I get by with a little help from my friends

Too swamped to blog? Turn to your awesome coworkers for post-worthy content!

From Barrett, like twenty years ago (sorry): Volkswagon taps into the "clean street art" trend. The gist: reverse vandalism by cleaning off parts of graffiti-stricken walls to create new messages. Volkswagon is using it for a green campaign, natch.

From Lisa: How can we use widgets to measure a message's momentum? This particular article deals with the 2008 presidential election, but the concept is much broader than that, especially as we look for new ways to mark the success of viral campaigns. Without some sort of standard Nielsen ratings for the web, we have to be a bit more creative and track the process as much as the result.

From Matt: Some kids can now use a LunchPrepay.com debit card in the school cafeteria, but now parents can see how you spent your lunch money. While I think the card itself is smart, the fact that parents can monitor one more aspect of their kids' daily lives raises the hair on my arms a little. Maybe that's just because I know what I thrived on in middle school, and how little of my parents' business I thought it was. To Matt's point, "Do kids have any privacy anymore?"

And from Ried: Check out Mycrocosm, a new piece of social software that lets you visualize "everyday data." Browse through the ways that people are using a more visual medium to show their little statuses-- comparable to microblogging, or as Ried puts it, a "graphic Twitter thing, sort of."