This is perhaps the best, most hilarious marketing website I’ve ever seen. Be sure to watch the music video, but pretty much everything on the site is top-rate humor.

(via Gizmodo)

I don’t have a ton of gadgets, personally. I jumped on the iPod bandwagon about 2 years late, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that for those years I wasn’t realizing my “hip” potential. Still, reading about supercool tech gadgets has the power to make me giddy, so I guess I’m a closet gadgeophile, despite myself.

If you’re old-school like me (all relative, I know), you won’t be able to help but love this modded NES-controller-turned-cell-phone. (Google ads displayed “Zelda Ringtone”, which was so appropriate I guffawed.)

On another note, for people who always bite the heads off their animal crackers before they eat the rest, someone has fabricated the perfect USB drive for you. Data storage has never been so deliciously sadistic. Unfortunately they don’t appear to be available for sale, but you could always make your own without too much trouble.

Finally, in the not-so-cute-and-actually-I’m-kinda-scared category: Giant Panda robots. Perhaps a Flameosapien will meet the beasts in battle and save humanity. Or join them, in which case, we’re fucked.

Robin for Yahoo! Tech writes about MySpace accountability, particularly when it comes to youth using MySpace to plan and engage in less-than-healthy activities. But how much should MySpace be accountable for what its users are doing, even when they’re young?

When she went to her daughter’s page the headline on her last entry seared through her. It said, “Priceless: Joyriding with Your Friend at 3AM”. Dana says after reading her daughter’s entries she realized she knew nothing about this place where her daughter could freely “promote her indulgences, had no accountability and just be cool”.

I can’t help but feel that if kids were not using MySpace to plan their dangerous indulgences, they’d be doing the same thing somewhere else. Just ten years ago, keeping your kid off the telephone was the way to keep them out of trouble, and if they made plans over the phone to go joyriding later, well, no one would have tried to make the phone company accountable for what happened. Now pretty much every teen has a cell phone and it’s easier than ever to make plans and coordinate mischief without even stopping by at home to check your messages. Still, while parents may try to limit or monitor their kid’s phone usage, they don’t point their fingers at Cingular or Verizon or Virgin if their kid uses their phone to plan some rabble-rousing.

But back to computers. If MySpace weren’t an issue, you’d have instant messenger services like AIM where kids could coordinate, and more and more we’re going to see video-conversations propagating, which may or may not be a hit with image-conscious teens. The point is that teens are social, and they’re going to talk to their friends one way or another, and what they plan to do with their friends is much more dependant on what kind of kid they are than on what medium they are using to make those plans. Sure, their may be a certain amount of peer pressure involved, a certain adrenalin and ego-boosting that go along with being able to post pictures and accounts of your exploits for all your friends to see. But MySpace isn’t offering these kids the wine, it’s just out there growing the grapes.

So, the issue, I think, is simply that parents don’t understand MySpace. And this has always been an issue in parenting: kids are always technologically two steps ahead of their parents. In the end it all comes down to active parenting, which means being involved in your kid’s life and knowing what they’re up to, showing an interest in their hobbies and ideas. Sure, teens don’t want their parents to be interested in their lives, but they don’t get to decide. After all, the difference between being a parent and having a kid is in how much responsibility you take in raising them.

In the meantime, MySpace has made some conciliatory efforts to make their site safer for teens.