Silicon Alley Insider has re-posted an email Jason Calacanis, the former CEO of Weblogs, Inc and current CEO of Mahalo (one of those "human-powered" search engines, similar to Naptown's own Cha-Cha), sent to his "Jason's List" email subscribers detailing why you don't need a PR company for your startup. From a broader view, it's also about the kind of behaviors and self-talk you can model to hype and network your way to being one of those cult-of-personality CEO's.

It's long but definitely worth a read if you're interested in this kind of thing.

I am not the world's biggest fan of EA Sports -- or really Electronic Arts in general. But I have to say their approach to marketing the new Tiger Woods game is nothing short of genius. It's raw and authentic, yet polished and professional and it gets what the Internet is all about.

The Ad Age article that turned me on to this quotes Carolyn Feinstein, EA Sports' consumer marketing VP:

The plan now is to let this thing go and see how much buzz it generates ... What we're talking about a lot around here is the idea that 'I don't want to interrupt your entertainment experience to tell you what I want to tell you, but that I want to be that entertainment experience.'

At this point, I'm beginning to seriously wonder if the Parents Television Council is on the payroll of the CW.

First, the PTC's supposedly derisive quote of "Mind-blowingly inappropriate" is used by the CW as a headline on a Gossip Girl ad. And now the PTC is going after the new Beverly Hills 90210 exactly when the CW is trying its hardest to hype the show.

Ostensibly, the PTC is claiming the CW's decision not to screen the new 90210 for critics or advertisers is the network's way of hiding some kind of ultra-lewd, culturally-destructive content from public scrutiny. (As we mentioned when we first wrote about this, we are hoping for naked Darcy.)

Does the PTC realize that releasing a statement criticizing a show for "glamorized drug and alcohol use along with casual teen sex, including threesomes" makes people interested in seeing it?

So Joe Biden is Barack Obama's running mate, huh? I can't say I'm too enthusiastic about an old white guy who's been in the senate since 1972. So he takes the train home to Delaware every night -- big deal. That doesn't inspire me to think of him as someone I'd gush about running for president in 2016. At least Evan Bayh looks the part of an heir apparent.

Obviously Obama made his decision to counter the objections that he has no experience, especially with foreign policy. I feel like a better approach might have been to take this objection and turn it around; make experience out to be a problem, something we don't need when 200 years of experience has made poor people poorer, rich people richer, the powerful more powerful, and the weak more voiceless than than ever. This seems like business as usual.

Given the contentious religious discussion argument going on over at Wakeup Naptown on a post entitled "How common Christianity affects our moral and intellectual integrity", I thought it might be worth telling you about a similar drama that recently played out on some Philadelphia billboards.

The story — at least according to this Philadelphia CityPaper article — goes something like this:

A group calling themselves The Philadelphia Coalition of Reason put up a billboard that read, "Don't believe in God? You are not alone."

As soon as that board went down, a new one was erected in the same spot by a "mysterious group that does not appear in the phone book and has no online presence" calling itself Holy Souls Ministries. The new board implores viewers to "Say one Hail Mary" and features an image of the Virgin Mary levitating a heart between her hands.

Actually, that's really not much of a story. Personally, I prefer the billboard that Pastor Marc Royer put up in Goshen, IN. It reads, "Obama had one. McCain had two. Let me be your crazy reverend."