Daily Links for 27.07.2010

Sports & Money: Texas lands athletics sponsorship with "green" energy firm (via @Sociablesport)

The Uni. of Texas is going to offer branded green energy provision through their Texas Longhorns Energy program. While branded products for alumni are no big deal, leveraging the alumni network, passion for the university, sponsorship and environmentalism creates a novel approach to moving the UT brand and taking a step forward to a greener Texas. While its partly surprising that this idea emerged from the heart of oil country, I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't signal a novel move in collegiate sport sponsorship.

Twitter Begins Testing Inline Photos And Videos On Its Website It seems Twitter has finally gone the way of Brizzly and is looking at embedding content within the tweet-stream. Such a move may seem to be an easy win for improving the user experience of Twitter, but depending on how this is implemented, it may fundamentally change the way user's approach the network. For one, this adds a value to using Twitter.com that 3rd party clients will have to scramble to compensate for (something that seems to be quite a trend lately). Secondly, this changes the way the Twitter.com user experience exists, as a clean, text based content stream becomes heavily loaded with thumbnails and preview widgets. Will it work in the long run? Probably. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a little unexpected handwringing in the near future.

Diesel Facepark: The Analog Version of Facebook  I like the Diesel 'Be Stupid' Campaign, but this really takes the idea and drives with it. Facepark took a park in Berlin and encouraged people to 'Be Stupid' by creating an analog version of Facebook to rival the 'smart' digital version. What results is some really good viral content, an interesting website and a hope they might do this again in London one day.