lukeM|V.com

Yes, I have been away for a while. The reason being that I have left my advertising gig and spent a month working my little side project. In addition to that, I recently have taken over as Director of Digital Marketing for Vaillancourt Folk Art. I have noticed that I am not the only one on a small vacation from the blog world…so I don’t feel too bad.

For your entertainment, I have included one of my favorite title sequences inspired by Saul Bass. Enjoy.

After months of speculation and debate, News Corp. has announced its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co Inc. (who’s co-founder, Edward Davis Jones, was a Worcester Academy alumni) for $5.6 billion.

Rupert Murdoch has been acclaimed for his understanding of the role of new media within today’s society. As newspapers have been in debate in this blog (here, here, and here), and as Google has expanded it’s advertising model to include print ads (here) it will be interesting to see how Murdoch’s forward thinking will affect the print industry—specifically the newspaper industry. Thoughts?

I heard a statement a few years ago that went along these lines, “Every single medium that exists today is in existence because of the drive of pornography.” Whether it be films (one of the first “new media” outlets to watch porn), video cassettes (created to distribute porn more easily than film reels), or the Internet (used to check e-mail, IM, and watch porn). Thanks to MIT’s Media Lab the new not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child program—where schoolchildren in Nigerian where given a free laptop to be given “new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves”—these children were able to do what comes naturally to any male with technology: find porn.

Reuters Africa,

“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials.”

OLPC News dubs the program one pornographic image per child now. But, like all good things that come to an end, changes to the next round of laptops will include filters to prevent these children from doing what every child in developed worlds do—look at porn.

Won’t somebody think of the children??

More:
ShortNews.com
Tech.co.uk
TechShout

Advertising in the 50s…smoke anywhere, women expected to be treated like girls, the famed 3-martini lunch…ah “those were the days.” Matthew Weiner’s (producer of The Sopranos) Mad Men is finally premiering tonight on AMC at 10:00pm.

At the beginning of the month Google acquired GrandCentral. The service can be used to manage all of your phone numbers (cell, work, home) and consolidate them into a single number. On the web site, you are able to manage your numbers, forward them to specific umber, forward callers to voicemail (and listen to them while they leave a message, or even record them).

This is a great service, and with Google now running with it, we will see some amazing integration with gTalk or gMail. Throw in Apple’s iPhone’s voice mail technology, and we will no longer have to spend 20minutes waiting to hear our voicemail operator give us prompts and tell us how many message we have that are new, that are saved, and are marked to expire.