Free Wine for Bloggers!

If you’re one of those lucky bloggers who lives in the U.S., the Mankas Hills winery will send you a free bottle of wine. The winery is fairly new and is trying to get the word out on their wines.

It’s all in the pursuit of good “word of mouth” marketing and to be fair, you should blog if the wine is crappy as well as if it’s good.

Let me know if you take advantage of this. I’m curious.

Inconvenient

Brooke and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth tonight, which was fantastic. The horrible thing was sitting through three car commercials before the screening. I’ve been starting to count the number of commercials that are for cars and I’d say, according to my unscientific guess, that one out of every three commercials I see these days are for automobiles or things that support the automobile industry. We are truly addicted to these things. I don’t mean to sound high and mighty. Though we don’t own a car, we borrowed my dad’s gas-guzzling SUV to drive up to see Brooke’s parents this weekend. But the car culture is so pervasive, we don’t even notice it anymore, and I think that’s dangerous.

TED Talks

TED is an elite conference designed around issues in Technology, Education and Design, and is notoriously selective about who gets invited. Even with an invitation, it costs $4,400 to attend. Now, they’re making online versions of several speakers’ talks available for free. So far, I’ve only checked out one, but it’s a keeper.

Hans Rosling is public health expert and the founder of Gapminder, a non-profit initiative to bring global health and economic statistics alive. His presentation is incredible and really brings some positive news from a huge pile of seemingly boring numbers. On the Gapminder site, you can download a number of animated presentations of global reports. Rosling’s work seems to embody the perfect synthesis of technology, education and design. Check out an online version of some of Gapminder’s work.

You’ll need the Flash plugin installed to watch online, but you can also download video or audio. Other speakers in the series include Al Gore and David Pogue.

Who Has God On Their Side?

I clicked on a strange Google Ad today. Nice to see that Campus Crusade for Christ is using the World Cup as an evangelistic opportunity. Jesus And The World Cup is basically an evangelistic tract laid out in the green and gold of Brazil’s team colours. Is this a hint as to whom God favours?

My favourite quote from the page: “If soccer is your source of happiness, then your life can go up and down.”