The concept of this site is pretty cool. While everyone by now is aware of how useful tagging can be in terms of organizing a blog or searching through del.icio.us or similar sites, Brand Tags takes the same concept but reverses it. Instead of posting entries and then tagging them and having them searched in multiple places, this site takes some of the most popular brands and asks you to apply one tag word or phrase to whatever brand it displays to you at random (though you have the option to skip a brand if you wish). You can browse by brand, guess what brand it is based on the tags, or search for brands that were tagged with a certain word.

Brand Tags still appears to be relatively small--you can't add a new brand without contacting the site creator, for instance. However, as a starting point, this is an interesting way to see how the big brands are perceived, as well as compare multiple brands that have similar offerings. Check out, for instance, the difference between Target and Walmart. Do the results on each page match up to your perceptions? As anyone in business knows, how the public perceives your company and its practices can often have a huge impact on whether they choose you or a competitor. Knowing these popular brand perceptions allows you to get in on the conversation and help address the negatives and possibly boost the positives (Jason Cormier just posted an entry the other day on staying in front of PR crises, which addresses some helpful tactics that should be used.)

If you are a savvy company, you are already tracking your brand reputation online through a variety of methods including Technorati, Twitter, Google, and of course myriad others. The downside to this method is that you are relying on many different arenas to help provide an overall picture. If a site based on something like Brand Tags caught on as more than just a fun experiment, just think of the possibilities when searching for smaller brands. Assuming rival companies are not maliciously tagging their competitors, the results would speak of what the masses think of your brand in general, which can help during times when you are not headline news and the talk of the town. The general impression gained by all of the tags inputted by hundreds or thousands of individuals will more than likely be a better reflection of long term perception of your brand by the public. Do you know how you will rank?

Many of us observed back in 2006 when a man proposed to his girlfriend by utilizing the time lapse webcam set up in front of the Apple Store that opened in New York City. While public proposals are nothing new, the use of a 3rd party webcam in the middle of the night was a novelty.

With the rise of social media, it seemed inevitable that someone would eventually use one of the many tools to do exactly the same thing. And as it turns out, this is exactly what happened. Last week, the Wired blog reported that a San Francisco web designer proposed to his coworker via Twitter. It was conjectured that this was the first public proposal delivered over Twitter, but the blog was soon updated to report that earlier in the month, on March 2, another couple had already successfully become engaged. This couple lives in different cities and travels often, so the use of Twitter to seal the deal made the most sense to the husband to be.

While people certainly can and will propose any way they choose, is it more or less romantic to have these traditional rites of passage delivered in a very untraditional media? Would you be offended that it didn't happen the way it happened for your parents and grandparents, or would you just be too happy by what it symbolized to care how it happened?

It does take a certain amount of guts to publicly display your proposal, as a negative reply would be that much more devastating when it's visible to the whole world. While this does reflect a certain amount of commitment, and I do love social media, I have to say I think I'd still prefer the old-fashioned way. Though, I guess if you've waited 15 years to hear the question as was the case with the SF woman last week, getting that Tweet may have been the best thing she'd ever read. Perhaps her fiancee was just waiting for the right social media to come along to do the job??