(Photos by Walter Kitundu)

Brin told the crowd how tinkering with the G1 gives him pleasure: "It's just very exciting for me as a computer geek to have a phone I can play with and modify." Page mostly stood there with a silly grin on his face.

Contrast the willy-nilly performance with Apple CEO Steve Jobs's meticulously planned iPhone announcements. It serves as a convenient illustration of the differences between the Apple's mobile strategy and Google's. Apple's iPhone offers millions of consumers a simple, structured experience — just as Jobs's bullet-point keynotes focus on marketable sound bites. The G1 is an open, developer-friendly phone that — like Brin and Page's slapdash appearance — thousands of geeks will appreciate and few consumers will bother to decipher.

Many of the 367 commenters seem to have no idea what Twitter is. "Guess I'm a figment of my own omagination [sic]. I've never heard of Twitter. " writes AdmiralGreenscreen in remarkable English for a YouTuber. "neither have I thank god," says flybreath.

Just another attention/fame/pseudo fame/friend/dating pile of crud site that everyone says you have to join or you're no one, in other words - a free thinking, unique individual who has reasonable fun on and knowledge of the Internet knows it's all toss :)

Here are the lyrics if you'd like to sing along.

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter
And if you aren’t there already you’ve missed it
If you haven’t been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged
You might as well not have existed

In the old days it was all about achievements
Collecting all your trophies in a shrine
Then everybody came across the internet
And suddenly you had to be online

A home page was all you really needed
To seem like a success but not a geek
As long as you updated semi-annually
And checked your email once or twice a week

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

Technology was moving rather quickly
And the next thing you needed was a blog
With intimate and detailed press releases
And now and then a photo of your dog

More recently the students brought us Facebook
And everybody has a hundred friends
The parties in the photos look amazing
They’re not so great but everyone pretends

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

Now you need to publish every movement
And every single thought to cross your mind
I’m told the Twitterverse is full of rubbish
But most of us are actually quite refined

We validate each other’s insecurities
And brag about the gadgets that we’ve bought
We laugh out loud at every hint of jolliness
And try to self-promote without being caught

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

If you don't, you probably think that the Web 2.0 bubble will never burst. If you do, you were probably developing a wicked taste for single-malt scotch, cocaine and Internet porn — and have the collection agency notices from rehab-facility bills to prove it. Either way, your perception of reality is sufficiently warped that you'll find the scenario plausible enough to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the gags. Certainly more credible than the hypnotism macguffin in Office Space.

• Dog
• Disco ball
• Pirate flag
• Exercise spheres
• Free eat-in lunch
• Costco snacks and drinks
• Ikea desks and Aeron chairs
• Founder who says "cool" nine times in three minutes
• Conspicuous daytime drinking

• 0:55 Loic Le Meur is worried about the economy.
• 1:14 Brandee Barker hides behind a fern, says Facebook will never sell to Microsoft
• 2:30 BillShrink’s Peter Pham says a lot of startups are going to go under
• 2:36 Randi Zuckerberg wants you to register to vote
• 3:32 Steven Levy says the arrow points no where but up
• 5:43 Israeli superinvestor Yossi Vardi says that Lehman Brothers stock isn't worth as much as World of Warcraft shields.

Yahoo, triumphant over a host of other wannabe Web portals in the '90s, resurgent in the early part of this decade, has never really gotten used to not being No. 1. Apple, for all its arrogance, recognizes that the Mac is not the best-selling PC brand.

Yahoo's marketing department should spend all its time explaining to Internet users why they should use Yahoo instead of its competitors. That's what Apple does with its "Mac vs. PC" ads. Each commercial humorously sticks to its talking points comparing the advantages of Macs over PCs. Apple does this because it remains far behind in the PC market and needs to convince customers to switch from more popular products.

That's what Yahoo needs to do in search. But instead of saying why users should, it markets itself the way Apple markets the iPod — as a ubiquitous aspect of a certain way of life. Apple can do this because it already dominates a market full of similar digital music players. A better product helped sell the iPod to the masses. But an advertising campaign which keeps people associating themselves with the brand reinforces Apple's dominance.

Yahoo doesn't have that luxury. It still dominates, but in tiny niches. It needs to say why Yahoo News is better than Google News and the New York Times. It needs to say why Yahoo Fantasy Sports games are the most popular on the Web. It needs to say why anyone who owns a digital camera should upload their pictures to Flickr, not Facebook. But instead, Yahoo spends all it's time trying too hard to convince users how wonderfully wacky it is.

What's tragic about that is that the brand Yahoo is trying to create isn't particularly attractive. Look, it screams, we're so desperate to be seen as kooky kids, we're willing to hit our top executives in the face with rubber balls!

Perhaps the real target of the campaign is Yahoo's own employees. Morale is in the dumpster at its Sunnyvale headquarters. "Bleeding purple," Yahoo's longtime catchphrase for displaying loyalty to the company, has come to refer to the endless exodus of employees. Wearing purple may boost the mood of longtime Yahoos. But it will hurt recruiting for those outside the cult. What adult wants to work at the company which still hasn't figured out what it wants to be when it grows up?

