It’s funny – especially if you already have Blair Witch on the brain – but the first thought I had when I opened the movie’s official website was that it seemed kind of 1999. The text that’s used and the buttons at the top, all of it kind of harkens back to the early days of web marketing, when websites were big blocky things that only a handful of people were capable of creating.

From Movie Marketing Madness.

It’s decided, 1999 got recorded in our minds as the year of the not-so-great-looking Web sites.

via Woodland Creature

http://www.patrickmoberg.com/internet-vices/

This is strangely insightful and really funny.

(I found this via twitter… but I can’t remember who posted it.)

I like it… but no one else does. So sad!

Maybe I have develop a more interesting taste… or not.

In this post titled Do you have digital natives at your organization?, Brian Whalley call companies to hire digital natives and gives four reasons why they should.

1) Natives are More Interested in the Information than the Machine

2) Puzzles, Problems and Games

3) Digital Natives Love Constant Communication, But Hate Phones

4) Digital Natives Tell It Like It Is

I like this post because I agree with most things  it has to say about the rather enigmatic digital natives.

I believe claims 1, 3, and 4 perfectly apply to myself and my peers.

It is true, I love the fact that I have easy access to an enormous amount of information to satisfy my ever growing curiosity for random facts and high need for cognition, and the machines that facilitates this process is negligible.

It is true, I hate being on the phone, because it is intrusive, requires too much attention, and it’s generally uncomfortable when it’s too close to your face. Hence, I am often  accused of being rude/cold/inattentive/you name it, whenever I talk on the phone with my mother.

It is also true, that I am also fond of being honest and telling people what I think (how long it can take me to work up courage to say what I think, and whether or not I say it at opportune moment, is certainly a subject of debate).

But…

I am not entirely sure about claim 2.

I believe I fall under the category of “digital native”, and I do like games, problem solving and puzzles to certain extent. But to me liking these things does not make me prone to not liking asking for help.

I may not ask a person for help, especially one I am not fond of or don’t trust. But I will go strait to google, and google does have answers. And when I don’t know something, I have to ask someone. It is humanly impossible to know everything or be able to solve any problem entirely on one’s own. Besides, isn’t asking for help half the work involved in problem solving? And aren’t there lots of forums that help you figure out games? And a thousand other ways you can ask for help without having to actually talk to someone else in you office?

Maybe it’s just me misinterpreting the post or refusing to admit I don’t like asking for help… or… maybe I’m right.Regardless I thin Mr. Whalley was right on with his other 3 claims about the digital native generation.

(Maybe that means that more Spanish speaking tweeterers will begin tweeting in Spanish, too… but that’s another matter).

You have to go into your account settings to change from English to Spanish. I went ahead and did so… and I got something like this:

Basically Spanglish. Of course these are Twitter’s first steps in other languages, so Spanglish is to be expected at first.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ll stick to Twitter in Spanish much longer. In general, I am so used to English that no matter how good a translation is, it always feels unnatural and somewhat forced to me (especially MS office and Facebook translations). In my opinion, Spanish is too wordy as a language to translate well into one words commands. English lends itself much better for those purposes.

I must say though I did like cnet’s translation of the fail whale as “la ballena del fracaso”. It sounds so much more dramatic in Spanish, but it has such a nice ring to it in English. I think I’ll stick to the Spanish version until a “ballena del fracaso” appears on my screen, I’m sure I’ll enjoy that just as much as I enjoy the fail whale.

“La Fina” is a type of margarine sold here in Colombia and for as long as I can remember they had a series of ads on TV which all featured the same jingle and tag line, “Colombia cocina, con La Fina” (Colombia cooks with La Fina).

I couldn’t find any information about the ad online, but I did find it on YouTube. Comand670 is definitively right, “whoever doesn’t know this song is not Colombian”. I honestly don’t think I know a single person from this country who doesn’t know this song.

These ads and their jingle are a hallmark of Colombian advertising, and to be honest, now that the ads are no longer appearing on air, I really miss them. Somehow, I feel like now that the ads are gone, Colombia no longer cooks with La Fina.

I guess repetition is a great persuasive cue after all (or maybe just one that makes it so you can’t forget a product’s jingle).

When you open the cracker cabinet, yes we have an entire cabinet dedicated to them, there are at least 5 different kinds of crackers. Sesame seed, honey, salt, whole wheat, cheese, and even chocolate.

Curiously, the one thing the all have in common is their brand: they are all Noel.

I asked my mother, who is in charge of grocery shopping, and she has no explanation for this phenomenon, maybe I just need to drag her into a focus group. Muahaha!

As annoying as it used to be to get that “twitter is over capacity” message, I had actually come to miss it. And today I was more than happy to see the fail whale

… odd, but true.