A very strange tray liner, found in an airport Burger King, depicts some very strange goings-on.

The scene is from Veg City Airport, where passengers are being screened for their suitability as Burger King ingredients. It’s quite a cutesy idea but—as you can probably see above—it’s received quite an adult treatment. We can see:

• A gherkin security guard preparing to cavity-search an onion
• A magazine on the floor called “Playveg”, with a large-breasted carrot on the cover
• Another magazine called “Green & Horny” featuring a topless pickle

It’s all a bit brutal isn’t it? What’s the thinking behind it? Have children become sufficiently desensitised, post-9/11, that they can laugh at things like anal cavity searches or jokes about porn? Or is Burger King trying to be deliberately “edgy”?

• Digital Drugs: New Worry for Parents?
  Fans of The Day Today and Brass Eye will enjoy this baffling article about "digital drugs", the new scourge for the 21st century.
  (tags: music FAIL)
• McCain: "In The 21st Century Nations Don't Invade Other Nations"
  Republican presidential candidate McCain should read up on recent history, with a specific focus on the nation he's looking to lead.
  (tags: politics)

• The Implications of Robot Cars and Taxis
  Brad Templeton on why robot cars will be good
  (tags: technology robots cars)
• Aurora – Forecasting Scenarios (PDF link)
  Some forecasting scenarios that informed the Adaptive Path/Mozilla Labs "Aurora" concept
  (tags: web aurora internet)
• Knowledge Navigator concept piece by Apple (1987)
  The Aurora browser prototype featured a hidden easter egg, namely the agent from Apple's "Knowledge Navigator", a 1987 concept piece partly anticipating future developments in human-computer interaction
  (tags: visualization technology video ui)
• Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter
  A list of reasons why businesses sometimes fail when trying to make use of Twitter as a communications tool
  (tags: twitter socialmedia)

Here in the UK, Twitter has yet to seriously catch on although many organisations are attempting to make use of it. But the marketing and communications departments of large US companies are becoming increasingly aware of the need to establish a brand presence in Twitter.

The case of Janet, who masqueraded as an ExxonMobil spokesperson on Twitter before being unmasked as a fraud, demonsrates how even doing nothing can be damaging. Your brand can get hijacked and dragged through the mud while you’re busy formulating your micro-blogging communications strategy.

Here’s a list of brands that suck on, or simply don’t get, Twitter. It’s an evolving list – Starbucks, for example, got removed after responding to the blog post, showing that their Twitter account wasn’t merely “parked”.

Better commentary than my own can be found at Jeremiah Owyang’s web strategy blog.

• adaptive path » blog » Kumi Akiyoshi » Aurora: Visual Design
  Kumi Akiyoshi of Adaptive Path writes about the visual design work that went into the Aurora user experience concept video
  (tags: design aurora)
• Online virtual piano keyboards: free way to learn notes! – A Consuming Experience
  A collection of links to piano & keyboard applications – handy for trying to write melodies when the boss isn't looking.
  (tags: music software)
• Who has the best sorry page ? | 365questions.org
  Gmail's outage on Monday caused me to spend quite a while looking at its "sorry" page. This got me thinking, what are the best examples of "sorry" pages? Well, here are a few examples (it's an old link though so no Twitter "fail whale"!)
  (tags: internet webdesign)
• Freedom, OS X Networking Freedom Software
  An application for Macs that shuts down all network connections for a user-specified period of time, allowing you to focus on work without the distractions of the interwebs.
  (tags: productivity software)

Yesterday, Lifehacker featured a free Mac OS application called Freedom. You specify a time period and the program then shuts off your network connectivity until it elapses. I heard about it here and the Daily Telegraph has published a link to it too.

Pretty simple, isn’t it? But is it useful?

Not everyone thinks so. The majority of commenters on the Lifehacker thread have laid into the application. Most of the remarks can be paraphrased as “this is not something that I would use, as I have something called ‘willpower'”.

What I find confusing, though, is the fact that so many people have used their time to log in and post comments to that effect. If I tried to actively communicate my non-interest in everything that I didn’t like or wouldn’t use, I’d die before I did anything else.

