With Thanksgiving tomorrow, tis the season for sweets and treats.  A newspaper article about cookies sounds like a great idea.

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times has just an article today, but not one about recipes.  It is about Pepperidge Farm, the cookie company, which is employing social networking in a new advertising campaign.  While other companies establish a presence on an existing social network site by setting up a group, profile, or buying ads, Pepperidge Farm has launched artofthecookie.com.

The Art of the Cookie site is aimed at woman and helping them make connections through cookies. Sally Horchow, co-author of The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections, is a key spokesperson for the campaign.  On the site she posted a diary of a cross country trip she made this summer during which she spoke with women about friendships.  The site offers other tips about friendships.

Companies have taken a more serious look at social networking as many are either creating niche social network sites or participate on existing networks.  Clearly the notion of connecting customers with each other is gaining traction with the common practice of a company speaking to its customers.  

Pepperidge Farm didn't haphazardly decide to pursue a social networking centric campaign.  After conducting research in the homes of its customers, vice president and general manager Michael Simon explained to the NYT that "this notion of connection came up again and again…hectic lifestyles, life in general, has gotten in the way" of fostering friendships.  He expects positive results from portraying the sharing of cookies with others as a great way to make and strengthen relationships. 

It'll be interesting to see how this new campaign works out.  I wonder if a poultry company will launch a campaign about forging business deals over steak… 

I have an idea for The Economist Group, which has assigned six staffers from various divisions to develop an innovative web based product for the company that can pull content from any of its properties.  They're blogging about their progress on the Project Red Stripe blog and soliciting ideas from the outside world.  Since this group is developing an Internet based product, it better take advantage of what the web has to offer when it comes to interactive features.  My idea is a super-sized Big Mac Index section with community and interactive features that personalizes and expands the scope of the index. 

The Big Mac Index is an understandable way to present currency exchange-rate differences around the world since a Big Mac is a fast food item that is virtually the same to many of us.  Thus, it is simple to understand that Argentina's economy is relatively weak compared to the United States' economy if the Big Mac is significantly cheaper in Buenos Aires than it is in Boise. 

That seems simple enough, but why not flesh it out more? 

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Apparently in Texas, you need a high-tech microscope in order to see patriotism at work. CNN News reported yesterday that electrical engineering graduate students Jang-Bae Jeon and Carlo Foresca at the University of Texas at Dallas succeeded in building a mini-American flag. This flag isn’t just any mini-flag, however, it’s a nanoflag.

The flag built at UT Dallas is so small that it would take 10 of them to span the width of one human hair, reports CNN.
This was an experiment in what scientists call nanotechnology—the study of very little things. Despite the flag’s microscopic size (7 microns, to be exact), it has not been recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records, which claims they have no method of actually seeing the flag.
To put things in perspective, check out the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s “The Scale of Things”. As you can see from this chart, the flag built at the University of Texas is smaller than the head of a pin, a dust mite, and a human hair. It measures somewhere in the range of a red blood cell.
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