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If you have a big head about the number of followers you have on Twitter then you’ll love Don’t Tell Ashton. Simply reply @donttellashton and your profile photo will be added to a collage that sizes the avatar’s by the number people following you.  As Twitter’s top super user, Ashton’s image would of course fill the screen.

Don’t Tell Ashton is the product of the Interactive Communication class at Berghs School of Communication in Stokholm Sweden. Berghs offers a one-year program that combines both creative and strategic disciplines to help students develop innovative thinking for brands and organizations.

The stated mission of the project is to “explore the possibilities of social currency” and to showcase the brands and people that make a difference just by being social online.  Oh…and to leverage the power of celebrity and Twitter’s 80,500,000 estimated unique monthly visitors to promote the Berghs School.  Student’s and faculty at Berghs definitely have big heads…filled with ideas.  I know they’ve just given me a few.

The music industry has faced considerable challenges in the passed few years as technology has shifted the power away from the big labels to the independent artists and their fans. Success these days depends on a critical mix of talent and the artist’s ability to connect with their fan base. The Recording Academy’s 52^nd Annual GRAMMY Awards campaign acknowledges this shift in a big way making the media the message.

This year’s “We’re All Fans’ GRAMMY advertising campaign celebrates the power of social media and its ability to create a direct connection between artists and fans. The cornerstone of TBWA/Chiat/Day LA’s integrated campaign is the www.wereallfans.com website which creates real-time portraits of  GRAMMY-nominated artists composed entirely from fan postings on YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.

The site also features the “FanBuzz Visualizer” powered by partner Visible Technologies. This data visualization tool scours the web for conversations, comments and mentions of the featured GRAMMY Nominated artists to measure the strength of buzz that each artist has created with their fan base via social media. Available on the site and as a widget that can display current standings on fan’s social media pages, the application ads level of transparency and competition which fuels participation.

Criticized in past years for not representing the true zeitgeist of current music culture, the Academy brought it this year with a powerhouse show featuring arresting performances  from Pink, Beyonce and Lady GaGA and continued the fan participation theme into the programming by inviting fans to cast votes online to determine which song Bon Jovi would play live.

As both the music and the advertising industry struggle to measure and monetize the phenomenon of social media, this year’s GRAMMY Awards, if nothing else provided each nominee’s camp with an accountability tool to measure the effectiveness of their own social media efforts against their competition. And that is the name of the game these days.

For the first time in 23 years Pepsi will not place ads in the Super Bowl telecast. Instead it will make a $20 million dollar social media investment to activate the Pepsi Refresh Project.

Firmly positioned at the crossroads of social media and social consciousness, the Pepsi Refresh project will “give away millions of dollars to fund ideas that will refresh the world.” This high concept, high touch campaign seeks to engage consumers, businesses and nonprofits at the local community level to use their social media chops to compete for millions of dollars in grants to fund cause related good ideas.

Refresheverything.com, launched January 13, 2010, invites participants to submit and price their ideas, provides a project page to support their ideas with multimedia and promotional tools to solicit votes through Facebook. Votes are tallied and winners are selected monthly.  Good ideas are eternal and unselected ideas can be resubmitted each month.
The move demonstrates the continuing trend away from buying audience impressions to growing audiences by providing meaningful engagement and value over time.

Given the current state of the economy and this week’s catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, the program’s philanthropic high road makes Super Bowl advertising seem quite superficial. The campaign charts new territory as it redefines the ground rules of cause-based marketing. It seems like the ultimate win-win for the brand, it’s fans and their communities.

But what if it doesn’t work?

Like many music fans, I have always been a frustrated musician at heart. I’ve recently added another near music experience to my air guitar and shower vocal anticks. Zoozbeat published by Zooz Mobile, is a gesture-based iPhone app that lets you easily compose, share and remix music, regardless of your musical talent.

Scott Geller, Zooz Mobile’s CEO states that the company’s mission is to enable everyone, anywhere, to express themselves musically. At Zoozmobile.com you can sample the versatility of the app by listening to tracks created by a range of users from ATL legend Cato to, well…me BlairC.

The core app offers users a satisfying range of beat genres to work with including Rock, Pop, Thash, Hip-Hop, Techno and Tejano. It does take a little practice to get the hang of it, but the experience is easy enough for hacks like me to enjoy and rich enough to be interesting to more accomplished musicians. Shaking my beloved iPhone like a wild man to get the sounds, did make me a bit nervous. so I am sure more timid users will enjoy the tapping feature available from the landscape view. Once you have created your tracks you can share them via Facebook or direct your fans to your own “My ZoozBeat” profile page.

The highly customizable Zoozbeat platform provides interesting licensing and promotional opportunities for both bands and brands. Gil Weinberg, Director of Music Technology at Georgia Tech and Zoobeat’s founder states the app offers recording artists new ways to connect to their audiences, allowing fans to download their music, reCreate and share the tracks. Zoozbeat is cutting licensing deals with a growing roster of artists including Too Short and Street Lotto.

As of Friday October 15th Zoozbeat was the number 2 paid music app and ranked number 40 of all paid apps, while Zoozbeat lite was the number 7 free music app on the Apple iTunes App Store.

Social media continues to illuminate social issues as citizens in increasing numbers are using security cams and YouTube to mobilize the public to help solve crimes. Atlanta couple Dan and Alyssa Kopp have been the victims of 2 break-in’s over the past 10 months. In both instances they have used YouTube to post video captured by the security cam system in their home.

