The Web has become such a force in commerce and culture that a group
of leading university researchers now deems it worthy of its own field
of study.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of
Southampton, in Britain, are starting a joint research program in Web
science. The MIT-Southampton partnership, the researchers emphasized, is
intended as a catalyst for Web science research at universities
worldwide.

Students of the future will no longer need to persue a Computer Science degree with an emphasis in Internet, but can earn a true Web Science degree, which "[goes] beyond algorithms and understand[s] the social dynamics of issues like
trust, responsibility, empathy and privacy in this vast networked space [of the internet]."

By Steve Lohr, The New York Times
/ Published: November 2, 2006

Check out the Publications and Events on the Web Science website for further information:  http://www.webscience.org/

Inspired by the truly inane (but no doubt true) posts of actual idotic agency and client comments on Adverbatims.com we are pleased to announce our new puzzler.

Send in your inane agency and client messages and the winner will receive, yes you guessed it, $50 in Fandango tickets. Contest starts now. And it closes a week from today. Judging will be by an independent party, most probably not me but definitely a Mortar employee.

To get you started here are a few choice items from Adverbatims:

“They loved it but the want to change the pictures, headline and design.”
(Agency, Account Executive)

“Can you ask the announcer to produce a whispering scream?”
(Client, Area Manager, during the recording of a radio spot)

“POS? What the fuck is that, another word you made up?”
(Agency, Account Executive)

“Make it wild but conservative!”
(Agency, Account Executive, to Art Director)

“Before negotiating something, I practice in the shower“
(Client, Marketing Assistant)

“There’s an X crossing the photo. When you send me the final art, it’s not going to be there, is it?”
(Client, Area Manager)

“Can you change the word ‘exquisite’ on the ad? Words including the letter X are way too complicated.”
(Client, Marketing Manager)

“It’s amazing how well you interpreted the brief. This piece is exactly
what we wanted, you could not have made it any better, I love it. But I
also think it’s too good. This is for a bigger client, a more
international one. We’re not like that. See if you can do something
shittier that we can use.”
(Client, same Marketing Manager)

“This is a picture of how I want the ad. I had to draw it in a napkin.”
(Client, same Marketing Manager)

And my absolute favorite:

"You’re going to rape every piece of crap on the shelf.”
(Client, Marketing Assistant, optimist about a colleague’s future product launch)

Enter your entries below or email them to me.

Here’s a new take on the childhood obesity epidemic. Seen on Adrants.

"Childhood obesity is everyone’s responsibility. Including ours. That’s why we’ve been committed to reducing the fat content in our children’s food since 2002 and have already removed over 50% of the saturated fat from our entire Captain Kid’s range".

Umm. But, what about the rest of your products, Cap’n?

This is a very easy, cool tool.

What’s a Clusty Cloud?
From: http://cloud.clusty.com/

A Clusty Cloud is a tool that webmasters or bloggers can use to instantly visualize a topic using the familiar tag cloud display. What makes the Clusty Cloud unique is that you can create a cloud based on any topic or query – you don’t need tags or months of content on a subject to create an interesting cloud.

Clusty
Clouds are generated using our search results for the topic you enter.
Since the tags you see come from Clusty, you can click on any of them
to go to Clusty’s search results. Using Clusty to generate the cloud
also ensures that it is always up-to-date because the clusters are
generated in real-time.

 What do you do with a Clusty Cloud?

Use
the Clusty Cloud for individual blog posts, blog sidebars, your
personal site or any other web page. You can also customize the look of your Clusty Cloud to match your site or topic.

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