Just as the Internet is no spammed with ads, we often forget that the real world is also filled with ads and useless messages.

Advertisements are out there to gain attention. Any business or organization (even non-profit organizations) hoping to grow will need advertisements and promotions targeted at their respective audiences to achieve this purpose.

Advertising agencies have a whole host of people who work to get your message out there, from professional ad directors, designers and artists, to writers. Creating an advertisement that is cost effective and catchy is what every ad professional strive for. But what really makes advertising work is creative content.

The main idea of an advertisement is of course, to gain attention. By way of creative content, such as catchy lines, graphics and photos, all of it utilizes creativity and ingenuity, to make people take that second look.

As ads can be placed anywhere, on billboards and sidewalks, banners and posters, in printed media, or digital media. The possibilities are endless. Now we even see an allout tug-of-war between Apple and Google in the mobile device advertising space. Much of the ads out there is spam, but let’s take a look at some creative ads that work.

Mozilla Firefox – Always use protection.

Frontline (Flea Spray) – Get them off your dog.

Sony Xacti (Waterproof Digital Camera)

Cemex (Fast Drying Concrete)

Samsung Plasma TV

WMF Knives – Sharper than you think.

BBC World – See both sides of the story.

Nivea – Good-bye cellulite.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX 100 (Wide Angle Camera)

WWF – You can’t afford to be slow in an emergency.

Orion Telescopes

Panasonic – With intelligent face detector.

Lays - Our potatoes are grown closer than you may think.

Brighton Language School – Refresh your forgotten.

Calcutta School of Music

There are literally thousands of streams of podcasts out there, some more exciting than others, but I am sure what whatever your preference, there are bound to be some that will suit your fancy. But how does one get access to the world of podcasting?

Well first off, podcast, or their video equivalent, vodcasts, are nothing more than a fancy term of calling an audio or a video file. Most podcasts are news-like in nature, bringing you the latest updates in the world of X, where X is pretty much anything you can imagine of, from celebrity entertainment to photography tips. Most of them are filmed or recorded no more than 30 minutes long, although longer podcasts, such as the ones from SlashFilm, can last hours on end.

Podcasts are a great complement to my habit of commuting from home to work. I just fire up something from Howstuffworks then proceed to my destination. Some people love to listen to music, but I find that podcasts are a great way of enriching yourself with knowledge, as well as learning quite a lot of useful tidbits as conversation starters.

Podcasts are often delivered as an RSS URL (also called a Feed), which simply means that its a self-updating link where the author will insert their latest episodes into the link. A podcast manager’s task is to collect and record all these links then provide a means of checking each ‘Feed’ for updated content. Then the option of downloading the recording as well as archiving it completes the task of a podcast manager. With this in mind, what are some of the podcast managers that you can use to get yourself started on the world of podcasting?

gPodder - This is a free, multiplatform podcast manager, useful when you are working on multiple systems and don’t want to have a different program for each platform. The interface is sparse but does all you need in a small, neat, efficient package. I find the exclusion of any built-in players to be especially liberating because it keeps the system drain low.

Miro - This open source project started off as a video player, then slowly evolved to become a podcast manager. It’s great at giving smooth playback of vodcasts and offer a slightly nicer interface than gPodder, as well as being great for streaming online media or other web-based tasks. Check it out of gPodder looks too dated for your taste.

iTunes - If you have an iPod, iTunes offers a great podcast manager built right into the software. However, looking for feeds are a little bit cumbersome due to there being no ability for you to directly specify the URL of your podcast feeds. You need to trawl through iTunes’ own database of podcasts, and not every podcast is available on their database, although a lot of useful and quality content is tracked by iTunes so it’s probably doing you a favor by filtering out all the junk on the Internet. And until another software comes out with a way to sync podcasts to your iPod Touch, iTunes will sadly remain your only manager.

Juice - Yet another free podcast manager that’s even lighter than gPodder, this manager’s sole task is to track and download podcasts, making it every light and useful on netbooks and older computers. In the past, I’ve had a few problems with Juice and have moved on to iTunes ever since, but in the meantime, the programmers at Juice have probably fixed all the bugs.

There you go, four great podcast managers for you to start. Now start gathering your favourite podcasts online!

This particular problem is quite nasty. It only happened to me recently and here are some tips to overcome it, although it cannot be 100% solved.

Your computer may be suffering from this malaise without you being aware of it.

Recently I noticed that my computer has slowed down considerably. The problem was particularly acute when I was playing a certain Facebook Flash game in Google Chrome. Blaming the problem on an unoptimized Flash game running on Google Chrome, I did not bother fixing it until it got more severe. Okay – until a cute female friend asked for my help…. that’s when I decided that it’s really a problem worth looking into

The Cause

So I ran the game in Firefox and Internet Explorer and found out that the problem is not any fault of Google’s. Investigating further, I finally followed the trail to some sites where people congregated and compared notes on Adobe Flash 9 and 10, like this one here.

