Bizarro Food Trend
Ideopia's Eyeball Division
Getting Fat and Crazy with Words
German Airline Buzz
Whipping Web 2.0
Kung Fu Budgeting
Reverse Engineering
Getting Personal: Piggly Wiggly
Naked HTML: Cross-Browser Hell

Just because you can put something in your mouth doesn't mean you should eat it. Again, conventional wisdom falls by the wayside with an onslaught of strange food for foodies.

Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods TV show on The Travel Channel serves up delicacies you won't find at IHOP. At online UK-based Edible.com, daring eaters will find toasted leaf-cutter ants, mopani worms, reindeer pate and Thai green crocodile. For your shopping convenience items are organized in six categories: Insectivore, Herbs & Spices, Aphrodisiac, Carnivore, Herbivore and Apothecary.

Every time I hear a young mother tell her toddler to "use his words," I cringe. Tell the kid to blow out his peas and carrots instead, I say. There are too many words already. And the more words there are, the cheaper they become. Thanks to the Internet, we have huge containers called websites, discussion boards, MySpace, and - the worst - personal blogs, that overflow with words faster than a McDonald's Dumpster. Our society is bloated with words while the average working stiff barely has enough time to floss every day. The "axis of evil," of course, is the computer, especially the Apple computer. It's too freaking easy. Copy, cut, paste, and share every last photo of your kid's last soccer game, and then blow it out to all your friends, colleagues and family. Guess what? Outside of mom, dad and brother Billy Bob, nobody cares. I know, because plenty of my best friends don't read my stuff.

Our customers are beleaguered by all our words. They're deluged, frustrated, and close to exploding. That's why I'm calling for a national word diet. We'll train ourselves to think in haiku, and stick our fingers down our throats anytime we splatter down more than 50 words. Soon people will opt to visit wordless resorts free of scrolling text and email, or desperate emails from the Nicaraguan princess who wants to launder her inheritance through your bowling league.

The problem is that we rarely know when to stop, edit, slash, or burn. There's too much available hard disk space, and by golly we've got to fill it. My 200 words were up 88 words ago. See you in the bathroom.

Germanwings, a notable airline company based in Cologne and Stuttgart has used a viral email campaign to create buzz by allowing its customers (and 45,000 of their closest friends and relatives) an opportunity to build their own empire, online.

Germanwings Airlines sends out an email; you click on it and create a profile. And watch what you say. Online police at the site will revoke any group that contain words like "crash", "Jihad", "72" and "Virgin" in the title. After you settle on a name and chug three or four energy drinks, you send out five emails to friends, family, the neighbor's dog, whoever. They send out five emails, and they send out five emails, then five more until you have a little pyramid scheme 2.0 of your own. You get to pretend to be 'Das Fuhrer' for a month, and Germanwings sees their email list grow by 0.5%.

Using a Web 2.0 marketing tool is not new, but this viral email campaign allows users to be in charge of everything. Recruit people to join a group, channel their inner army field generals and take over a micro-site. Why would you do all this work? You love free stuff. Become the game's largest group, and you might win bags of peanuts, a few Deutschmarks off airfare, and those flight-wing pins that they give children when they fly alone.

Tim O'Reilly is to 'Web 2.0 ', what Al Gore is to the internet. Tim O'Reilly, an Irish businessman, of O'Reilly Media fame, chaired a brainstorming session in 2004 that coined the term 'Web 2.0 '. Nice, but what is it?

Large groups believe that Web 2.0 is a fantastic idea that encompasses all that is creative and personal about the internet. Any user controlled or contributed application, like Craig's List, Amazon, or the on-line photo album flickr, falls into Web 2.0 category. O'Reilly is a promoter of the "free culture movement", a social movement that works toward freedom of information and copyright-less work.

Many web savants, however, think that Web 2.0 is simply a marketing gimmick for O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly took what everyone already knew and understood about the web, created a name for it and got publicity for his company. This is quite contrary to the spirit of 'Web 2.0 '. And because the internet has always been about users interacting with other users, O'Reilly's fabrication of the term Web 2.0 (coupled with the fact that he seems to take credit for the idea as a whole) has received its share of criticism.

I suppose though, Web 2.0 is as valid a term as any. Everyone who gets on the internet uses these individual, creative applications. Hell, I'm using one right now. Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media and the term Web 2.0 all got into Wikipedia, and what's more Web 2.0 than that?

As much as we evangelize about maintaining advertising expenditures during recessionary times www.ideopia.com/recession, we're certainly not opposed to cutting fat. Let's start with the Christmas card, the low-hanging partridge in a pear tree:

1. Mailbox to trash can, e.g. 30 seconds
2. Unnecessary tree death
3. Transportation costs of mail equal bad carbon footprint
4. Potential explosion in politically correct minefield
5. Expense of leftovers and returned mail

Solution: Sink a small portion of your print budget into a holiday email or email(s), or skip it altogether.

A new grocery store model by Piggly Wiggly Carolina Company, Inc. fits the way consumers shop. It's homey, environmentally correct, and organic. But the real breakthrough is a surround-sound-like approach to shopping.

Explains David Schools, Piggly Wiggly CEO, "When you enter the Piggly Wiggly at The Market Common, you don't see check out lines. You don't go down five aisles to get ingredients for one meal."

One-stop stations offer complete meal solutions with items such as ground beef, hamburger buns, chips and beer grouped together for backyard grilling.

Additional features include signature prepared meals available for curbside pickup, an on-site sommelier, and a Dream Dinners franchise where shoppers may prepare as many as two months of meals in advance.

Click here to check out Piggly Wiggly's video tour of the new store.