But why are they all the same? In marketing we want to stand out, but we all use subtle variations of a square, black-and-white barcode. Hardly memorable.

Well, now you can change that. A quick visit to QR Hacker will get you a free personalized QR code in no time. With QR Hacker you can change the color with pixel-by-pixel granularity, include an image in the center, even adjust the roundness of the pixels.

Personal branding

QR codes are awesome for personal branding. You can put them on business cards to direct people to your website, or portfolio or any other website you wish. But standard QR codes are a bit of an eyesore — and there’s so much potential! Check out what Laurent did:

Include your name as part of the QR code for personal branding

If you want some creative ideas for QR code business cards, head over to Pixel Curse.

Company branding

For businesses, QR codes are the latest trend in outbound marketing collateral. But why use a plain QR when you can incorporate your logo — or any other image — right into the code? I can imagine some great creative campaigns that use ONLY QR codes with images in the center: something captivating that will make people interested in scanning it. And with the right metrics in place, a company could use different images and track their respective traffic to determine their popularity. Here’s what one company did with their QR logo:

Include a logo within the QR code for easy brand identification

What do you think of QR codes? Do you take the time to scan them? Would you be more interested in scanning them if they were visually interested?

Just by it’s very nature, social media is fast-moving. Viral content spreads rapidly but is tempered by the fickle, ADHD readers that consume it: what is hot now might not be hot in a week/day/hour. We get busy. We get bored. We lose interest.

Well, the same is true for the platforms themselves. Social media platforms are also memes.

Look no further than the litany of flash-in-the-pan platforms that had the world all a-Twitter before slipping into obscurity or getting gobbled up by a larger company.

MySpace, for example is hardly worth mentioning in a scholarly discussion of social media except for the fact that it used to be the largest social network just a couple of years ago. Everyone was on it. And now? I, ahem, think I still have an account…

And remember — long before Zynga’s Farmville — when everyone was obsessed with JAMDAT Bowling? Well, I do. The company quickly went public and was acquired by Electronic Arts for almost $700 million — it’s now the successful mobile arm of Electronic Arts, EA Mobile.

Del.icio.us and Digg — the platforms once lauded as the go-to solution for social bookmarking and website sharing have all but evaporated for the mainstream user who opts to post articles to Facebook. And speaking of Facebook, the giant gorilla in the room, walloping the competition: will location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Loopt be able to compete with Facebook Places?

Even the mighty can fall (again, look at MySpace) — will Facebook be overtaken by another social media platform? What social media platforms are the next flash-in-the-pan? Which ones have the real staying potential?

Part of what makes the combination of globalization and social networking so amazing is that it has the ability to connect previously unconnected groups of people.  What was already socially organic in the real world, ie. a person meets someone and becomes involved with the groups and communities the person belongs to, and vice versa, became global and instantaneous thanks to the web.  And just as in the real world, individuals that do the connecting, called “bridges” or “social connectors” will prove to be a vital in studying behavioral change between online communities.

Previously, researchers focused on identifying central individuals, (ie. influencers or  leaders), in the group to accelerate behavior change or stem disease spread.  We utilize this principal all the time — for instance, we trust the reviews of our favorite movie critic; we reward the coworker who always boosts team morale; we identify the coworker who helps to spread or prevent disease (the guy who NEVER washes his hands/the OCD hand sanitizer freak).  But this only works locally, within groups or communities.  For non-movie buffs, the critic’s review doesn’t mean much nor does the morale boost or potential sickness to someone outside of the company.  Influence is only important to those who are in the know — and central individuals struggle to affect behavior because their influence means that they must share their attention and persuasion with numbers of people, reducing effectiveness.

A new study by Thomas Valente and Kayo Fujimoto, which appears in the April issue of the journal, Social Networks, suggests that when compared to central individuals, identifying bridging individuals who connect two otherwise disconnected groups is a much more efficient way to affect behavior change or stem disease spread.  Furthermore, the study presents a new model for identifying bridging individuals.