And I found out that there are so many tormented souls like me out there!

Others have noticed this sluggishness running Youtube videos. These people have 3 GHz cpus and 4 GB memory but they have the same problem. Youtube is known to work fine in mobile devices running Firefox in only 256MB of available memory space – try googling Nokia N900 – so it cannot be due to people’s computer being old and unable to deal with Adobe’s Flash requirements.

Many have speculated that Adobe Flash’s resource hogging is due to Adobe Flash being a poorly written program, with unoptimized code. Some even say that this is a new version of the Microsoft-Intel conspiracy theory where these giant corporations worked together, to get us to fork out more of our hard-earned money so that we have to buy more computers and help the IT industry prosper.

The Fix:

1. Uninstall Adobe Flash

Really important! You can skip step 2 but not this!

2. Get the beta version, Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta.

If you don’t want to run this beta version, then reinstall the current version at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Just remember NOT to get the free McAfee security app.

After the uninstalling and reinstalling, I find that my Facebook game is more responsive now – my friend says hers is playable now and my Facebook gaming life has improved – I get to spend as little time on it as possible

I won’t say that it’s 100% solved – I still notice that Adobe Flash leaks memory frequently in Firefox and Google Chrome. To resolve this, feel free to restart the slow responding browser or wait for my next article on how to identify and close the memory leak.

Hopefully, this short guide here can solve your problem. If not, then your problem may be a different one or is more severe than this and I can’t really help you but direct you to this article and see for yourself that you are not alone in this.

Happy gaming!

First up are two very useful scripts for Greasemonkey that are called FB Purity and Facebook Fixer. FB Purity takes aim at annoying quizzes and blasts them out of Facebook alltogether. Well, technically they are just hidden from you using clever manipulation of CSS scripts, but at least you will enjoy a cleaner looking and less obnoxious home page. Next is Facebook Fixer, which does a whole lot of behind-the-scenes changes so that the new Facebook resembles the older style. More importantly, it adds a really useful feature whereby when you mouse over any images, it will automatically pop up the full resolution picture at the side. Very useful when browsing galleries.

A word of warning though, these scripts need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, and may cause instabilities if and when Facebook updates their website, which may happen often. So far I only had problems once, and the fix is simply to disable all scripts until an update comes along for it. These two have helped me the most in cleaning up and making Facebook more user friendly and they are thus highly recommended.

Next up is a Firefox extension called Archive Facebook, which does exactly that. After installing, navigate over to Facebook and a link should show, allowing you to backup all your pictures, messages, activity stream, etc. Everything related to your account will have a copy recreated on your hard drive, which is very useful for downloading all your profile pictures.

Finally, TweetDeck is the app of choice when it comes to integrating Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into a single application. The tool is currently the second most popular Twitter application (behind Twitter’s own website) and offers features such as sending and replying tweets, status updates to Facebook and creating groups to monitor selected conversations, as well as previewing thumbnails and un-shortening shorturls so that you can see which websites are going to. It’s wrapped up in a shiny Adobe AIR interface and performs well. I have already replaced Digsby with TweetDeck on my computer.

With these tools, Facebook and Twitter will hopefully work even better for you. Any other tools you can share which improves your experience on these two web services?

Why it’s Important to Claim Vanity URL for Your Username in Facebook?

Some of you may not even bothered to sacrifice your plans on THE DAY for a little silly trick like this. However, there’s something you need to know:

• Vanity URL is your digital identity.  If you plan for business or personal branding exposures via social media sites, there’s no reason why you should risk the chance of getting your very own vanity URL with Facebook – the world’s largest social networking site.
• An easier way to find your personal profile by search engine. Having it memorable and effortless for others to find you is the main idea.

Remember the domain-grabbing in earlier days? Pretty much the same type of frenzy. Only the webmasters are now fighting over it in Facebook.

The vanity URL grabbing spree will be conducted in first-come, first-served basis. Beneficial to users who owned their profiles before the feature was announced on 9^th June 2009. So if you’re a newbie in Facebook, well better luck on 28^th June then. Finger crossed that hopefully nobody will pick up the exact same branding name as yours. Also, don’t misspell your name, as it is not editable. And NO, You can’t try to sell Pepsi or whatever big names you grabbed either, it’s not transferable, and they could report you for infringement. So be honest and play fair, register your (brand) name only.

So all set for the game? Enjoy the Count Down… right now it says “0 days 11 hours 9 minutes 18 seconds”!