Career Builder: Casual Friday

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6 p.m.

So this isn’t a commercial, but the Jay-Z intro is pretty impressive, because drum beats = drama, and have that lovely orchestral backing that scream “Important sports documentary moment.” And it doesn’t involve Diddy, which everything seemed to about five years ago, so all the better.

You know what’s not a Super Bowl commercial but that I love anyway? Those surreally cheesy Bedding Barn ads with the weird dude in the cape and the women in the costumes playing drums and the big red barn they’ve been using since 1987. It’s the most consistent “What that higgity was that?” moment in advertising, and it’s so awful you gotta love it. Read the full story

Interest in searches for Michael Jackson showed that users used engines to look up celebrity news, even in the face of a bad economy. (AP)

Michael Jackson’s stunning death made him the Internet’s biggest star this year.

The quest to find out what happened to Jackson in his final hours on June 25 and celebrate his legacy elevated the late entertainer to the top of the Internet’s search charts for 2009. On Yahoo, it ended singer Britney Spears’ four-year reign on top.

The annual lists released Tuesday were compiled separately by Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which combined handle two-thirds of the world’s Internet searches.

Jackson also grabbed the top spot on the third-largest U.S. search engine, Microsoft Corp.’s Bing, which announced its rankings Sunday. AOL, which relies on Google’s search technology, also had Jackson at No. 1.

The lists are meant to provide a reading on our cultural pulse.
Read the full story