According to Valente in a recent article from U. of Southern California, researchers systematically deleted each link in a person’s network and calculated the resultant network cohesion, enabling them to identify an individual’s bridging effect.  Using their model, researchers were able to correctly identify the bridge individual in two separate studies: the spread of HIV among the first 40 cases diagnosed in the U.S. and drug use behavior among Irish teenagers in certain social networks.  Thinking about the introduction of the myriad of diseases introduced to Native Americans by European bridge individuals (and other more recent examples), it’s clear that this model will be important to public health officials who wish to prevent the spread of disease.

But what does the bridge individual mean to online communities?

Online communities work in a similar fashion to their real world counterparts: viruses and information spread through networks utilizing bridging individuals to reach previously unconnected groups.  It’s important to many people to be thought of as a thought leader within their network in order to influence behavior (get someone to read their blog, buy their product, etc.) but this study shows that at a macro level, it’s more important to be a connector, linking groups that might not otherwise organically come together to influence the same behavior.  In the case of web marketing/public relations, this model makes it possible to identify individuals and businesses who belong to several groups and who influence those groups naturally — as opposed to individuals and businesses who have influence only within a limited group.

As I noted previously, 80% of Americans don’t believe that the government can be successful.  By and large, we Americans believe that the government is broken.  Yet, we still maintain that America is the best country in the world.  We don’t have nearly the best education system, nor healthcare system, nor justice system.  But, apparently, we’re still the best.  We don’t have totally equal rights for women, for gay people, for minorities.  We don’t have the highest standard of living.  We don’t have a strong economy (right now).  But– WE’RE STILL THE BEST!

I’m curious, given our dissatisfaction with the government and the way the country is run, why we still believe that America is the best country in the world.  Undoubtedly, there’s a lot of great things about this country…but I still think that the zealous patriotism espoused by many Americans is little uncalled for.

In one breath a person can begrudge the government for screwing up everything in his life: his kids’ classroom size; the cost of his prescriptions; the cost of his mortgage; the price of gas; the taxing of this or that; his 401K account balance; his job security; his marriage; the weather; and so on and so forth — and still proclaim from the highest purple mountain’s majesty that America is the best country in the world.  How is that?  Are we loyal to our government — the American “way of life” — for no good reason?

If we’re not the greatest country in the world (how is that defined?!), would we revolt like so many before us have?  If every last person in this country believed that the government is broken beyond repair, would we take up arms? Would we march on Washington and demand the dissolution of Congress? Burn the Constitution and start fresh?  Cede and start a new, better country?

No, I don’t think we would.  We’ve lost that revolutionary spirit.  We’re too preoccupied, distracted, busy; we have given up and given in.  Of course we have: American Idol is on.

Photo courtesy publicintegrity.org

According to a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll, 80% of Americans believe that government is broken — mainly because of fighting between the political parties and branches of the government.  The poll found 33% blaming Republicans for a broken Washington and 27% blaming Democrats, with 2% blaming both parties, 5% unsure and 17% saying that Washington isn’t broken at all.

The message is clear: we don’t have faith that the U.S. government can be successful.  But why is that?  And what’s the solution?

According to CNN’s David Frum, the answer may be as simple as locking — and bolting — the doors to Congress.  In his recent article, “Blame yesterday’s reforms for today’s gridlocked Congress“, he asks readers to take a quiz:

Name the most important legislation enacted in the 30 years between 1950 and 1980.

Overwhelming isn’t it? Civil rights. Voting rights. Interstate highways. Medicare. Medicaid. The deregulation of the airlines, natural gas, trucking, rail and oil. The immigration act of 1965. Clean Air, Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts. Supplemental Security Income in 1974. I could fill the whole screen.

Now … the next 30 years.

There’s the Reagan tax cuts of course. Deregulation of the savings & loans in 1982. The Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Welfare reform in 1995. Medicare Part D. What else?

