What would it sound like if you composed “music” out of every blip, bleep, squawk and squeak that emanates out of the multitude of gizmo’s that keep us company these days? It would probably sound pretty cool and better yet, you might be able to dance to it! At least that’s what the organizers of New York City’s 2nd annual Blip Festival 2007 are thinking.

The Blip Festival is a four-day international cultural event taking place in New York City this November into December, focusing on the 8-bit scene - musicians and artists who use low-bit videogame and computer hardware as their creative tools. The festival is the widest-reaching event in the history of the form, boasting a roster of over 40 international artists performing and exhibiting from places as diverse as Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Argentina, and across the United States.

The New York Times calls it the “Woodstock” for chiptunes.

Move over Cape Cods, cosmos and Long Island iced teas; there’s a new league of libations in town. Ecco Domani winemakers have concocted a line of mixed drinks they’ve dubbed “winetails.” This clever variation on the cocktail is mixed with Ecco Domani wines, fresh fruit juices and a number of other tasty treats, like ginger and chocolate.

Ecco Domani teamed up with Alex Ott, a master mixologist, to create scads of signature drinks. Every winetail is mixed with one of the three Ecco Domani varietals; pinot grigio, Chianti and merlot.

There are eight different winetails to wet your whistle, two for every season. This winter’s selections are the Ecco Sidro, a spicy mix of chai, apple cider and Chianti and the Cannella Domani, a mix of cinnamon, oranges, lemon, cloves and merlot, served hot.

To promote what Ecco Domani calls “the hottest new trend in drinks,” they have been hosting “Winetail Wednesdays.” They treat entire magazine staffs to their latest concoctions made by the master mixologist himself. They’ve held tastings at several magazine offices in the New York City area including People, Niche Media, Redbook, Women’s Day and NYLON.

While working at NYLON I was lucky enough to attend one of these “Winetail Wednesdays,” and take it from me, these drinks are delectable. My personal favorites would have to be the Ecco Cioccolato, a combination of raspberries, cocoa and Chianti and the Domani Limonata, a fresh blend of lemons, peach, apple, and guava juices and pinot grigio.

Ecco Domani wines are available at most local wine shops . Head on over to Ecco Domani for the full list of winetail recipes.

New Mexico is known for its interesting geography, diverse cultural influences and activities like skiing. But none of these elements creep into the state’s new ad campaign where TV commercials feature aliens and the tagline “the best place in the universe.”

The ad doesn’t explicitly mention New Mexico’s famous Roswell alien connection but the connection is clear and the X-Files style characters are creating an uproar amongst some New Mexico residents and tourism officials.

According to an Associated Press story:

“New Mexico has a lot to offer—we don’t need to bring our standards down,” said Ken Mompellier, head of the convention and visitors bureau in Las Cruces, the state’s fast-growing second-largest city, which has refused to use the alien ads to bolster local tourism pitches, as it normally would.

“My first question would be: What does this campaign show of the things that we are known for?” Mompellier asked. “I look at this campaign and I don’t see the fit. And the things I’m hearing from people, some of it is very negative.”

My guess is the TV spots wouldn’t be drawing so much negative attention if they used cute E.T.-like creatures instead of the scaly, grotesque ones that made the final cut.

The idea of terroir is a serious matter for growers of all sorts, not just grape producers in the wine regions. Coffee growers also rely on their location as a key identifier. For instance, Kona coffee only comes from the Kona district on the Big Island’s western slope (even though interlopers often use the Kona name illegaly to benefit from the equity in the “brand”.)

According to this Reuters report, Greece is now claiming feta for its own.

Greece has declared war on white cheeses, launching 2008 as the “Year of Feta” and hoping promotion of its trademark salty cheese will win more international clients.

Despite winning the exclusive right to call its white cheese feta in 2005, after a long battle within the European Union, Greece has a surprising small share of the international white cheese market, which is dominated by Denmark and Germany.

Feta is believed to have been produced in Greece for about 6,000 years from a blend of sheep and goat milk and is still a big hit domestically. The United States and Australia are the two largest foreign markets for feta.

Drum roll please.

The first full-length feature film to premiere exclusively on iTunes, before seeing theatrical distribution, is now here. The movie is called Purple Violets and for $12.99 you can download it right now and play it on your laptop, desktop, iPod or if you have Apple TV, your television.

Purple Violets is the ninth film from actor/director Edward Burns and when asked about how his film will play on an iPod he told the LA Times, “You don’t need to be sitting in a massive theater to experience two people sitting on a park bench trying to figure their lives out.”

For fans of his work it’s a win-win situation: there will be no waiting for the DVD to come out, or hoping Burn’s small, dialogue heavy, relationship film can elbow and/or nudge its way between the usual crop of big-budget holiday fare now showing at the mall.

Filmmakers like Burns want people to see their films and this quick jog around the bottleneck at the vaunted gate of the multi-plex is the inevitable path that many of them will gladly take. Will downloading movies take the place of the theater going experience? I highly doubt it. Just as video and then DVD made movie watching more convenient (and mobile), people still love to sit in the dark and watch movies on the big screen.

