Hi Internet friends. According to our calculator watches, the most glorious time of the year is upon us. That’s right. South by Southwest (SXSW). This year, we’re doing it up big. In addition to sending a small army of producers, designers and creative directors to Austin, we’re partnering with Adrants, one of our favorite blogs, to cover the events of the conference.

For the uninitiated, SXSW has become the official cultural launching pad for all things digital, film and music. The learning is massive. Here’s a good overview of the brain food we’ll be gorging ourselves on for the next couple of weeks. Be sure to check back with us and Adrants for thought nuggets and the occasional random photo. We look forward to over-sharing.

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About a year ago, Mr. Charlie Sheen began one of the most awesomely bizarre meltdowns in modern celebrity history. Here’s our favorite recap.

So it is with an odd sense of pride that we announce #winning the 2011 AAF Mobile Bay “Best of Show” ADDY®. For a beer glass. A beer glass that allows one to carefully gauge where one falls on the Sheen scale.

Yeah. There you go. Anything can be an “ad,” right? If you’d like to purchase one of these award-winning™ glasses, please visit our store.

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Oprah. Love or like the gal (who can hate her?), I doubt you’ve spent more time thinking about her than I have. I also doubt that anyone besides someone selling something has spent so much time lobbying her for a favor.

Full disclosure: I am Red Square’s Oprah guy. Even before I worked at Red Square, I was their Oprah guy. I wrote the first 100 tweets for its @YoOprah Twitter project. Don’t know about Yo?

@YoOprah is one of our many internal projects. More than any other, it’s strictly a publicity project. Its purpose is to solicit a #FF from @Oprah for @redsquareagency (her first ever, as far as we know). The thinking goes: If only half a percent of Oprah’s followers followed us, we’d have 45,000 new followers.

So far we have written about 400 tweets at her (270 by me, 130 by Nick Ewertz). They have ranged in style from direct petitioning to word play to prose to sending @YoOprah on soul-searching adventures into the American west. Each tweet is treated as if it were a client-facing headline.

Now we’re adding line extensions. Last week saw the genesis of @DearestOprah, the high tea and croquet-playing, butler-mistreating aristocrat whose May 13th #FF Masquerade Brunch is, at least in her mind, the day on which the much sought #FF will be literally served to us on a silver platter. So how much do I think about Oprah? Here are some other @YoOprah spinoffs anticipating launch in early 2012:

@CiaoOprah (Bringing much needed ragu and ravioli to the #FF quest.)
@HowdyOprah (If Oprah won’t give up a #FF, @HowdyOprah’ll wrangle it herself.)
@NuqnehOprah (“Nuqneh” is Klingon for “hello.” Coming 2364, if we still have #FFs.)
@AvastYeOprah (Pirate Oprah. She’d walk the plank for a #FF.)
@BraaaaainsOprah (“Braaaaains” is how zombies say “Hello, could you spare a #FF?”)
@KupoOprah (Part Moogle, part Oprah. If you thought a Star Trek Oprah was nerdy, think again.)

Why so many Oprahs? There’s a chance she blocked @YoOprah a long time ago. And we still want a #FF. Maybe it’ll secure us a small place in Twitter history. Maybe it’ll help us leverage our brand into a new market. In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be working on @你好Oprah, but first I need to learn Mandarin.

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There’s been plenty of coverage on Facebook’s IPO, specifically on the riches soon to be distributed to various early investors in the company.

More interesting reading on the subject exists, and it comes directly from Facebook’s S-1 registration statement. A close study of the filing reveals insight into the company’s culture, their revenue model, the value delivered to end users and advertisers, and their view of the future. It’s the best read on Facebook yet.

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Update: Facebook announced Timeline for brand pages today. Here are the details.

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Conventional thinking in regards to Charlie Darwin’s theory of evolution is that biological change is the cumulative result of slow, continual and incremental processes. Think of changes happening in several, barely-perceivable units.

Another change model, punctuated equilibrium, states that species exhibit little change for long periods of time (stasis) interrupted by sudden and radical clusters or bursts of change.

Punctuated equilibrium has been applied to explain how change occurs in economics, organizational behavior and politics. And while an esoteric thought, it certainly seems applicable to the advertising business right now. Technological advances are revolutionizing the way people consume information, and those tasked with creating content for consumption are having to figure out how to adapt. Profoundly and at lightning speed.

Just a thought.

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