quick word-vomit about segmenting of society and marketing

AdAge is a leading advertising industry magazine. Here's a little bit about what may become a greater trend in advertising: the increasing push of the utility of a product and less specific identification of the product with an identity.
The comments section is particularly fantastic, as it contains some great critique. My personal favorite is the one that says "you lost me at 'consumer generated media'", which says to me that the commenter is probably very confused by the MySpace. The next comment provides better commentary, saying that self-segmentation (such as the type Facebook uses for those little side-bar ads) are not the death of consumer segmentation, but considerably better than any focus group could be. He also says that what "marketers need to think about is how to encourage more consumers to share their preferences with marketers – replacing privacy concerns with a desire to receive more relevant and appealing marketing communications." Ew.

two sides to every story: somali pirates

Most of what I've heard about piracy off the coast of Somalia pertains to their nautical reign of terror and hostage situations. Here are some nice alternative perspectives that do a pretty good job in not justifying all while excusing those that are excusable. There is also analysis of the surrounding political situation that has allowed (or pushed) this to happen.

You Are Being Lied To About Pirates (via Huffington Post)

'Toxic waste' behind Somali piracy (via Al Jazeera)

Piracy challenges global governance (via KenyaImagine magazine)

And, as a final link, here's the simultaneous blog post by Gabriel Teodros. It contains a video of K'Naan, a Somali rapper, talking about the situation from a more personal perspective.