• Julie Gomoll’s had it with twitter/facebook/social-media spam from people pitching their South by Southwest panel proposals.
• The best lessons on marketing from Second Life come from the people who are creating fashion, gadgets, and other things inworld. Learn from them.
• Your employees may be gender-switched in virtual worlds when representing the firm. I think, given IBM’s comfort with it, and Zha’s impeccable sense of fashion, that it should be a non-issue. But what do I know, as I’m a small brass robot while on company business.
• Budget cuts at the state-level in the US will force people with disabilities into nursing homes, where dehumanizing treatment, and risks to health and safety prevail.
• Here’s a couple of lighter chasers:
  • Each year at Worldcon, UK fan Steve Rogerson organizes a pre-convention pub crawl to visit places serving locally-made craft brewed beer. These are always a great evening out, even when you’re going on three hours of sleep. We didn’t make it to every place Rogerson listed on his Montreal outing, but I liked L’Amère à Boire.
  • Xach Beane has been making web toys in Common Lisp. His latest is a riff on a Super Mario Brothers cut scene.

I got an email from Noise Marketing this morning, asking (probably since I’ve mentioned Neil Gaiman here) if I’d blog about Mirrormask.

Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Anansi Boys) wrote the script, and Jim Henson Studios produced the effects, so I figured that if you haven’t heard about it, you’d probably be interested.

I didn’t know what to do about the request. Product placement in a blog is a bad smell for me. I asked a few friends for advice, and the best suggestion was, “you’re a fan of Neil Gaiman, so blog it, but also blog it was at the request of a marketer.”