My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Operating System Interface Design between 1981-2009

This is like taking a walk through the past 20 years of my digital life. Looking at old interfaces like the first Macintosh OS brings early projects and experiences back to mind. It’s notable how today, even the open source systems have a slick look.

ESPN Aims to Be the Home Team, All Over America

So many questions these days about the future of news organizations. Local is undoubtedly a large, uncharted territory online. ESPN is making an interesting run at the sports vertical. Two points I find noteworthy: They’re going down to the high school sports level, and they’re using citizen journalism in the process. While I don’t know the inner workings of the publishing industry, I can imagine that for the average high school sports star, there’s nothing better than being featured on ESPN, no matter what variation of the network it involves.

iPhone Games: Idea Attracts Coke, Audi, but not Many Others

I know I’ve said this before, but iPhone games are a long shot for brands as a mass market vehicle. If you have a specific way of extending your service, then I can see an app that provides utility making sense. But with so many free, and good games out there, pure entertainment is a tough arena to compete in.

Photoshop in movie posters and ads

A fun look at how movie posters go through the Photoshop wringer.

Facebook Now Lets Advertisers Use Your Picture

I’ve been waiting for something along these lines to happen with Facebook Connect. A man is served an ad for a dating service, with a headline “Hot Singles”. The “hot single” featured in the ad? His wife. Facebook has been adding more and more privacy controls, but the default on FB Connect is pretty wide open. And changing the default settings on an app or platform is probably as common as reading the service aggreement before signing up.

Summer At MoMA – Using Facebook Connect to match your interests

I have to follow the train wreck above with a good example of how Facebook Connect should be used. Facebook, of course, has quite a lot of info about each user. Facebook Connect takes the info and contextualizes is across just about any online experience. In this case, MOMA has used your various interests to try and project what art exhibits you’ll most like. It’s not a flawless example, but certainly moving in the right direction.

Does social media really correlate with the bottom line? Color me skeptical

I’m on board with this contrarian view to a research report posted earlier this week (the link to the original report is in the article). Social media is powerful, but this really stretches the correlation between social media action and business success far too thinly, IMO.

MySpace: A Place for Gaming

So, MySpace is getting killed in the social media space, and their resurrection will come in the form of gaming? My only issue with this logic is that by all industry projections I’m aware of, the big growth opportunity in the gaming industry’s future is social gaming. And what’s the dominant platform in social gaming right now? Facebook.

Top 12 Social Gaming Trends

In case you doubt my previous assessment, here are 12 social gaming trends. Note how many of these trends align with Facebook’s features and strengths. Collections and wish lists, gift invites, donations as revenue, virtual goods, using friends’ data, iphone. What I also find interesting is how the campaign ideas we’re coming up with for clients are involving these same types of features. Just as movies and TV shows were often the driving inspiration behind many TV campaigns of the past, games will likely be the driving force for more and more campaigns of the future.

Online gaming: Has Evony become the most despised game on the web?

Ironic that while so many other industries are exploring ways to integrate gaming into their ads, a game campaign resorts to good old T & A as the foundation for their campaign. I too saw these adds all over the Web. The writer speaks about a general migration from more game play-oriented ads, to little more than women’s breasts. My guess is that this is simply campaign optimization. Finding out which ads are working, and going with those. And at the end of the day, the real probably could be that the game just sucks.