Leave it to Mad Men to do some TV advertising innovating.

Motrin has now retracted their ad. The good news is that the retraction is signed by a human being. The bad news is that the text, but not the signature, is enclosed in quotation marks.

A new service assumes that anyone who writes about something once is worth following on Twitter.

“Hey you can build up lots of followers this way!”

And if you want lots of e-mail, I know some people who will be happy to e-mail you too.

Quick Twollow.com Demo from jon on Vimeo.

This article from today’s Times is worth rereading:

In the span of just a few weeks, orders for both business and consumer tech products have collapsed, and technology companies have begun laying off workers. The plunge is so severe that some executives are comparing it with the dot-com bust in 2000, when hundreds of companies disappeared and Silicon Valley lost nearly a fifth of its jobs.

October “was like turning a switch,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, a research and trading firm. “Everything pretty much shut down.”

It’s also worth recording that yesterday brought horrible retail sales data. The three month average decline in retail sales annualized was 10.9%, or 7.4% ex autos.

Somebody thinks I should be secretary of commerce.

The whole market trades like a swamp, but NYT in particular looks like it’s in a relentless death spiral. Are its lines of credit gone?

Hanging together.

With Google trading at ~$335, down from $700 a year ago, the folks at Woot offer up this subtle ad when you search for GOOG, Google’s stock symbol.

Fox now asks: “How could [McCain] end up with a running mate who doesn’t know that Africa is a continent?”

And people thought McCain had the judgment or temperament to be President? McCain’s reckless belief in his own luck, his refusal to take counsel, his recklessness paint a long and obvious streak in his personal history. (See Matt Welch’s Myth of a Maverick.)