Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, has once again developed a new and innovative way to advertise their products.

A few months ago, CenterNetworks posted about Ikea’s ad campaign with Nils, a single guy living alone in his Ikea-furnished apartment while his every move was broadcast across the Internet. That was pretty wild, but I think Ikea’s latest innovation is even more ingenious (although it’s just as creepy and weird as the Nils concept).

Ikea has unleashed a new site called “Come Into the Closet” (warning – for some unknown reason, this site resizes your browser window). This campaign uses Adobe Flash to synchronize stop-action animation (with actors, not drawings) with any music thrown at it. The characters will move in sync with the beat of the music. What’s more, the movements actually seem to be controlled by pitch as well as rhythm.

Be sure to check it out. You can even upload your own tracks to see how the characters interact. I found that the movements almost begin to look like epliepsy when you upload a track with driving beats and very little silence.

Earlier this week, I missed Fringe when it aired on Fox on Tuesday night. I decided I would try to catch up by checking it out on Hulu. Unfortunately, that was a disaster for me.

About 30 seconds into the video, it started skipping terribly, playing for about a second, then pausing for two or three, then playing another second or two, then pausing for another two to four seconds. I can only assume that the problem is due to my satellite Internet connection.

Curtiss wrote a great post about Thanksgiving earlier this morning and I wanted to echo his comments. I especially want to say thanks to Curtiss, Leppy and Deadeye for taking care of the forums, making sure they are spam-free and all their hard work answering everyone’s questions. Also a shoutout to Till for helping to get us working on the new Web host.

It’s amazing to think that we started the HTMLCenter journey over 10 years ago and I believe we are the longest-running independent web developer community operating today. I’ve got some ideas which will continue to move HTMLCenter forward over the year next year so stay tuned.

No matter if you are in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world, all of us here at HTMLCenter thank you for your interest in our community.

To all of our readers in the United States, I want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving. In these trying economic times, please take the time to remember those things for which you truly are thankful. In everyone’s life, no matter how dim things may seem, there are always things for which to be grateful. I hope you find those things in your own heart and mind, and take the time today to celebrate them.

If nothing else, at least most of us can be thankful that we won’t be dealing with the Black Friday crowds in a major metropolitan area (I will, regrettably, be dealing with Black Friday crowds, but not in an urban setting).

Recently, I have found myself more and more frustrated and dumbfounded by the sheer lack of attention people seem to pay to their own writing. There are certainly circumstances under which I can understand using poor grammar.

However, over the last few months, I have encountered poor grammar in almost all situations from almost all types of people. I have seen sloppy, unedited writing in commercial marketing. I have seen and heard poor spelling and speech in professional situations and official communiques from various white-collar managers.

When searching on Google the other day, I noticed two new icons for the first time. Next to each search result, there now are two icons. One of them looks like an arrow pointing upwards inside of a box, and the other looks like an X inside of a box.

When you mouseover the first, the tooltip says “Promote”. When you mouseover the second, the tooltip says “Remove”.

Also, a little less conspicuous is a comment icon, allowing you to post comments about the search result.

Google is calling the new features “SearchWiki”, and they posted about it in the Official Google Blog.

Have you noticed this new feature? Have you used it at all? What are your thoughts?

We received our monthly Verizon bill this month and were shocked to find nearly $30 worth of extra charges. The bill said “This portion of your bill is provided as a service to Enhanced Services”. Lower down, it said “Charged on behalf of Rocket Communication”.

After a bit of Googling, I found quite a few stories about similar situations. It seems that Rocket Communication has a habit of doing this to people, and are notoriously difficult to get ahold of. I will let you know how it goes. I do not plan on paying these charges.

Here is a sampling of the posts I found on this subject:

• http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/381/RipOff0381035.htm
• http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/365/RipOff0365818.htm
• http://www.complaintsboard.com/?search=rocket+communication

Update

I was a bit reactionary in posting this. However, I want to share what I experienced, in case any of you suffer the same issue (after talking with Verizon, it seems that this is extremely common).

Last weekend, we went to Costco and signed up for a new AT&T Wireless family plan. We cancelled our Nextel service, for which we were paying about $100/month for two phones. We replaced it with a new AT&T Wireless family plan for which we will pay about $110/month for four phones with twice as many minutes and unlimited text, picture and video messaging.

I was checking out my Yahoo! homepage this evening when I came across a “news” story with a title that interested me. I clicked on it, and came to an article on Wired called “Five Gadgets That Were Killed by the Cellphone.” I was very interested to see what gadgets would be on the list.

Unfortunately, however, the author took a lot of liberty with the term “killed.” Three of the gadgets on his list are far from dead. One of them never really had much of a market share to begin with, and the last was more integrated with cellphones than killed by them.

The comments to the article do my feelings quite a bit of justice, but I thought I’d break things down from my perspective, anyway.

I came across a very cool site the other day called Animoto. Animoto is a very neat application that allows you to create animated slideshows with your photographs. You can upload as many photographs as you want. You can then choose background music from the library on the Animoto server, or you can upload your own music to use in the background of your slideshow.

Somehow, the Animoto application automatically picks up on the beat and rhythm of your background music, and animates the photographs to go along with it.

It does a pretty decent job, and makes the slideshow rather interesting. You can create as many 30-second slideshows as you want without having to pay anything. If you want to create longer slideshows, then you have to sign up for a premium account.

Pop on over to Animoto and give it a try. It’s incredibly easy to use.