Squeak of the Week

Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.

How do you catch up?

If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.

Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days’ help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.

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Pizza Hut has developed a new logo that shortens its name to "The Hut," which caused a bit of a brouhaha as many pizza fans concluded the popular purveyor was changing its name. Not true, said the company. "Pizza Hut is not changing its name," Mr. Niccol said in a statement. "We are proud of our name and heritage and will continue to be Pizza Hut."

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Ads used to be confined to a handful of places such as prime-time TV and highway billboards. Now commercial messages are so ubiquitous that people learn to block them out. What's an advertiser to do? Create something so attention-grabbing that it's impossible to ignore. The following sales pitches use new technologies, viral qualities, or in some cases, classic inventive thinking to cut through the cacaphony. Unlike most ads, these are hard to hate.

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First it was Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! Now it’s Alice, Alice, Alice. When will Jan ever catch a break? Online marketplace, Alice.com, enters an already crowded ecommerce space today with an intriguing economic proposition for consumers and packaged goods companies. Consumers get free shipping and low prices on everything from detergent to bodywash to toilet paper [...]

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Dunkin' Donuts is encouraging consumers to pick up something for their friends or coworkers on the next donut run. The coffee and baked goods chain this week kicked off “Dunkin’ Run,” an interactive website and iPhone application, which aims to make group orders easier and more fun.

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