If the application was buggy, expensive, or easily surpassed by rival products, then these comments would make sense. But it’s free, and it doesn’t seem to replicate features already offered elsewhere. So, as things stand, this is like me logging on to a Harry Potter forum and spending my time writing posts about how I’m not interested in Harry Potter.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have too much of a problem being productive when the chips are down, but could see myself using a Windows version of this application every now and again.

• kwout | Firefox add-on
  Really handy Firefox plugin, allowing you to take screenshots from your browser, crop them, upload them and specify style attributes literally within minutes
  (tags: screenshot plugin tools kwout firefox extension)
• Remember The Milk – Services / Remember The Milk for Twitter
  As part of my ongoing absorption into the world of Twitter, I'm seeing if I can use it as a time management tool by incorporating it with Remember The Milk, a web based task management service.
  (tags: twitter productivity rtm)
• Visualising Artikulation music
  Graphic visualisation (plus audio) of Ligeti's "Artikulation" from 1958. Shapes and colours are used instead of traditional musical notation.
  (tags: visualisation electronicmusic)
• Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Snowl
  Mozilla Labs post about their Snowl project, an experimental Firefox extension integrating messaging into the web browser. Intended to combine all inbound messages – email, Twitter, RSS feeds, online forums – into one single view.
  (tags: web twitter software snowl rss firefox plugin)

My friend Lindsey sent me this link earlier on today. It’s a video exploring a future user experience concept, developed by Adaptive Path for Mozilla Labs.

Jill looks at the New York Times website

In the video Jill, the principal user, makes use of a number of futuristic interface devices to:

• Interact with a friend while browsing
• Extract and manipulate data sets from within websites
• Navigate through a vast collection of bookmarks using a 3D interface
• Migrate her browsing experience seamlessly from desktop to mobile devices

It’s a bit like MacOS X

I initially found myself wondering, is the future really going to look so much like Mac OS X? But looking past the visual treatment, there are some strong concepts here. I particularly like the ability to extract and manipulate data from web pages, the near-removal of the browser interface, and the utilisation of the 3D interface to convey the age of bookmarks.

That said, not everyone agrees with me – I’ve had a few conversations today about these ideas and there isn’t really a consensus among the people I’ve been talking to.

The Z-axis is used to convey the age of a bookmark

Is 3D ever really going to enter the mainstream as a means of web navigation? I’ve always been quite sceptical, to be honest. It comes down to incentive – if there’s a serious benefit to be had from learning unfamiliar and complex interfaces, then people will do it. People learnt how to use Myspace, after all!

So, what would have to happen to make us want to learn new, complicated, 3D web interfaces?

Well, the web (along with our own slice of it; our bookmarks, our browsing histories, our social networks etc) is on its way to becoming unmanageably large. Past a certain point, there may be a real benefit in migrating to more sophisticated – but more complex – interfaces.

The standard methods of searching and browsing may still be usable, but woefully inefficient; like running a modern computer with only a command line interface and no GUI. Achievable, but insane.

The web is growing exponentially – its size in five or ten years’ time could present us with unique problems and challenges. Some of the ideas in this concept video shed some light on how we might solve them. But what are those problems and challenges going to be? I’m probably more interested in them than I am in the solutions.

• Visualising Ligeti’s “Artikulation”
  Graphic visualisation (plus audio) of Ligeti's "Artikulation" from 1958. Shapes and colours are used instead of traditional musical notation.
  (tags: visualisation electronicmusic)
• Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Snowl
  Mozilla Labs post about their Snowl project, an experimental Firefox extension integrating messaging into the web browser. Intended to combine all inbound messages – email, Twitter, RSS feeds, online forums – into one single view.
  (tags: web twitter software snowl rss firefox plugin)
• Spaz: An Open-Source Twitter Client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
  Yet another Twitter client for various platforms
  (tags: socialnetworking spaz twitter software tools)

I posted recently about Tweets on the bus, a little site that aggregates all Twitter posts containing the phrase “on the bus”.

Since that post, I’ve been following the “on the bus” posts using Google Reader. Every now and again there’s one that makes me laugh. Here’s a digest of my favourite “on the bus” tweets from the last few weeks: