Web

AdLab has some detail about the already-old-news Avatar/McDonalds upload-my-face thingie, running in Europe.
Obviously this has been done before - from "Simpsonize Me" to M&M's to Dexter and back again - but at least this time we have some stats:

• 4 million user sessions
• nearly 10 minute session time
• about 1 million shares via email/social network post

So, a great data set for explaining the concepts of "sticky" and "spreadable" to your audience.
AdLab post

Avatarize Yourself

Guy Kawasaki points us to AppMakr - a simple widget builder that creates an iPhone app, with your RSS feed as the content.
You distribute the resulting app through the iPhone App Store - either under AppMakr's account, or your own Apple Developer Account, if you have one.
Be sure to visit Guy's article - from now till Monday, he's got a promo code that lets you build your app for $49 instead of $199.

AppMakr site

Following up on the news that whitehouse.gov has been migrated to Drupal, Tim O'Reilly comments on the O'Reilly Radar site.

Among other things, O'Reilly points out that having a high-profile target like this using OSS software validates the long-understood advantage of open source in the security arena. But there's more:

More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support.
In many ways, this is the complement to the Government as Platform mantra I've been chanting in Washington. When you build a vibrant, extensible platform, others add value to the foundation you establish; when you join such a platform, you get the benefit of all those features you didn't have to develop yourself.

So is the White House actually creating a user community around their website, in the best Web 2.0 fashion? Well, not yet - right now there's no interactivity to speak of on the site, and no indication as to what the plans are.

O'Reilly post

AP news release, via Huffington Post

Drupal lead Dries Buytaert's comments