When you watch this, note the reference to Kevin Costner, who will apparently test his water cleaning technology on the spill. It’s usually laughable when Hollywood gets political, but I sure do hope Kevin can pull it off.

Click here to view the embedded video.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

For those not familiar with Foursquare, it’s a geo-tagging application for online and mobile users that tells your friends know where you are and vice versa. It also provides you with online schwag such as points, badges and even coupons for use at local businesses. It’s also not the only geo-tagging game in town and anyone interested should check out Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Where and Hot Potato.

Like journalists, marketing professionals often need to target communities and get valuable information. In today’s social environment, where interacting with one’s audience is a key element, these geo-tagging apps have the potential for greatness. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the valuable ways to use them:

1. Find targeted contacts. With geo-tagging applications, you can attach real people to actual places. Find people who frequent certain types of establishments. Reach out and chat. Find out what type of people are going where. There’s valuable information here.
2. Get tips on local business, customers and competitors. Users leave lots of tips regarding local businesses and venues which provide insight that a professional analyst may not be privy to. Knowing how people view a restaurant chain or coffee shop can be gold for marketing teams.
3. Learn about people you’re profiling. You can learn a lot about people based on where they go and things they say. Make more friends on apps such as Foursquare and you can follow their activity, as well as begin to understand their habits. Find out where folks are going and you can “accidentally” show up to observe activity. Yeh, it’s essentially like cyber-stalking, but if you have a relationship with them, it’s not too creepy.
4. Discover and monitor trends. This is easy with Foursquare and other apps. Find out where people are suddenly going and why. Find out if a local joint that sells competing products is becoming popular and why. More gold here.
5. Publish and distribute content. As a member of a community, there has to be some give with the take—one of the golden rules of digital marketing—and it pays to link to places you go, as well as share your tips. An online marketer would be wise to share tips and information about places you like, in addition to just peddling your product or service.
6. Crowdsource real-time information and reward readers with badges, etc. People just love online schwag and badges. It’s like Internet coolness merit badges. You need to find out what people think about your client’s juice stores or a local event? Create a badge, ask folks to check out and offer them incentives with badges and coupons. Forget surveys, this is uber-valuable marketing information. You can also offer different badges and incentives for different levels of participation.

Geo-tagging applications now provide digital marketers a fast, effective way to gather market information about clients, businesses, services and the people who rely on them. Tools such as this could be a massive game-changer for marketing budgets and gathering valuable metrics. I believe that any marketing team or service with their salt should be looking into using one of these tools.

And be sure to read this hard-hitting article about social networking tools and how we cover them.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

At 25 years of age, the veteran Atlantis will blast off from Launch Pad 39A on NASA’s 132nd space shuttle mission.

Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off from Kennedy Space Center.

Star gazers and skywatchers will also have a chance to see Atlantis as it approaches the international space station and when it undocks. Anyone interested in checking it out should read ‘How to see shuttle Atlantis from Earth‘ on Space.com. Atlantis’s crew will perform three spacewalks on the 12-day mission and deliver Rassvet (Russian for dawn), the new research module and other spare parts.

Cool Atlantis Facts

1. Atlantis was named after the original exploration sailing vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It has lived up to its namesake venturing out into the unknown and returning with an abundance of scientific information.
2. It’s the shuttle fleet’s workhorse. The unsung hero Atlantis will have flown 32 missions to orbit and space stations. No stranger to space station missions, NASA’s oldest flying shuttle flew seven times to the Mir space station and 11 times to the International Space Station.
3. It was the first shuttle to launch an interplanetary probe. In 1989, Atlantis launched the Magellan spacecraft, which mapped more than 98 percent of Venus’s surface.
4. It helped us watch a comet hit a planet. In 1989, Atlantis launched the Galileo probe, which captured close-up images of an asteroid on its way to Jupiter. Then in 1994, it made the only direct observations of a comet collision when Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into the solar system’s biggest planet.
5. Atlantis doesn’t have an extension cord. Basically, it can’t plug into solar-powered electrical systems on the space station and is limited to 14-day missions, the maximum its hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells will allow.
6. It has a clone. The shuttle Endeavour was built from a complete set of spare parts that were originally made in case Atlantis was damaged. After the Challenger shuttle was lost, NASA decided to build another shuttle. (Endeavour’s last mission will be in November.)
7. Atlantis was the last space shuttle to visit the Hubble Space Telescope. During its May 2009 mission, the crew made five space walks to repair and enhance the Hubble with the Cosmic Origins spectrograph allowing the telescope to peer deeper into the universe’s ultraviolet light spectrum, as well as add Wide Field Camera 3 allowing astronomers better quality observations of galaxy evolution, dark matter and dark energy.
8. Atlantis is a movie star! That’s right, the shuttle co-stars in the movie “Hubble 3D” with narrator Leonardo DiCaprio about its 2009 mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

