Who do you want as the next U.S. President?

Some time back a very bright friend of mine who commits his formidable intellect to social entrepreneur projects came up with an idea that has been waiting for the internet to come of age. We all know that the decisions made in Washington D.C. (or is it Crawford Ranch now?) have an impact around the world that is disproportionate to the population of the U.S. vis a vis the rest of the world .

It's always been the case that the U.S. election is the only political show in town that counts, and for those U.S. residents who feel it's an exclusive affair to holders of U.S. citizenship well the rest of the world disagrees and I can assure you the last 7 years have been deplorable. We're not happy and it impacts directly on our live, and now here's your chance to be heard.

The good news is that the global community now has the opportunity to express who they wish to represent them in the next presidential election through the good work of Joey Baxter and his friend at Community Counts. So if you remember this post from some months back, the site has been built and is ready to rock and roll. Now is the time to sort out the year of the rat. The votes break down neatly by geographical location too which adds some relevancy to your choice of candidate.

Go here and make a point for a few seconds if you can.

Web Features

Window cleaners at the Sheraton in Shanghai. Now if they were particularly obtuse Sony Pictures would be all over them with writs. Or if they were clever they would P.R the hell out of this. I understand the idea came from a brainstorm with the workers. Thus dismissing that solipsists debate to the refuse area where it belongs.

Via the excellent Shanghaiist.

Brand Tags

One of my favourite communication bloggers, Noah from Naked in New York has developed the sort of simple Web 2.0 interface that has way more validity than a lot of expensive research. Its called Brand Tags and allows tag clouds to coallesce from text inputs by people such as ourselves. Go and have a play and while you're at it remember that if a brand is a collective hallucination then this particular emerging brand has an awful lot of 'collective' going for it.

I just remembered that Noah probably wrote what he needed to create this interface himself with the self taught PHP/MySQL explained in this post over here. He's very clever like that.