The web is changing the way musicians are marketed, and the way artists and fans connect. If you are in a band or into music merchandise, you need to check out Tunipop. Currently in beta, Tunipop bills itself as “the online source for discovering all forms of music-related fan gear and interacting with other members.”

Tunipop is not a retail outlet or a source for CDs, DVDs or digital downloads. Rather, Tunipop strives to help fans easily find official sources of available music merchandise like T-shirts and posters. It also helps artists market their fan gear more effectively.

The Merchandise Resources section directly links artists to apparel printing, on-tour merchandise and fan club management services, just to name a few.

The site will soon have about 5,000 pages of content which will mainly consist of artist listings within Tunipop’s Go2Merch directory. Coldplay, Elvis Costello, Alicia Keys and the Beastie Boys are some of the artists represented. Tunipop will eventually grow this directory through user-generated artist listings.

Future site enhancements include a syndicated blog, news, links and feature sections. A mobile version of the site is also in the works.

Tunipop wants to be a player in a $6 billion global market. They appear to have some traction, having beaten MySpace to the punch thanks to MySpace’s decision to delay their music merchandise push until later this year.

Tunipop has an interesting angle worth exploring, so check out the site or watch for it on your favorite band’s MySpace or Facebook page

Since June first, we’ve had the most rain ever recorded here in Wisconsin. Rivers and streets are overflowing, basements are flooded, and you may have read about the lake that washed away. Here in Milwaukee, the floods we’ve gotten aren’t as devastating as those in Iowa or even a little further west in our state. After suffering mostly wet basements and some mildew, local news coverage is filled with people in boots trying to salvage their soaked possessions.

But what was interesting to me was a throwaway comment one man made on the news. Standing in two feet of water in his basement, he said he was “getting rid of all the stuff he didn’t need anyway.” It made me think of something I’d read recently about a new grass-roots movement, The 100 Thing Challenge.

The premise is this: if you have too much stuff, it can weigh you down. Editing your personal living space down to 100 things will help you let go of the past and move forward. Added benefits are that you can easily find things and you will gain a sense of control over your life. And who wouldn’t want that? Whittling your stuff down to 100 items is a little hardcore, but I think we could all stand to “challenge” our things, one by one, and get rid of what we don’t need.

Of course, I’m not advocating throwing all your stuff away in the trash. Gently used possessions are always welcome at Goodwill, and for more beat up items, try offering them on Freecycle, an online collective of community-based giveaway programs. In fact, I just used Milwaukee Freecycle to give away 12 pairs of ripped jeans to a teacher who will use them for an art project.

I can imagine that many of those people cleaning their basements out may be wishing they’d purged their possessions before the flood. Clear your clutter and concentrate on more important things in your life!

Twitter is a truly unique channel which both mimics and complements existing communication media.

Twitter is:
• public and published — like a blog
• conversational and concise — like text messaging
• available via a subscriber model — like RSS or Atom
• a social networking tool — like MySpace or Facebook.

In 140 characters or less, I regularly update my Twitter status via text message — which, in turn, automatically updates my Facebook status. This blog entry will be announced to those following ActiveMinds on Twitter, and simultaneously broadcast via our RSS feed.

Some call it “micro-blogging,” but this label is misunderstood. The Twitter FAQ (and certain Penny Arcade comic strips) give the impression of an extended Facebook status — where the egocentric can broadcast even the most mundane day-to-day occurrences. However, spend just a few minutes watching TwitterVision, and you’ll realize its true nature as a global conversation. As a user, I can be selective about what I’m “hearing,” and I can listen and respond to anyone in the room. More impressively, this conversation is growing rapidly. The Twitter user base has doubled since January to 1 million users, with an impressive 20% daily usage rate.

Others have written about the multitude of marketing opportunities this new medium provides, and its growing popularity does nothing to hamper this. As an information broadcast tool, Twitter has no entry cost for your business and a simple subscription model for your audience. Even better, so long as you provide content that interests this audience, they are captive. Your contribution to the conversation appears as an alert in the desktop clients, iPhones and web browsers of those listening. Compare this to a banner ad or a headline alongside hundreds of other messages in an Inbox or RSS aggregator.

Like any technology, Twitter is no silver bullet. The primacy of content does not change – it’s king, right? If anything, the terse nature of Twitter makes it easier to update, but it also makes it more critical to ensure your 140 characters are well spent.

So, if you’ve got it, why not tweet it?