SXEPhil, "Doda Elektroda has some huge......": 4,871,621 views

Jessica Rose as Lonelygirl15, "My First Kiss": 2,645,339 views

KevJumba, "Ask KevJumba": 3,868,597

Kevin Nalts, "Farting in Public": 5,565,515

Michael Buckley, "Britney Spears & Paris Hilton new tape w/ OSAMA?!": 4,514,905

Charles Trippy, "Boobs Are Awesome!": 1,034,687

Cory "Mr. Safety" Williams, "The Mean Kitty Song": 12,413,649

I didn't know they make trailers for books now. "The World of Anathem" is by Seattle videographer Brady Hall, who I'm told makes a decent living from the genre.

What we still don't get: Why is Jesse Draper bothering? Most videobloggers we know are hoping to parlay a career covering tech — and by "covering tech," we mean "flouncing around on camera with an iPhone" — into a Hollywood star turn. With "Valley Girl," Draper is going about things backwards.

No. While exurban exiles will feel the pinch on payments and at the pump, denser inner-urban communities will probably see rents increase as desperate homeowners look to cut costs and find job opportunities. And it's not like you can expect affordable housing in the likes of Belmont and Saddle River, Ross or Sag Harbor, Piedmont or Greenwich. As bad as renting is long-term for your retirement and rent control may be for their housing markets, apartment dwellers with fixed costs are the least likely to move back in with parents right now.

The story: Two British guys adopt a lion cub in 1969, raise it for a couple years and then release it into the wild. Later, the pair go to to Africa to visit their old friend. Despite warnings that the cub will no longer recognize its old friends, it decides not to maim them. Or something. Anyway, watch the clip below and trust me, you'll squirt a few drops. 13 million others have, which is exactly why, during these troubled economic times, Sony Pictures just announced it plans to adapt the clip for a feature called "A Lion Called Christian."

Rule No. 1: Convince the video's participants that the end product will be less embarrassing if they don't worry about being embarrassed while they make it. Get your people to either commit themselves fully to the project, or stay out of the way. Vimeo's companywide lip synch of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" wouldn't work nearly so well if the girl listening to her iPod at the beginning didn't keep such a straight face. Know what else doesn't hurt? Actually memorizing the lyrics.

Rule No. 2: Get the heavies involved. Digg's "Groove Is In The Heart" from Mark Trammell wouldn't be nearly so worth watching if CEO Jay Adelson didn't start rapping two minutes in. Tocquigny's video featured only interns, making it seem like the real executives didn't take the PR project seriously. What kind of example does that set for the monkey-see-monkey-do younguns?

Rule No. 3: Plan meticulously and practice. Here's "L'amour a la française" from AOL France. Note how precisely the performers hit their marks. Note how cleverly new singers appear on the screen. That's dedication, people! (It probably didn't hurt that the most of these people knew they were about to be laid off and probably spent most of their remaining time working on this video.)

Rule No. 4: Learn to edit. Facebook code monkeys — here dressed as White Ninjas for the company's annual games day festivities — aren't actually supersneaky ninjas; that they appear as such comes from careful editing. A hint: Editing usually takes longer than filming.

Rule No. 5: Feature the most attractive coworkers prominently. Sure, a companywide video will probably include everyone from the company. But give the longest shots to the most attractive office-workers, like the girl listening to the iPod at the beginning of the Vimeo video or the swirling blonde in the middle of the video below made by Leonardo Dalessandri's production company, "Tambureddu." Also, be a little cynical and use a frame from one of those shots for the clips' still frame, which will appear in searches and embedded placements in blogs.

Did you catch it? Asha claims that her network — presumably run by the Linksys router — is called "Geeking Out." But the shot of her Apple laptop shows that she's connected to a computer-to-computer network — most likely a wireless link to Asha's iMac, which can easily be configured to broadcast its Internet connnection via Wi-Fi.

Much easier than configuring a Linksys router, and a great ad for Apple technology — so easy, even a trust-funder can use it! As a promotion for Cisco, Asha's video utterly fails. We won't even get into her claim to have "wireless speakers," when the wire housings on the wall are obviously visible.

Remind us, what's the point of a celebrity endorsement? Ah yes — to have some of the endorser's qualities rub off on the product. If Cisco wants to be known for a glossy surface hiding technical ineptitude, it's found its star in Asha.

Playing on an early meme about home computers, Alan Alda shows how an Atari will make your kid a better typist than you. Oh, and it plays games too.

Apple flaunts its Y2K-proof products with a sad monologue from 2001's HAL 9000.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion teaches you how to get the color you want from your I-can't-decide girlfriend. Sexist? Not as much as the talk about Sarah Palin at Whole Foods this morning.

A clever Web page ad for Apple that ties two ad spots on the page together. John Hodgman's PC guy undermines the ads a bit by making me feel sympathetic for him.

Seinfeld's pointless but funny Superman ad for American Express's product warranty feature was probably what convinced Microsoft he could do the same for Windows. If the writers of the Microsoft/Seinfeld ad had created a similarly out-of-character character for Bill Gates, it might've worked.