I am fascinated with bike messengers. They are the digital age equivalent of the Pony Express, navigating our treacherous streets with great speed and grace to deliver our stuff on time.

As designers, we can’t help but be inspired by the unique culture of bike messengers, visual and otherwise. Part athlete, part urban soldier, these riders personify the rebel zeitgeist that inspires brands and trends. Where they go, others follow, and that’s a lesson for brands. From the fixie craze to fashion trends like the messenger bag, bike messengers influence and inspire. Everything about them just screams “cool.”

In honor of these riders, I’ve assembled a few handpicked examples of mess culture from around the web: (mess = “messenger”).

The New York Bike Messenger Association website is the hub of New York’s messenger society. You’ll see that they don’t stop riding when they’re not delivering. They’re racing, playing bike polo, and riding to raise funds for fallen comrades. Don’t miss the wealth of content in their links section.

Moving a little closer to home, this article from OnMilwaukee.com honors Milwaukee’s sole bike-only messenger service, Breakaway Bicycle Couriers. When the weather shut down the post office, Breakaway riders toughed it out, delivering packages through the snow and ice – on road bikes.

And finally, the Mecca of mess, messmedia.org. What this site lacks in design, it makes up for in content. If it has anything to do with bike messengers, it’s on this site.

Sadly, I noticed much real estate on messenger sites devoted to memorials and fundraisers for messengers who have been killed or injured by motorists. Hopefully, that statement alone will inspire more people to give them the a little extra space.

I live right next to a big park, and I’m constantly amazed at the fact that it’s almost always empty. It’s the kind of place I would have spent much of my time as a kid. Of course, when I was a kid (here we go) we didn’t have MySpace, World of Warcraft or cell phones with internet access. Our version of World of Warcraft was hitting each other with sticks.

I won’t say those were better days, but I do believe we’re losing touch with the physical world. This article from The Guardian confirms that. It says that the number of people participating in outdoor activities has fallen precipitously since the 1980’s. The culprit? Videophilia, a preference for indoor media activities. Translation: MySpace, Facebook, RuneScape, texting, Nintendo DS, PSP, PS3, Wii, instant messaging, first person shooters, email, MP3 players and smart phones, to name a few. Who has time to go outside?

We need to make time.

The Guardian article goes on to say that by staying inside, we’re putting the environment at risk. People become environmentalists because they love the outdoors. You can’t fall in love with the outdoors if you’ve never been there.

But the environment is not the only thing to suffer as a result of our decreasingly active lives. According to our friends at the President’s Challenge, two-thirds of Americans are obese or overweight. Coincidence?

I humbly suggest that we all try a new game. It’s massively multiplayer (6+ billion users), high-rez and rendered in stunning 3D with immersive sound. It’s free to play and you don’t need any technology. It’s called the real world. Log out and give it a try! Unplug the kids and bring them along too. Throw a ball, ride a bike, chase each other around the park, play disc golf. If you’re short on ideas, visit the President’s Challenge website for some inspiration.

And don’t forget to take some pictures for your MySpace page.

Our friends at Two West have a great podcast called the Brand Show. Every week, they explore the brands people love, hate, and love to hate. Their guest list includes some of the best minds in the biz, including some familiar names from Hanson Dodge Creative. This week, our own Dawn Finnegan and Marty Ellery discuss our Active Insights research initiative. You can check it out here.

(Their segment starts about three quarters of the way through.)

Popular Science has rounded up the best green tech inventions of 2007. The winner is Nanosolar’s PowerSheet, a remarkable advancement in solar technology. It’s cool for lots of reasons: first, it’s cheap, especially compared to conventional glass panels. Second, it’s made on what amounts to a printing press, so it can be produced in rolls big enough to cover huge surfaces. Check out PopSci.com for the entire article, including a slide show describing PowerSheet’s construction and a video explaining its applications.