How Dentsu London and BERG London create stop-motion iPad light paintings: “We extrude the single 3D animation frame as light in the air.” Brilliant.

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Hot damn. Is it after midnight already? Figures.

I’ve lost another night to the SXSW 2011 Panel Picker.

In my defense, there is a veritable ton of ideas to reckon with this year (2412, to be exact). Many are killer. And if, by some stretch of the imagination, you don’t have the time or energy to sift through them all, don’t fret: here are some standouts to get you started.

So peruse ‘til your heart’s content. All I ask is that if you like what you see, show it. Vote. Comment. Spread the word. The Panel Picker’s only open through Friday, so do what you can over the next 48 hours. Then, come Saturday, we can all rest easy.

• Gamestorming. Dave Gray, XPLANE.
• Designing for Crisis. Jeromy Henry, Google.
• Love, Music & APIs. Dave Haynes, SoundCloud.
• UX, UI and Glitter Graphics. Mike Macadaan, MySpace.
• Why Civilization Needs More Hackers. Jeff Lindsay, Twilio.
• Your Meetings Suck and It’s Your Fault. Kevin Hoffman, Happy Cog.
• The Attention Defecit: How Brands Stay Sharp. Marty Pytlik, Stink Digital.
• Last of the Launch-and-Leave-‘Ems. Anjali Ramachandran, Made by Many.
• Websites Aren’t Enough: the New Interaction Design. Dan Mall, Big Spaceship.
• CITY AS PLATFORM: Gameplay in the Third Space. Sara Thacher, Nonchalance.
• Bartering Life: the Trend of Online Exchange Services. Rachel Clemens, SwapYourShop.
• Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work. Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin.
• Behavior Design: Stop Being Neutral, Start Influencing Decisions. Leslie Chicoine, Adaptive Path.
• Your Caption Here: How to Manipulate Images Without Photoshop. Austin Kleon, austinkleon.com.
• The Great Paywall Experiment: Evolving Digital Subscription Models. Donald Chestnut, SapientNitro.
• Let’s Get Naked: Benefits of Publicness Vs. Privacy. Jeff Jarvis, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
• Futureproof Publishing: Interactivity, Magazines, Journalism and Augmented Reality. Benjamin Palmer, Barbarian Group.

And then, of course, there are the panels from my co-workers at Springbox and me. Do us a kindness and send some love our way.

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After a decade of daydreaming about Portugal, Sara and I finally made it out there for a couple of weeks. I can honestly say it was worth the crazy long wait.

Our trip began and ended in the Estremadura, where we stayed in Amadora for a week and used the almighty Lisbon Card to check out the region together. Sure, we had to deal with some thugs in the train station once. And yes, a baby threw up at my feet. It was still pretty fantastic.

Week two was horse of a different color. It started with a drive up the Autostrada to the GPS-proof part of the Beira Litoral. Once there, we village-hopped around the countryside and partied nonstop with Sara’s extended family. Festivals, pig roasts, you name it. Voa (Sara’s grandmother) outlasted us every night.

Humbled, we’d retreat to Voa’s house — a place called the Italu — which everyone we met seemed to know is haunted by a playboy ghost named Amaral (only women can see him, but he’s known to tickle men’s feet). Needless to say, our willingness to stay there earned us instant cred. Or scorn. Seriously, it’s hard to tell the difference when you don’t really speak the Portuguese so much.

Plenty of other stuff happened during our trip, too. I won’t bore you with the details, but I will encourage you to flip through our photos for more of the story. Or we can just say we had ourselves a time and leave it at that.

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As Facebook’s torrent fiasco and the Wikileaks war logs controversy have made crystal clear, big data has gotten too big to ignore. While we’d all like to think our data is secure, that belief runs contrary to the train of thought that information wants to be free.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with that line of thinking, it’s hard to deny that projects like IBM Research’s World Fact Dashboard empower us to look at the world in amazing new ways. In fact, one could argue that what we lose in personal privacy, we gain in collective knowledge.

So, what do you think — is it worth the tradeoff?

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Scratch that — I know Dustin likes me. He said so the other day! :D And he’s got pretty high standards, so I know he isn’t just saying that to get into my beta like some people (I don’t even have one, haters).

Still I can’t help but wonder if Dustin’s into me because he really thinks I’m smart and pretty, or if he just wants me because I’m here and it’s convenient right now. So tell me, diary: will it last? Will we last?

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In early 2010 the World Bank Institute (WBI) debuted Evoke, an innovative social game on a mission to foster global change through open collaboration. Now, six months after launching the platform, Jane McGonigal and company are breaking new ground yet again by conducting a social post mortem (which, in an inspired act of rebranding, they’ve dubbed a “post-vita”).

More than just a clever tactic that aligns with Evoke’s core philosophy, the social post mortem has great potential for organizations looking to encourage participation, collect insight from and share learnings with its community. We hope the effort turns out to be as productive as it is innovative.

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From the looks of it, cross-country trips are hot like fire this summer. Both Sears and Levi’s have launched grassroots campaigns that follow a journey across America — one by tractor, the other on foot.

The two campaigns have a lot in common. Both narratives revolve around a young, rugged-looking dude. Each campaign used Google Maps and YouTube to help set the scene. And if you were to guess that the marketing strategies for both campaigns involve telling a story about honest, hardworking, all-American products that can endure even the most rigorous wear-and-tear, you’d be right.

Sort of. Turns out only one of these campaigns is the straight story. In a PR stunt that would make Mad Men proud, Levi’s talked the talk but apparently didn’t walk the walk. Still, the end result is a brilliantly crafted campaign — one that arguably outshines Sears’ effort. Which goes to show that sometimes a lie travels faster than the truth in advertising, even if it doesn’t hold up as well over the long haul.

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Coke Europe is using short, stylized films and other niche content to introduce Burn to its target audience of young hipsters. From winged competitors like Red Bull to fleet-footed fighters like Converse to 10,000-lb. heavyweights like Dell, big brands have been wielding microgenres in the battle for the attention of tastemakers for years. And the success of tactfully branded collaborations like The Creators Project suggests that the approach may be working.

Now, whether people actually share the content socially or not is another matter. Here, success seems to rely on two main variables: entertainment value and the credibility factor. In other words, influencers are always among the first to show cool stuff to their following. If a piece of content is too heavily branded, that implies not only the absence of freshness but the presence of a massive built-in audience who already knows what’s up. Makes sense, right? Certainly there are plenty of exceptions to this rule (Nike, Adidas, et al.), but one way to help influencers them keep their cred intact is to burn most of the evidence of your brand within your content.

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