An interesting article at DMNews.com about the impending relaunch of About.com, which the New York Times bought earlier this year for $410 million. If the redesign works well at placing reliable information and user experience above shoving ads in site visitors’ faces, user traffic and ad dollars will necessarily follow, and the Times’ investment will wind up looking pretty savvy. (Will we see the Times start to print more higher-profile stories boosting the perception of unreliability of other popular online information services, like this one over at USA Today about John Seigenthaler and Wikipedia?) Oh, and what’s that about a “blog strategy”?

Pandora may be the coolest musical thing you’ve discovered since your iPod.

Enter a favorite artist or song, and Pandora creates a “radio station” of music for you, sort of a sonic variation on Netflix recommendations. Example: My “Bruce Springsteen” station is serving up music by Billy Joel, Tom Waits, John Mellencamp, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival … hey, works for me! The point, though, is also to discover new music you may not have heard before. In the case of my Springsteen station, I’m getting Sister Hazel, Bodeans, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Son, Ambulance.

You’re limited to the number of songs you can skip each hour (according to music licensing issues, Pandora says), but you can also ask why a certain song is played. When I asked why it played Nick Drake’s “Tow the Line,” it said: “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features milds rhythmic syncopation, acoustic sonority, repetitive melodic phrasing, acoustic guitar riffs, and acoustic rhythm riffs.” There are links to iTunes and Amazon, of course, in case you really like what you hear. Any marketer of new music not plugged into Pandora is missing out on a good potential sales channel.

I’m gonna have some fun playing with this. I bet you will, too.

I guess this is a form of experiential marketing … well, in the sense of your experiences are helping to market Madonna‘s new album, Confessions.

Here’s the deal: Call 1-888-2-CONFESS and confess. Before you do, Madonna herself will remind you that by confessing, you’re also consenting to your confession being used “in any form, at any time, until the end of time — so think twice if you’ve been naughty.”

The confessions get aggregated into a Podcast, of which there are currently nine installments. The results are a mixed bag. (“I put my darks in the laundry with the whites!” winds up juxtaposed with “I’m a sales rep who gets customers by sleeping with them.”) At its most poignant, all this is, really, is an audio version of the superlative Postsecret blog. But it’s also an outlet for crank callers and self-promoters (I wonder how many hits a URL touted on the Podcast is likely to get), as well as some creative shenanigans that occasionally generate real humor (one guy calls to profess his love of Garry Shandling; later, he calls back to confess he has a thing for Charles Grodin, too).

Ultimately, though, all this user-generated content is served up in service of helping Madonna sell more CDs and make more money. For the goofballs and the cranks and the “let me see if I can come up with something that’ll make the Podcast” folks, well, they’re just having a bit of fun. But what does it say about the person making a genuine confession?

(Madonna is so off my radar screen anymore, so thanks to Ken Leonardo over at Commotion! for the heads up on this one.)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) tracking Santa, and yes, there’s an official Santa-tracking site. It’s clearly a work in progress: As of this writing there are several “Check back soon” links, text isn’t flowing into the white space properly (at least not on Firefox), the Santa Puzzle game link leads nowhere, and there are missing images. I hope the NORAD elves pull it together soon — the big day is just three weeks away. At least they have an MP3 of the United States Air Force Academy Band performing “Santa Wants A Tuba For Christmas.”

Beyond getting the basics right, a whole lot more could be happening here — and should, considering it’s NORAD’s golden Santa anniversary. Hey, as long as you’re going to do it, do it right. For example, why not develop a fun little desktop app that looks like an active radar screen, maybe with the map on the screen able to be adjusted to the user’s location. A countdown of shopping days wouldn’t hurt, either. (Oh, crap, that reminds me …)

“We don’t stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing.”
—George Bernard Shaw