So, more and more “small” films will probably choose this new route, piping their creators’ cinematic dreams straight to the consumer via the Internet. Musicians have been doing it for years – eschewing CDs and their associated manufacturing costs – and delivering their sounds straight to the listener. Now it’s time for the filmmakers to do the same.

Cadillac is finally getting some accolades. Motor Trend has named the 2008 CTS its ’08 Car of the Year, saying it’s proof General Motors is capable of building a world-class vehicle.

The CTS was chosen from what Motor Trend called one of the toughest groups of cars in the award’s history. It was selected from a field of 18 vehicles that also included the new Honda Accord. In order to be eligible for the award, a vehicle has to be new or redesigned within a year of the award date of January 1, 2008.

The award is further proof that Cadillac is on the right track with the sporty, hip designs it’s been producing over the past several years. Motor Trend’s Editor-in-Chief Angus MacKenzie agrees:

“The CTS obliterates the old man image of Cadillac,” MacKenzie said. “This car will turn heads in the same way the elite European models do, but it is unmistakably American.”

According to dezeen, Croatian agency Bruketa & Zini? has designed an annual report for food company Podravka that has to be baked in an oven before it can be read.

Here’s the link to the brand: To be able to cook like Podravka you need to be a precise cook. That is why the small Podravka booklet is printed in invisible, thermo-reactive ink. To be able to reveal Podravka’s secrets you need to cover the small booklet in aluminium foil and bake it at 100 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes.

The mix tape occupies a special place in American culture. Some consider it an art form of sorts. Mix tape aficionados will tell you that a mix is like a personal statement or a reflection of a certain mood or memory. If given as a gift, the compilation serves as an outlet of self-expression. A lot of time and thought goes into the process of making the perfect mix, the song selection, the ordering, the name of the mix. The saying, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” definitely applies here. It’s about the whole package, and 5inch.com is making it a whole lot easier to create that perfect personalized package.

5inch.com is taking the mix tape (i.e. compilation CD) to another level with customized silk-screened CDRs. You’ve got your choice of over 50 quirky designs to choose from including orbiting satellites, a scene of the apocalypse and even a cassette tape for those feeling wistful. Now you can make that mix of heartbreak songs, slap them onto the CDR screened with a print of a composition notebook, write some custom liner notes and voila, it’s like your own personal audio journal.

The discs come in packages of 10, 25, 50 and 100. If you’re not willing to commit to one design, 5inch offers a custom sampler. Choose any 10 designs to create your perfect pack of CDs. Make them as diverse as the mixes you’ll be burning onto them. One for the road trip, maybe one to reminisce and of course one devoted to your biggest crush. With 5inch.com’s silk-screened CDs there’s a print for every occasion…or emotion.

CAMBRIDGE—Brisk winds blow orange-colored leaves from the trees and some of them make their way inside the I.M. Pei-designed Wiesner Building at MIT, the nation’s top technology school. Students, professors and vagabonds from industry are also bustling at an early hour this Friday, in anticipation of an intimate and heady two-day conference on media culture.

Futures of Entertainment 2, sponsored by MIT’s Comparitive Media Studies program and Convergence Culture Consortium is underway in Bartos Hall where Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green set the tone with a dazzling display of samples of this “convergence” we’re here to hear about. Jenkins starts by showing a clip from a 1953 program by legendary animator Tex Avery called T.V. of Tomorrow. He points out how 54 years ago people were envisioning the interactive medium now unfolding.

Jenkins talks about how TV programs are extending their storylines naturally into other mediums, like gaming and online. He says, NBC’s Heroes “embodies all the transformations underway in TV.” He says, TV isn’t an appointment medium today, it’s an engagement medium. We’re ten minutes in and already the audience is enriched.

Jenkins touches on CSI, Halo 3, the Geico cavemen, Colbert, indie film “Four Eyed Monsters,” SoulJa Boy, Luminosity, Harry Potter, Comic-Con and the iPhone on his way to a map of the convergent media culturescape. And this at MIT, a place where they build things!

Clearly one of the things they’ve built here is a fantastic media studies program, which is why people from Turner Broadcasting, AOL, MTV Networks, and agencies like Saatchi, Naked, Organic, Deep Focus, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Fallon, GSD&M and BFG are in attendance.

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Radiohead’s pay what you wish strategy for their latest album isn’t just influencing other bands. It’s carrying over into the world of tangible media. One of my fav publications Paste magazine recently started offering pay what you wish subscriptions and now Premier Guitar magazine is following suit.

Regular annual subscriptions to Premier had cost $14.95 and online content has been free. The magazine, which bills itself as a monthly for “serious and accomplished guitarists,” also created a social network for guitarists this year. The pay what you wish subscriptions will be offered to the magazine’s 15,000 current subscribers and to non-subscribers, according to Folio.

“What we’re looking to do is create exposure for a relatively new magazine,” says Peter Sprague, president of Premier parent Gearhead Communications.