News you may have missed, but need to read.

News you may have missed but need to read.

I watched takethislollipop.com, screamed, and almost cried. I watched Intel’s Museum of Me and smiled from ear to ear.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the new ‘People Talking About Metric’ Facebook introduced last week. What does the new metric mean for brands? First, take a look at the top 50 brands measured by fan count (via Famecount). I ‘reranked’ the brands to show their new rank based on the ‘People Talking About’ metric.

Inside Xtranormal’s Budding Do-It-Yourself Movie Empire:

‘Xtranormal puts simple tools at the disposal of regular people. Choose from a selection of several dozen characters. Enter text (profane or otherwise) for your characters (bears or otherwise) to act out. Set your camera angle. Sprinkle in sound effects. Presto! You have your own mini-movie, ready for its online premiere… the company’s original goal was to produce an application to give film studios a storyboarding tool during preproduction. Hollywood loved the idea, but the animation and controls were too basic. Not true for the do-it-yourself crowd… revenue now comes from selling special characters and sets to users. While the company has yet to make a profit, [Xtranormal] anticipates getting into the black during the first half of 2011. With plans to go mobile and allow for collaboration over social networks, the challenge for [Xtranorma] will be to keep things simple while giving Joe Public more options to unleash his inner Tarantino.’