In what has to be one of the strangest pairing of television stars I’ve ever seen, Will Ferrell will be facing nature’s wrath alongside Bear Grylls on the season premier of Man Vs. Wild, taking the duo deep into the frozen tundra ‘far north’ of Sweden. It is set to coincide with the release of his upcoming motion picture Land of the Lost.

I wonder who’s idea it was (marketing or talents)?

Discovery Communications ad sales jockey Joe Abruzzese decided to step up and give the typical marketing pat-on-the-back by telling Variety Magazine just how this is a prime example of working closely with advertisers on “content integration.” At least Annah Zafrani, VP of media promotions for Universal Pictures, was put on record calling it the studio’s “most innovative project to date” with Discovery.

Should be fun to watch.

They just posted over at the official Gmail blog that apparently the engineering team had recently suffered from a bad case of holiday spirit and decided to print up in bulk some of the homemade stickers that had been circulating through the office. Everything from some wacky Gmail keyboard shortcuts, a bunch of shiny envelopes, a robot and even a friggin’ unicorn. Yes, a unicorn.

So, if you want some free Gmail stickers of your own, all you have to do is send a self-addressed stamped envelope (with short note if possible) to:

Send me some Gmail stickers already
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420

I so want the unicorn:

Apparently eBay’s in trouble for their recent $1 Holiday Doorbusters Giveaway, where they ‘randomly’ give out 100 gifts ranging from GPS devices, jewelry and even a new Chevrolet Corvette for only $1 (with a new item given away each day). The catch? eBay isn’t going to tell you what item is being given away each day or even what category it’ll be in….a plan that apparently was full of holes.

The contest was brought down to a screeching halt on Tuesday when hundreds of users began using automated scripts that would continuously bid on items for $1 in an attempt to secure the winning bid even before the actual auction page goes public. This then resulted in a large crowd of the more ‘honest’ users becoming furious at eBay for letting these rogue ‘script kiddies’ get away with cheating the system….evidence of which can be found throughout the eBay public forums.

The script in question is right now all over the internet. You can find it for sale on RentACoder for $20 or even for free in various forums.

Poor eBay.

Jeff from over at Perishable Press has just posted a handy guide to adding code to your WordPress theme that will enable you to offer SEO-Friendly, fully validating social media links for each of your pages or posts. If you want the easy way of adding social media links to your blog, there are countless WordPress plugins that will do just that, this method is for those of you who want to use as few plugins as possible (a real lean mean blogging machine!)

He gives the code for Delicious, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl, Reddit and AddThis (with more sites provided in the comments).

Here’s an example for Digg.com:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Submit this post to Digg">Digg this!</a>

In order to add the code to each post, edit the single.php and paste in the appropriate code before the comments PHP tag. So you’d paste it before:

< ?php comments_template(); ?>

To add the code to your pages, edit page.php and paste the appropriate code after the PHP tag for your page content. So depending on your theme you’d paste it after:

< ?php the_content(); ?>

To have the links appear on the homepage after the end of each post, edit index.php and paste the appropriate code after the content PHP tag, though it might differ depending on your theme. So you’d paste the code this time after:

< ?php the_content(__('Read more'));?>

Go check out the full post for more examples.

Interested in making money on twitter.com & other social media sites? Here’s something I was recently sent:

There’s a new CPC Advertising site called adjix. Available for both advertisers and publishers, it takes long URLs and converts them into a shorter format similar to tinyurl or shorl. The only catch is when a user clicks on the link, they’ll see an advertisement in the top of their screen. The best news is, you decide what category of advertisement it shows. You’re also provided two separate types of short-urls:

Here’s an example link (in the technology category):

One of the great things about this service that sets it a part from all the other URL-Shortening services is that it provides you with user information on anyone that follows your link. It even shows the IP & hostname of the user!

Another key feature of adjix is that they give you the ability to use your own domain instead of theirs!
What does that mean? Say goodbye to http://adjix.com/fp9p and hello to http://links.brentter.com/fp9p! All it took was an easy DNS change and voila, the affiliate link no longer looks like an affiliate link.

Also, if you just wanted to use this URL-Shortening service but did NOT want to display any ads, they have recently launched a no-ad version of adjix! You can find more information about that here.

There’s a long list of categories available for you to choose from as well.
Here’s a sample:

This is the start of a whole new breed of CPC advertising opportunities. Should be interesting to see what comes out next!