The last elec­tion par­ties have ended by now, the USA are look­ing for­ward to a new era of fair­ness and social improve­ment. Will the new pres­i­dent be able to live up to his promises in times of an eco­nomic cri­sis? Looks like Bar­rack Obama has got to deal with a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, as the cri­sis is now spread­ing from the finance sec­tor to old econ­omy and car man­u­fac­tur­ers start fac­ing seri­ous trou­bles. Of course adver­tis­ing bud­gets will be cut, which will even­tu­ally lead to more and more online-money being spent for per­for­mance based mar­ket­ing. A rather bleak sce­nario for tra­di­tional adver­tiser, but def­i­nitely not the worst news for affiliates.

Going against Wikipedia: In Ger­many, left-wing politi­cian Lutz Heil­mann started a mas­sive dis­cus­sion among blog­gers: the genius sued Wikipedia and had them remove the Ger­man arti­cle which con­tained among other bio­graph­i­cal data on his his­tory with the infa­mous Stasi. This is the per­fect exam­ple of new media mis­un­der­stood: while Heil­mann obvi­ously tried to obfus­cate facts, he pro­voked a flood of arti­cles that give him a worse name than any Wikipedia page ever could have. The net is chang­ing pol­i­tics faster than any­body expected ten years ago…

Move­ment vs. Change: I love Seth Godins sim­ple yet very illus­tra­tive exam­ples of “the power of the net”. And I’m not a fan of Starbucks:

Sim­ple exam­ple: the Star­bucks in Larch­mont, NY keeps their ther­mo­stat at 64 degrees. And the stores in Breck­en­ridge, Col­orado keep their doors wide open all win­ter. If you’re rag­ing mad about energy waste, you could say some­thing. And noth­ing would hap­pen. But if cus­tomers orga­nized and ten peo­ple said some­thing or a hun­dred peo­ple said some­thing… boom, new rules. The sys­tem doesn’t know what to do with a movement.

The ugli­est thing of the week: it’s a mix­ture between a car and motor­cy­cle, and it com­bines the dis­ad­van­tages of both con­cepts in per­fec­tion. I have no clue why Time Mag­a­zine has voted the Per­avces Mono­tracer one of the best inven­tions of 2008. C’mon guys, you can’t be seri­ous — even the descrip­tion sounds like a joke, but it’s not:

You really need the mind of a Swiss engi­neer to come up with a vehi­cle that com­bines the lithe maneu­ver­abil­ity of a motor­cy­cle with the not-getting-rained-on-ability of a con­ven­tional automobile.

This week in Online Mar­ket­ing: Google started rolling out a Digg-like fea­ture where users can “like” or “dis­like” search results. It seems they are cur­rently run­ning a few tests — I’m won­der­ing if this social com­po­nent will be used for the gen­eral index or for tai­lor­ing SERPs to the logged-in user’s needs. And Twit­ter still is the new hot sh*t — even though the fail-whale returned today and SMS func­tion­al­ity is not avaible in most Euro­pean coun­tries, users still love their microblog­ging ser­vice #1. One of the rea­sons is the large num­ber of mash-ups: the lat­est one even allows you to tweet from beyond: using twuffer.com, it’s poss­bible to sched­ule tweets — so if you already know what you’re going to do next week or next year, twuf­fer might be just for you. And if not you might still be able to use the ser­vice for mar­ket­ing pur­poses

Video of the week

How do you visu­al­ize a car that doesn’t even exist yet? Infin­ity has invested a great deal of time and money to build a flex­i­ble and impres­sive 3D sur­roundig — this video explains the whole idea: