Notice that Hi5 (whose t shirts I wear at times, though I don’t have an active profile on Hi5 and haven’t logged into it for close to 2 years) just raised $14 million dollars in additional funding according to a post on TechCrunch.  Based on what I’m hearing – maybe I ought to take a second look at Hi5

The new funding will be used for hi5′s continued expansion into social gaming and virtual goods. Hi5, which has been actively remodeling its site to cater to the gaming industry, just bought gaming startup Big Six. Last fall, the social network launched a totally revampedsite that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system.

Another interesting post in TechCrunch was about The Old Spice Man answering Tweets on YouTube Videos in almost real time.

For instance, Digg founder Kevin Rose Tweeted out that he was sick, and in response the Old Spice Man created the video embedded above, in which he tells Rose that he has never had a fever himself because his body is “98 percent muscle.” He even talks to Rose in binary code so that Rose can understand, to which Rose responded on Twitter:

I think this is one of the most creative things I’ve heard of – merging Social Media and Commercials – get this persona’s in ads to actually respond as real people would and in real time.  Whoa  … did a new industry just get birthed?

Came across a site that has created an open specification for Menus – something that would probably help SEO of many eating establishments – it’s called OpenMenu.

Open Menu has created a standard that will change the way restaurants store and share their menus over the internet by standardizing the menus’ structure and format.

Open Menu will give out access to the Open Menu Format menus and the menu information to other companies, developers, restaurant based websites and iPhone App creators. We are going to let them consume this data into their ideas.

One menu to maintain, in one location, shared everywhere.

Pretty smart idea if you ask me.

Also I was at the Bizzy.com launch event two days ago – it’s a little bit different – take a look at the “What’s Happening” section of the site for the few cities where Bizzy is active.

I’ll do a more in depth post on Bizzy shortly.

Finally, this caught my eye yesterday – MIT Creates Cloth That Listens in Read Write Web

MIT scientists announced this week that they have created a new kind of fiber capable of detecting and emitting sound. “Throughout their history a key premise has remained essentially unchanged,” the research team wrote in Nature Materials, “fibres are static devices, incapable of controllably changing their properties over a wide range of frequencies.”

Professor Yoel Fink and team says they’ve upended that history and have developed a process for making fiber that can act like a microphone or a speaker. As with any new type of sensor, the platform possibilities are intriguing – the degree of personal intimacy (pants with patience, shirts that sass you back) makes this particularly potent.

The shirt that knew too much: Cozy, no?
“Applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain,” says MIT’s Press Office. AFP coverage of this was the first we saw.

And just when you thought you had SEO all figured out – out comes Google with a new signal – your mouse – Google Eyes Mouse Movement as Possible Search Relevancy Signal

“The patent presents a couple of assumptions about how mouse pointer movements can be interpreted,” explains Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea, who presents a much more readable explanation of the patent. “For example, a longer hover over a result may indicate a positive opinion about how relevant a listing on the results page might be to a query. And, if someone moves their mouse pointer across a snippet line by line at a normal reading speed, it may indicate a higher level of attention to that result than if pointer was kept in a static position or moved randomly.”

So …. now we have to teach people how to hover over our search listings?

To be honest with you – the idea of the patent makes sense – I think the problem will be in maintaining a database of devices and browsers and co-relating responses against it – in other words, the idea makes sense, not too sure how well it will be implemented.

I wished I had not missed this – Entire Star Wars opening scene recreated on NYC subway