As a long-distance runner, my father taught me to warm up before my runs, cool down and always stretch afterwards to prevent injury. But even after following this fatherly advice, I’ve always had running-associated injuries (admittedly I’m also chronic “run-through-the-pain” runner which probably doesn’t help).

A recent New York Times article even discusses this disconnect, “The truth is that after dozens of studies and years of debate, no one really knows whether stretching helps, harms, or does anything in particular for performance or injury rates.”

So, why do I continue to stretch? The reason I stretch after my runs is more emotional than physical. There’s nothing better than calming my body down to an almost meditative state by concentrating my movements. Unlike the “runner’s high” I get while I’m running, it’s rewarding to breathe a slow, controlled pace and think about my accomplishment. It’s my way of coming back down to earth.

At HDC, we continuously seek to understand the mind of the Active Lifestyle Consumer. And it strikes me as interesting that as an active lifer, my emotional state is associated with my fitness activity, but it’s also more complex. My emotions change from a state of excitement/enjoyment while I’m doing my activity to a calm/relaxed emotional state as I stretch from my workout. As marketers, we need to acknowledge these emotional complexities as we think about the consumer’s entire fitness experience and what they are really seeking from that activity.

For my peace of mind, I think I’ll keep stretching.

We are essential to success in this increasingly complex, technology-fueled age.

We are evangelists for the combined power of technology, creativity and communication.

We know that good design is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

We are the high priests of a new economy driven by the consumer, hungry for ideas.

We create simplicity out of complexity.

We use our talent to define, inspire, plan and create.

We are driven to see the entire landscape, identify patterns, and create sustainable solutions.

We believe in the nobility of creating solutions that are elegant, effective, measurable and beautiful.

We stand between people and the information they need, the things they’re seeking and the human connections they crave.

Ken Hanson is the founding partner of Hanson Dodge Creative, America’s leader in creating Brand Experience Design, Marketing and Technology focused on the Active Lifestyle Consumer.

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 was doing some online searching the other day about passion and inspiration – key concepts of both innovation and communication – and I went to www.ted.com, a site dedicated to spreading ideas, to see what was new.

Each year, some of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers share their insights on general themes at the TED conference in Monterey, California. Each year, these speakers share both their passion and their knowledge on fascinating topics, and you can find them online.

TED stands for Technology, Education and Design and has an interesting history. The first TED conference was organized by Richard Saul Wurman in 1984, and after a six-year hiatus, it became an annual event in 1990. Wurman had already made a name for himself by developing the popular ACCESS travel guidebooks. The concept for these books was to present information the way we seek it — in this case, by location. Wurman coined the phrase “information architecture” and demonstrated the concept with this series.

The TED conference grew from Wurman’s observations of a convergence trend among three disciplines: technology, education and design. He saw potential in bringing together the greatest minds in each, to share ideas and explore new concepts. At the time, he was also an ongoing host and participant of the International Design Conference in Aspen, which was the leading multi-disciplinary business and design conference. TED took the concept further, as an invitation-only event. Additionally, each speaker is challenged to “give the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes.

Now, you can watch and listen to these presentations online. The content is presented in video and audio formats. You can search the content by theme, speaker, popularity or volume of online discussion. Once you discover TED, It won’t take long to find your favorite presentations or speakers. Here are a few of mine: Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto; William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle; and Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce.

Best of all, the videos are released under a Creative Commons license, which means you can redistribute them freely and legally. To me, this proves that the TED people are truly more interested in spreading ideas than trying to sell something or promote a hidden agenda.

The convergence concept couldn’t be more relevant today. Branding, like everything else, is increasingly social and technological. TED is a valuable resource for our work, but it’s also a source of inspiration and information about the increasingly complex and connected world-at-large. And for many of us, those small moments of inspiration and connection are what make us passionate about our work, and our lives.

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.

I just read this quote in a new book with the world’s longest title, called “Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership” by Joseph Jaffe, John Wiley & Sons press, 2007:

In the “age of engagement,” there are four fundamentals to keep in mind:

1. The Internet is the center of the universe.
2. The experience is the brand differentiator.
3. The database is the primary marketplace.
4. The technology is the explosive ingredient.

I found it to be a very helpful way of thinking about the collision of marketing and technology that we continue to explore and exploit.

I feel that Hanson Dodge Creative is in a very nice position to exploit three of the four fundamentals in this age of engagement. With the database being our next frontier to conquer. One that we are determined to take on.

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.