FWA Honors Those That Made it 50 Million Visits Strong

The Favorite Website Awards (FWA) celebrates 50 million visitors (and counting!) by creating a subsite dedicated to you, the good user.

The "Favorite Visitor Awards" invites users to upload their images where "favorite websites" would normally be featured. Up top, a ticker continues counting the number of visitors the site has served.

Fun stuff; the mood's infectious, even. Work by Domani Studios.

Cadbury Enlists Canadians to Build Bicycles for Africa

"The Bicycle Factory" is an uplifting piece about the many uses of bicycles in Africa. Under the weight of a single enterprising pedaler, one bike can deliver food and water, or play the roles of ambulance and school bus.

Put together by The Hive/Toronto for Cadbury Canada, which is raising funds to send 5000 bicycles to Africa. Whenever users enter a Cadbury UPC at thebicyclefactory.ca, they're adding a bicycle part to somebody's spiffy new ride. 100 UPCs build a complete bicycle.

Nice way to add a hands-on dynamic to a good cause. Here's hoping Cadbury gets the 500,000 UPC entries it needs to meet its goal, because boy, that's a helluva lot of Fruit & Nut bars.

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Lee Clow Battles Gary Vaynerchuk For Future of Advertising

Mullen Chief Creative Officer Edward Boches, with ten round, blow-by-blow coverage, pits two great marketing forces, Lee Clow against Gary Vaynerchuk, against one another in a battle of the past versus the future. Examining each contender's claim to fame, approach to marketing, book publishing efforts, awards, Google juice, Twitter followers and other qualities, the fight ends in a draw.

Regarding Twitter follwers, Boches writes, "Lee Clow: Zero. Lee Clow's Beard, 19. He's a legend; he doesn't need Twitter. Gary Vaynerchuk: 540,000. You can argue who cares, but round nine goes to Gary."

Regarding quotability, Boches writes, "Lee Clow: "We're not in the advertising business, we're in the media arts business. We're using all forms of media to tell a brand story-and the media is everything a brand does." Huh? Gary Vaynerchuk: "People are always talking about what you're doing now... To me, it's not what you're doing now, it's about where you're going." Round ten goes to Gary."

So which will it be? Good old-fashioned, time-tested advertising or this new-fangled social media shit?

Twitter-twitter-twitter, and a Video Marketing Gig.

- Creativity launches design blog.

- After user freakout resulting from a small change to its replies feature, Twitter's decided to go back to the way things were. It's also promising to release features that enable individuals to customize their Twitter experience.

- Feed Company, the viral seeding firm that's given us this and this, needs an experienced Social Video Marketing Manager. The position is full-time and based in Southern California. Email josh [at] feedcompany [dot] com for more details or to turn in a resume.

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PA State Yields Glimpse into Life of Another PA -- Peter Arthur.

It's not often we're impressed by a tourism campaign, particularly for a state like Pennsylvania, which hasn't exactly wowed us with its past initiatives.

For PA Tourism, Red Tettemer rearranged the PA Stories effort it launched late last year. Now, instead of courting campy tales from real Pennsylvanians, "PA Stories" promotes the misadventures of one Peter Arthur, an ordinary Pennsylvanian whose two defining characteristics are a two-man scooter and his unrequited love for a red-headed waitress, who once served him some amazing shoofly pie.

If the look, feel and plotline vibe suspiciously like Garden State, we don't blame you; judging from the PR folks' eagerness to position this as an "indie love story," it was probably more than a little inspired by the slice-of-life indie film genre.

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Carl's Jr's Resident Burnout Shakes Milk Cows for Milkshakes

Some ideas should never see the light of day. "Making Milkshakes" is one of them.

To plug its new orange cream milkshakes, Carl's Jr. releases this mildly bestial ad in which a hipster dances around a cow and tries shaking the shit out of it. We hate him. And we don't feel thirsty in the slightest.

Brought to our attention by BL Ochman, who seemed equally repelled by the prospect of an orange milkshake after recovering from this instance of audiovisual molestation.

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Agency Makes 'Bloody Good Video Ads'

Surely, there are as many ad agency introductory pages as there are ad agencies but it's always nice to see old school horror movie tactics put to work. Especially for an agency that claims to make "bloody good video ads."

Success of 'Signs' Springboards Schweppes into YouTube Top 10

In a coup to position itself as the refresher of choice for discriminating grown-ups, last year Schweppes Europe launched the Schweppes Short Film Festival.

Like Little Minx's Cadavre Exquis ("Exquisite Cadaver") project, five directors from The Sweet Shop were tasked with creating short human dramas for the 'net, the only requirement being that each film contain a "Schhh Moment."

"Consequently all the shorts make reference to Schweppes at some point, however this product placement is thankfully subtle and clever," says Creative Review, which posted the films on its blog.

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Google Suffers Major Outage

We have no details other than hundreds of Twitter reports that everything Google-related, such as Analytics, Gmail, FriendConnect, AdWords, Docs, etc., is non-functional for most people. Today is Google Fail Day and will forever be a reminder of how precarious it is to depend on a single entity for so much.

As of 12PM EST, most Google services began to come back online.

California Milk Grafts More Human Stereotypes Onto More Heifers

Real California Milk's Happy Cow Auditions gets two new entries: Anna, who's Swedish and yodels; and Destynee, who wants exclusive grazing rights to her own field of alfalfa.

See the last audition we passive-aggressively hated.