The team has been flooding my Treo with links to sites featuring the latest technologies, strategies or simply sites with great creative. So while in the Palermo airport, I got a link that highlights how far we have come with the Internet.

Verizon's Beat Box Mixer
The site was beatboxmixer.com, a site for Verizon where you can go mix your own songs. 'Not another lame online mixing site' I said to myself, but this most certainly was not. What you are mixing are actual musicians. You assemble video clips of these musicians as you like (or 'laying down tracks' as my nephew Special K tells me) to create your own song. And of course you can pass it along for a healthy dose of Word of Mouse Marketing.

Check it out. With the latest version of Flash 8, you no longer have to restrict video off onto its own little island in the site design. You can integrate video images, cut out the background, and create a powerful interactive experience. Video isn't a side dish on a web site experience, it's now the main course.

The BeatBoxMixer was a hit in Palermo. By the time my flight was called, I had a crowd of people crowded around me while I mixed my beats. While the technology definitely impressed me, I have to admit that spending an hour as Big Baddy B-Diddy was certainly a thrill!