With the rise of iTunes and easily downloadable music, some say the art of the album cover has gone the way of the 8-track. Not so fast. There is still a lot of great album cover art out there. Take Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective (see picture). Hours of optical and aural fun.

The guys at NPR’s All Songs Considered put together their list of favorite album covers of 2009 and they both agree that many times you can accurately judge the songs on the album by the cover. I have to agree with them on this. I have made many an adventure pick and been thoroughly pleased based on the cover art alone. Now I am hoping the art (and everything else) of 2010 is better than the movie.

If you’re looking to keep up with the Joneses, often you need only drive by their house and check out the post-holiday trash pile in order to determine the next items for your wish list (not that we encourage that sort of behavior or anything). That’s the concept behind this simple but well executed stunt by MINI in Amsterdam.

As a longtime Flickr fan and photographer of odd things, I’m excited about a new location-based game that integrates my kind of photography. It’s called Noticings and it’s all about sharing images of the things around you. Read Write Web calls it a Foursquare for photographers.

Players get points for things like being the first to notice something in a neighborhood or for noticing typos like this one:

It’s easy to play along. Sign in with your Flickr account and make sure you’re geo-tagging your photos and tagging them with “noticings.” There’s also a handy iPhone app that uploads your photos for you.

Once you start playing, check out the dashboard for recent activity. Points are calculated once a day at 15:00 GMT.

I love seeing new uses of social media tools out there and all in all, this appears to be a very cool use of Flickr’s location API.

When the holidays roll around, many folks in the advertising business can probably relate to this spoof of “A Charlie Brown Christmas:”

Charlie Brown and his weekend-working friends could have used some help from Mother. Their recent take on the holidays has been getting all sorts of attention.

They channeled the Nigerian scammer emails that promise big dollars in exchange for personal information, sending out a similar message to a few hundred people. They promised $10,000 to the first person who emailed back with their name and bank information. One person responded, leading to this video and sizable charitable donation:

Enjoy this creative approach and have a safe and happy holiday season.

Every now and then it actually happens: a useful new product comes together with well executed online and offline marketing efforts to create a perfect storm of promotion. The I.D. Case from Case-mate does just that. Here’s what’s so great about it:

The Product

It goes without saying that the I.D. Case from Case-mate is ultra-slim, adding minimal bulk to your iPhone (added bulk is why I have resisted an iPhone case for so long). But the really ingenious feature is the slot on the back, which will hold 2 credit card sized items. This could be your debit card and your I.D., business cards, cash, etc., making it perfect for any number of scenarios where you might opt to go sans wallet/purse. Check out this video of the product designers (Alex is a Savannah College of Art & Design alum) talking about how they arrived at the final prototype.

The Promotion

The second element of this success story is the promotion, both online and offline. Case-mate did a really good job of identifying a target audience for promoting the initial roll-out of the I.D. Case. The product holds immediate appeal to people who wish to carry as few items as possible when they go out. (Ladies, the little black dress rarely has pockets, does it?) There’s even a funny little website called The Complicators which profiles nefarious characters from the bar scene. Check out this footage of the brand’s field agents assuming the role of the Decomplicators as they give away free samples of the I.D. Case at the Sunset Strip Music Festival.

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

James Cameron’s Avatar has put 3D back in the news and most people usually only associate the term with bad monster movies from the 1950’s and 60’s when the fad pretty much died out except for the occasional Jaws 3D (not to mention you had to wear those silly red and blue paper glasses to enjoy the show).

The group NuFormer Digital Media from the Netherlands takes the idea of 3D out of the multi-plex and projects on the real world with some astonishing results. The above video shows off some pretty incredible 3D video animation projected on buildings and the video below is from the recent climate conference in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen - The Time Is Now from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

The Flyer’s Collection is a hilarious fake product line from JetBlue Airways created for those “unfortunate times” when its customers have to fly with the Other Guys. It includes items such as the Knee Jockey, the Full Body Compression Garment, and the Seat Back Beeper. The collection lives on a custom tab on JetBlue’s Facebook fanpage and is a great example of funny, engaging content that allows people to connect with the JetBlue brand at an emotional level.

The styrofoam cup is designed, to the chagrin of environmentalists, to be thrown away. Cheeming Boey sees styrofoam cups as a grand and cheap canvas for his art.

“The styrofoam cup itself represents the pop culture we live in, and in some ways, is the epitome of 21st century technology.”

One day Boey decided to draw a picture using a ballpoint pen on a styrofoam coffee cup (he’s since graduated to using a Sharpie - which Sharpie is very happy with). It was a very good idea. Since then he’s drawn on hundreds of cups and his cup drawings are sold for hundreds of dollars. While Boey can usually crank out a piece of work in a matter of hours he has spent up to three months working on one cup idea.

There’s a lot I could say about how this technology is going to revolutionize the gaming industry; about how this is truly (pardon the pun) game-changing. But I think it best just to tell you to watch the video and see for yourself.

Get them off your dog.

Your contribution can end child labor.

Fast drying cement.

When you use a mobile while you drive, your head is somewhere else.

Always use protection.

Stop Killer.

You can lose more than your patience.

See more over at TechieBlogger.