Nothing tends to elicit yawns like the words "municipal government," but on the other hand, as the most local level of inept faceless bureaucracy we deal with in our day-to-day lives, it's infuriatingly important. At this very moment I'm trying, and failing, to reason my way out of jury duty in Los Angeles; my first mistake was probably the "reason" approach, but I also find myself wishing the Powers That Leave at Three had some kind of online presence where I could get information about rules and procedures and email my silly reasons for wanting out of jury. Instead, I …

Chatroulette, one of the edgier new social media services to hit the Web in recent months, is a challenging proposition for marketers. Matching live video chat users at random, it's gained a large following of more adventurous chat users despite (or perhaps because) of the high frequency of exhibitionism -- read, some guy you don't know whippin' it out. On one hand, it's got all the makings of a good ad medium: a sizeable, engaged user base of almost a million users, who are by definition fairly receptive to whatever messages someone wants to deliver to them. On the other …