After an initial break-in in October of 2008 the couple used YouTube to post video of the perpetrators stealing a flat screen TV from their home. The video helped mobilize the neighborhood and the authorities. DeKalb County police received and anonymous tip that led them to a home containing a stash of stolen property. Some of the items tracing back to the Kopp’s break-in on Broyles Street in Grant Park. Six arrests were made in the case.

The Kopps are hoping for similar results in their most recent post. In this video 4 youths can be seen terroizing the couple’s dog with a bar stool and stealing a laptop. Their caption on the post boasts. “The last guys got caught bc of youtube, let’s do it again.”

Ashton Kutcher and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have a lot more in common than a shared hatred of CNN. Their antics have helped demonstrate the growing influence of Twitter as a communication medium.

This week thousands of Iranian techies used Twitter to provide on-the-spot reporting as they took to the streets to protest Friday’s “punked” reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Due to state restrictions placed on conventional news sources like CNN, Twitter prevailed, providing both a vent for the frustrated population and one of the only windows into the chaotic situation. 

Similarly, Kutcher’s public challenge and triumph over CNN in the race to 1 million followers demonstrated the power a single person can have in today’s networked society. Especially if their wife is Demi Moore and they are willing to share photos of her butt.

It’s also interesting to note that Ahmadinejad has promised to “ding dong ditch” the house of his opposing candidate, reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi when he is finally declared the winner of the election.

A topless Mona Lisa painted in a similar hand of the master Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered. This painting, which features many parallels to the original Mona Lisa, was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci at purchase in 1845. Leonardo may have painted his famous Mona Lisa in a number of styles — including nude.  But it may just be a study based on one of the artist’s now-lost works.

A video promoting the exhibit.

According to Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Louvre, Paris. The original naked Mona might have been part of a series of erotic portraits by da Vinci and his pupils, which were never really shown because they were considered inappropriate. Called “Monna Vanna,” the topless versions of the Mona Lisa are indeed often considered the portraits of a court mistress or prostitute.

Aside from social mores these portraits inspired other artists including. Raphaello’s 1518 portrait of his mistress, “The Baker Girl.”

“Our quest for naked Mona Lisa’s continues. We are now on the tracks of another interesting version in Las Vegas,” Vezzosi said.

I love agency parodies and this one struck me funny and got me thinking.  No heady insights here, just humor and observation.

In this business you can be on either side of the vendor/client table at any given moment. Given the multitude of skills required to create and maintain real integrated solutions these days, we are only as good as the companies and talent that we partner with. Now more than ever it pays to mange these relationships intelligently.

In the past I am sure I have been as guilty of this type of behavior as the next guy. I have become a bit more sensitive to these situations lately—and that’s a good thing. 

The schisms between art and science; left-brain and right-brain; intuitive and analytical disciplines are seemingly non-existent in the world of academia.  However government has always viewed the arts as an expendable commodity during lean times. As technology continues to both enable and define our life experience these seemingly polarized disciplines are converging in a meaningful way that hopefully demonstrates the codependence of art and science. 

At center of this movement sits the Allosphere at UCSB in Santa Barbara.  The Allosphere is one of the largest scientific and artistic instruments in the world. It’s 3D immersive theatre maps complex data in time and space, providing both visual and acoustic representations of complex scientific data, processes and relationships. 

Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, inventor of the Allosphere is the founder and director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara. She views the project as a convergence of art, science and engineering that can help usher in a new age of math, science and art.

Astronaut Mae Jemison has become a champion of science education and believes in a new vision of learning that combines art and sciences. History has shown that tomorrow’s scientific breakthroughs will be based on today’s teachings and discoveries, so a case can be built that it is imperative that both art and science be taught in the classroom if we are to create the next generation of bold thinkers.

Business (more specifically the agency model) until recently has had a fairly myopic view of creativity and what “creative people” are supposed to do. Luckily, as social media has democratized brand marketing and knowledge and ideas have become the new currency in business, the lines between role classifications of either creative or technical (or even consumer and marketer) have given way to a more collaborative model. 

So that would mean that academia and business are aligned on the importance of both the arts and sciences in education and the symbiotic nature of the two worlds would seemingly perpetuate this position. I wonder how long it will take for government to catch up?  …Could prove pretty darn important given the mantle of problems we are handing the next generation. 

But what do I know? I am just a “creative guy.”

What are you doing ? The growing popularity of Twitter has three companies stepping up to address some of the short comings of Twitter Search.

Twitter Search does a good job of providing you with a snapshot of the Twittersphere at any moment, but it works best on smaller result sets. When used to monitor a popular topic, the time-based nature of the platform can make it cumbersome to find useful information. What about relevance? If only the sort order had some form of ranking?

Here are 3 contenders that hoping to ruffle some feathers.

Twazzup, scheduled to launch today, is the latest contender. It addresses the relevancy issue by surrounding the standard time-based stream with related sidebar content such as Popular Tweets, Related photos and most popular links.

Twitalyzer Search adds two relevancy ranking numbers to each tweet in the results list: Influence and the number of followers the author has. So in essence Twitalyzer lets you find tweets from the people who matter most…or at least who have the most followers.

Tweetfind is pink—Pepto pink. Taking more of Google page ranking approach. It throws in a ranking algorithm that factors a list of attributes that included the number of followers, the number following, tweets and the number of retweets on an entry in the ranking.

But given the limitations of the 140 character Twitter format, one has to ask, do we really need another Twitter search engine? That depends on how much importance we place on what others are doing and thinking…right now.