Looking for more cool space shuttle stuff? Check out the NASA website, of course.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s got bloggers and content management system (CMS) folks amped up:

Custom Post Types

At this point, WordPress has two default types of content, posts and pages. (You can read posts on this blog and you can view extra pages through the navigation bar at the top of the page. Other themes may have different link placement.) In version 3.0, you can create custom post types with their own attributes for things like press pages, client testimonials, portfolio display, podcasts, video libraries, you name it. WordPress users are not forced into jury rigging posts or pages to fit their needs.

Menu Management

WordPress 3.0 takes control over navigation menus to a whole new level. Using the drag and drop user interface, you can create menus with internal links, external links, category or tag pages, or whatever you choose. Then you can use and manage these menus as a widget in the link management screen.

Custom Taxonomies

The ability to create taxonomies enhances WordPress’ standing as a true CMS. By default, you have the ability to create categories and tags within your site, but now you can add additional layers of meta data, and even make them hierarchical. For example, on this blog, there are over-arching subject categories for each post and more specific tags. Each of these allows readers and search engines to find topics of interest more easily. With version 3.0, I could choose to create another taxonomy for rowing and label posts with names such as sculling, sweeps, coaching, coxswainship, etc. and provide deeper layers of categorization and searchability. I’ve worked on websites with single-layer taxonomies as well as websites with multi-relational and hierarchical taxonomies, and this feature excites the web geek in me.

Multi-site

WordPress 3.0 now allows the management of multiple websites (with different domains and/or sub-domains). The former WordPress multi-user tool has been integrated into the newest version. An average blogger will probably not need this feature because you need to know a bit of code and how to configure server settings, however, for those who run blogging networks, news sites or companies with many employees with branded blogs, this feature is likely to raise an eyebrow or two.

Shortlinks

As Twitter and Facebook become more important, the need to shorten your URLs also becomes more important. With the wp.me URL shortener, you don’t have to rely on other URL shorteners such as TinyURL or bit.ly and can keep your branding intact. That’s right, you can shorten your URL and keep your own domain name. The WordPress blog has more on that feature.

Author Templates

Now everyone gets personal branding! Despite how you feel about personal branding (and I love Doc Searls’ insights here), you can create individual author templates, which are great for multi-author blogs such as this one or if you want to apply different styles or layouts to author pages.

Select Username and Password During WordPress Instillation

Anyone installing a new WordPress blog before 3.0 had their master account default to “admin” as the user name and a password was auto-generated. Now you can create your own user name during install and provide a little more security.

Other New Stuff

If you’re interested in the entire list of new features, upgrades and changes, check out the Codex page for WordPress 3.0.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Viralheat

Viralheat seems to be a few months old, judging by the history of their “In the press” section. It is a social measurement software as a service platform that provides social marketers and social networking types with an in-depth way to slice and dice information from Facebook, Twitter, “the realtime web,” and viral video. (And I suspect they’ll be adding more sites in the future.) One can then track, react and optimize social campaigns and audience engagement.

Poking around the site reveals a clean and easy-to-use user interface, as well as offering important geolocation data for global brands and an API to embed key statistical information into applications and internal websites for the movers and shakers at your company.

Notably, Viralheat has been instrumental in the helping to decide the outcome of the geolocation war between the two social-geo giants Foursquare and Gowalla after the recent South by Southwest conference.

For marketers grappling with analyzing the right social data, this primer post about ‘Making Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data‘ by Viralheat CEO and founder Raj Kadam on Mashable offers a great starting point.

Performable

Performable is a new product that’s in a closed beta mode. It offers analytics that help to optimize important online marketing tools such as landing pages, lead acquisition forms, newsletter sign up pages, targeted videos and contact forms.

At this point, the information at Performable.com is rather sparse. However, the potential is huge. I’ve been in countless meetings with UI designers, editorial teams, marketing and sales teams, as well as developers, trying to figure out how best to create a landing page, lead acquisition form or newsletter page. Each stakeholder has a different perspective and level of understanding. I would leave frustrated as these pages were diluted into watery mud puddles that proved to be ineffective in the end.

