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I stumbled onto Apple’s ‘Switch‘ ad campaign when I watched the Ellen Feiss commercial at Kiruba’s blog -

The campaign - which first aired in 2002 - featured what the company referred to as ‘real people’ who had ’switched’ from the PC to the Mac.

The commercial featuring Ellen Feiss became an internet phenomenon, partly because of speculation that Feiss was under the influence of illicit drugs during the filming of the commercial, due to her slurred speech and disoriented eyes. She denied these claims and ascribed the ‘drugged’ behaviour to the effect of the Benadryl cough syrup, together with exhaustion.

Feiss’s popularity grew to the point where she was offered appearances on both David Letterman’s and Jay Leno’s late night shows, both of which she turned down. In September 2005, Feiss made her movie acting debut in the French short film ‘Bed and Breakfast’. Ellen recently spoke about the making of the ad, and its effect on her life, in an interview.

Here is the 2002 Joy of Tech cartoon entitled ‘Mona Switcher’ that was based on Ellen -

Here’s the other Ellen Feiss commercial that was never aired -

He blogged late into the night and again in the morning. He reached office late and bleary-eyed and blogged through the day.

He was demoted, then lost his job, and couldn’t pay his mortgage. His wife divorced him, his children disowned him and his blogger-mistress left him.

But he was happy – he had his blog.

My blog is worth $16,936.20.
How much is your blog worth?

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, Dane Carlson of Business Opportunities has created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays a blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

My blog is worth $16,936.20.

Here’s what a few popular Indian personal blogs are worth:

Amit’s India Uncut is worth $461,793.72

Rashmi’s Youth Curry is worth $346,063.02

Gaurav’s Vantage Point is worth $209,444.34

Great Bong’s Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind is worth $204,363.48

Annie’s Known Turf is worth $186,862.74

Kiruba’s blog is worth $176,136.48

Neha’s Within & Without is worth $149,038.56

Jai’s  Jabberwock is worth $128,150.58

Kaps’ Sambhar Mafia is worth $103,875.36

Sonia’s blog is worth $93,713.64

Patrix’s Nerve Endings Firing Away is worth $78,471.06

Sakshi’s  To Each His Own is worth $75,083.82

Chandrachoodan’s Selective Amnesia is worth $72,261.12

Nilu’s Recursive Hypocrisy is worth $36,695.10

Of the popular Indian group blogs,

Sepia Mutiny is worth $380,499.96

Desicritics is worth $270,979.20

Pickled Politics is worth $219,041.52

 From Gapingvoid 

That I already have too many unresolved high-school issues, I have decided to let this be my only post today.

-*-*-*-

RICKSHAW-SHAYARI POSTSCRIPT

Ay admi! Haram khana chhor dey.

Tyre mehngay hain, race lagana chhor dey.

-*-*-*-

From Gapingvoid 

These are interesting days in the world of social bookmarking. Diigo is trying to position itself as an alternative to both del.icio.us and Digg, Weblogs is willing to pay bloggers $1,000 a month for their social bookmarking rights, and two very active Indian bloggers - Kingsley and Chandrachoodan - have started ‘PutVote’.

Now, PutVote is not the first indian social bookmarking site; Indian Pad, Indiagram and Forums of India have existed in the Indian blogosphere for a while.

I started an experiment about a week back and submitted the same stories (55-fiction pieces from my blog) in all these four sites. The idea was to track the relative number of responses from the four sites. In six days, India Pad generated 156 hits, PutVote 27 hits, Indiagram 7 hits and Forums of India 3 hits. Evidently, Indian Pad seems to be the most popular of the four sites in terms of traffic.

In terms of appearance and functionality, Indian Pad once more is the best (but also the most impersonal with an off-puttingly high amount of porn), Indiagram is OK, PutVote is work-in-progress and Forums of India is quite bad.

Amul has a tradition of using topical cartoons in advertising. Here’s a series of Amul ads based on movies, from a link on Indian Pad.

From an article forwarded by Ratoola.

India ranks 41st of 45 countries on Richard Florida’s Global Creativity Index, an aggregate measure of its strength across the 3 Ts of economic development: Technology, Talent and Tolerance. Not surprisingly, India does well on Technology, ranking 23rd worldwide. But, despite its globally renowned IITs/ IIMs, it ranks 44th on Talent, with only 6 per cent of its population holding a bachelor's degree. It also ranks a lowly 39th on Tolerance, presumably because of the emergence of the right wing political parties.

Richard Florida is an urban planner/ economist known for his revolutionary theory on the rise of the ‘creative class’. He argues that the creative class will be the real driving force for development of economies and the flight of the creative class from an economy will eventually undermine it.

I am told that Florida also has a creativity index for cities. It will be interesting to see how Mumbai/ Delhi/ Bangalore/ Kolkata stack up against each other.

Levi Strauss has announced a new range of jeans specifically geared toward iPod users.

The RedWire DLX line of jeans, due to be in stores by the end of 2006, will be available for men and women, and tentatively priced at $200. The jeans will have a special side pocket where an iPod can be stored, built-in headphones, joystick, a docking cradle and even a remote control that will allow the user to control the player without having to take it from the pocket.

Very cool!