He’s right.  Why is it that Congress can’t get anything passed these days?  Frum argues that the real cuprit are the bright, shining lights of the media.  The polarizing party lines.  The filibuster — most recently used by Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky to block short-term extension of unemployment and health insurance benefits.  Frum asks Congress to bring back the smoke-filled rooms where secret deals are created!  Where alliances are created far from the microscope of the public and media.

Maybe he’s right.  Maybe when we stick our collective nose into the business of Congress, it makes Congress fearful to actually get anything done.  They’ve got jobs to keep too, after all.

LG 7mm-thick HD TV (Photo courtesy of CNN)

Thanks to Toshiba, LG, and the Consumer Electronics Show, we’ve gotten a glimpse into the future of TV.  And three themes seem to be the focus: “Ultrathin”, “3D”, and “Connected”.

The Anorexic LG HD TV

The yet-to-be-named HD TV shown above was debuted by LG at CES this week.  It comes in at under seven millimeters thick — that’s less than a quarter of an inch — which makes it the thinnest TV that I’ve ever heard of.  It will be available later this year.

3D HD TV at Home

If you’re like me and you’ve only seen Avatar in IMAX 3D, it’s hard to imagine watching it any other way.  But you still want the DVD/Blu-Ray.  What to do?

Well, you won’t have to give up the 3D experience when watching video at home if Panasonic, Toshiba, Sony, and Samsung have anything to do with it.

Toshiba ZX900 Series Cell TV

The Toshiba ZX900 Series Cell TV, which debuted at CES this week, will convert standard programming into HD 3D in real time.  It requires a bit of horsepower to do that — which is why the new ZX900 will have roughly 143 times the processing power of current TVs, Toshiba claims.

It will be available later this year.  Don’t hold your breath on pricing.

Oh, and can’t stand the glasses?  3M (with that name, who else) has apparently developed technology that will allow you to watch 3D TV without those clunky 3D glasses!

The Connected Entertainment Center

The “connected” TV is also making news at CES.  Several new TVs, included the aforementioned Panasonic ZX900, will feature an internal hard drive for storing movies, photos, and any other type of media.  More importantly, they will be internet-connected, doubling as a video phone (think Skype on the big screen) and allowing you to stream content from Pandora, Netflix, Boxee.tv, and other web services directly to your TV in real time — and possibly for downloading and storage on the internal hard drive.

The Color Purple…err, Yellow

Sharp debuted a new TV technology at CES this week that adds a fourth color — yellow — to the red, blue, and green of traditional TV pixels.  The so-called “quad pixel technology” will allow their Aquos line of LED TVs to display more than a trillion different colors.  And I thought the Crayola crayon boxes already had too many colors…

The San Jose/Milpitas area has been rattled by a series of more than fifteen earthquakes yesterday and today, beginning with a 3.0 magnitude quake at 11:09pm local time last night.

The quakes are all occurring around the same area, near the Calaveras Reservoir, about five miles east of Milpitas and about six miles northeast of San Jose.  That area is is also where the Calaveras and Hayward faults join.  The Hayward fault runs up through Berkeley and Oakland.  Yikes!

Here’s the list of quakes:

1. 1/6/10  11:09pm – 3.0 magnitude
2. 1/7/10  12:37am – 1.5 magnitude
3. 1/7/10  10:09am – 4.0 magnitude
4. 1/7/10  10:19am – 1.5 magnitude
5. 1/7/10  10:22am – 1.6 magnitude
6. 1/7/10  10:24am – 1.5 magnitude
7. 1/7/10  10:34am – 1.4 magnitude
8. 1/7/10  10:36am – 2.2 magnitude
9. 1/7/10  10:54am – 2.3 magnitude
10. 1/7/10  11:34am – 1.3 magnitude
11. 1/7/10  11:36am – 1.3 magnitude
12. 1/7/10  12:21pm – 1.7 magnitude
13. 1/7/10  1:56pm – 1.5 magnitude
14. 1/7/10  3:52pm – 2.1 magnitude
15. 1/7/10  4:21pm – 1.5 magnitude

Is it a sign of something coming?