With Performable, one can: A. Easily create numerous variations based on stakeholder input without having to worry about design and development time and B. Easily gain insight from measurable real-time usage statistics. That’s a double win in my book.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any quick data on results or customer testimonials, but this looks like a good group to keep an eye on.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

NASA has brought us, well, space! Moon missions; the space shuttle program; and satellites that show us earth, our solar system, the Milky Way and the Universe with unparalleled detail. We also can’t forget how the NASA has captured our imaginations.

Now, these two organizations bring us another brilliant product together, Google Mars, a new mode included in its latest version of Google Earth. Oh, did I mention that it was in 3D?!

We can now get high resolution, three dimensional images of Martian terrain. Using NASA data and imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft, you can zip through Martian canyons or study the planet’s surface.

But rather than read my blather about it, take a glimpse of it online.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

You get to choose from one of six astronomical objects in honor of the International Year of Astronomy, the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s observations, which began this month.

Want to cast your vote? Go to HubbleSite.org to cast your vote for one of the following:

• Star-Forming Region: NGC 6334
• Planetary Nebula: NGC 6072
• Planetary Nebula: NGC 40
• Spiral Galaxy: NGC 5172
• Edge-on Galaxy: NGC 4289
• Interacting Galaxies: Arp 274

The voting deadline is March 1, 2009. I’ve cast my vote, so get yours in today.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

This video of a 1981 KRON report predicts the future of news reporting on the future of the Internet.

And the best part? An S.F. Examiner editor mentions how they’re not in it to make money, when referring to his newspaper’s experimentation of an electronic version of the news. “…we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.”

Oh, if they only knew…

Click here to view the embedded video.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Back in November of 2008, Randye and I discovered another local sushi restaurant in Newburyport, Hana Japan.

It’s a nice, clean restaurant situated in a back corner of the Port Plaza off of Rt. 113 as you get off Interstate 95, heading into Newburyport. Inside, you are greeted by a zen water fountain and the decor includes lots of bamboo and lots of modern Asian-style furnishings.

Every time we go, we are greeted by the same bowing, friendly and attentive hostess/waitress (and we presume owner) who loves children; she brings special tidbits for our son to snack on during dinner. Each time we’ve ordered the chirashi dinner entree and each time the fish was fresh and tasty. In fact, we found it to be the freshest we’ve found in the greater Newburyport area.

We love ordering chirashi because it’s a goodly amount of fish and rice for the price, and it comes with a small bowl of miso soup, a small salad and a personal pot of green tea. (Hana Japan’s green tea is awesome!) The other fun thing about chirashi is that it’s often a selection of fresh fish that the sushi chef has on-hand, and sometimes there are bits of fish you typically don’t see. For example, chirashi typically comes with tuna, red snapper, salmon, shrimp, squid or octopus and mackerel. And there is often a few pieces of fish that are not easily identified by the typical American. Here’s an oft-heard conversation at an American sushi restaurant:

“What the hell is this?” the man asks poking at a white piece of glistening fish with his chop stick.
“”Dunno,” his wife replies. “Eat it and tell me if it’s good so I can try it.”

That’s where this new illustrated sushi guide comes in. For those of you who love sushi and wonder what those mystery fish bits are, the sushi neta zukan (illustrated sushi guide) is likely to answer your questions. Made available in December of ’08, it will cost $5. Although it’s in Japanese, the developers promise that it will have an English appendix. The guide will have photos and descriptions of 82 different types of sushi.

I’ve been looking for it in the App store in iTunes and have been unsuccessful in finding it. If anyone knows where to find this baby, other than the Shogakukan website, which is in Japanese, I’d live to know.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Thanks to the folks over at ibirdexplorer.com, bird watchers have their choice of a number of versions of birding guides for the iPhone and iTouch:

• iBird Backyard: For common backyard birds of North America ($4.95)
• iBird West: For Western birds of North America ($9.95)
• iBird Midwest: For Midwestern birds of North America ($9.95)
• iBird North: For Northeastern birds of North America ($9.95)
• IBird South: For Southern birds of North America ($9.95)
• iBird Canada: For Canadian birds ($9.95)
• iBird Plus: For all birds of North America and Canada ($19.95)

Personally, I’m eyeballing the iBird North version. Imagine, the unique bird-identification system offered by ibirdexplorer.com is now in your hands while you’re in the field! I can narrow down searches by plumage color, beak shape, size and more.

Special thanks to the Birdchick blog for the heads up on this one. It was only a matter of time until the iPhone crossed paths with ornithology.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.