideas. From there reform may be one day possible. Less torturing of dissidents -- perhaps because increased access to search results makes hiding human rights violations harder?  -- would be nice. Plus now there's like a gabillion, I mean, a googol, more people to advertise to. Will they be buying democracy?