Nemo teamed up with Fuel TV to promote their show Dew Underground about the Dew Tour in Portland. We came up with the dewy and sticky idea of collaborating with Voodoo Doughnuts to create the Mountain Dew doughnut, known from here-out as the Voo Dew!

Voo Dew Doughnut - Nemo and the Dew Tour from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Nemo’s Chris Hotz explains the process that leads up to a special doughnut - it ain’t simple…

i suppose i should let bare my past for this project. you see, from the time i was 16 thru 23, i was on a strictly mountain dew diet. i didn’t drink water, or milk, or beer, or god forbid, coke products, ONLY mountain dew. at one point the Dew people told me i was drinking so much it was bad for my heart and i needed to stop. instead i asked for some coupons and like good americans, they gladly obliged. so with that in mind, this collaboration was actually pretty easy to come up with. the AST Dew tour only happens in a few very lucky cities, portland being one of only five venues. so as a city, we’re pretty fortunate.. we started to think about how lucky portland is to have such a cool and creative culture. those, “Keep Portland Weird” stickers are for a reason. as far as portland-centric institutions, Voodoo Doughnuts is one kick ass independent doughnut shop. i mean seriously, a maple bacon bar, genius… it almost seems like they make doughnuts that they dare you to eat. so as we started brainstorming, we threw out the idea of a Mountain Dew flavored doughnut. and honestly, i was thinking more about the color and the presentation, but when we contacted the VooDoo guys, they we’re all about getting the flavor JUST right. boiling down Mountain Dew into a syrupy reduction, lemon lime additives, caffeine powders, adding lemon sprinkles, laboring the color of the frosting. the first taste tests were unbelievable. the second test brought back memories from my childhood. damn i’m thirsty.

Babara Kiviat, a blogger for Time Mag’s The Curious Capitalist blog, has discovered two new things - Threadless and crowdsourcing. In a post yesterday entitled crowdsourcing worked on me she marveled at how Threadless works - it’s a user-driven business and its products are voted upon and ranked by its customers and/or site visitors. It is a highly successful and profitable business. Good job digging this up Barbara, Threadless has only been around since 2000. More details can be found at Skinny Corp the company that owns Threadless.

Meanwhile crowdsourcing is a term that was first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article and has been open to debate ever since. It’s worth reading the Wikipedia page about crowdsourcing where you will discover that Douglas Rushkoff and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales both have serious doubts about the term and its implications.

Nice to see Time keeping its finger on the popular culture pulse though.

Art 4 Life at StudioNemo from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

There’s never a dull day at Nemo but when kids come in the energy level always kicks higher. Here’s a bunch of kids from Art4Life art camp putting together a poster for their class with the StudioNemo crew.

Click image to Play

Today’s Digital Youth are already well-versed in Trust and Fame, they understand very clearly that their song, their video is only as good as the one that went before it on YouTube unless it is awesome, catchy and fun. Seattle’s Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head worked with the video crew That Go to cut this clip for their song ‘Sophisticated Side Ponytail.’ That Go also made a great clip for Thunderheist recently.

We seem to have dropped into a musical theme over the weekend and with that in mind I wanted to point out a post that David Byrne wrote on his blog. As you can see above he is pondering the idea of less press and pr and more online discovery. I believe Byrne is doing the right thing as there will be plenty of buzz around a new Byrne and Eno album on the blogosphere. And Byrne and Eno are both influencers and trusted sources. Those two elements alone will help any PR 2.0 campaign gain traction. I posted a slide show about PR 2.0 here, and also wrote an essay about Social Media, Blogs and Advertising which can be found here. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to spreading the word on the new Byrne and Eno album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. You can hear a cut from the new album and download it too. Click Here.

Happy Prescriptions “Thought it’d lead us..”

Getting it right, getting exposed. A comment on the Girl Talk post, left by a user named ‘Natron’ led me to a web site for Happy Prescriptions, no doubt the web site for said ‘Natron’ who it turns out is a Portland musician. Another click of a hand [you have to visit the site to get that] led me to Happy Prescriptions MySpace where I found the video above. There’s also a free MP3 ep there. Circle complete.