If you showed up to a listening party for one of your favorite bands only to find that you’d become the de facto producer of their latest album, you’d be Alex Caskie of Leeds, UK. Britpop outfit Kaiser Chiefs collaborated with W+K London to create a new digital platform that gives fans the figurative keys to their latest ride, The Future Is Medieval, and Alex was the first to release a version of it. See how his day played out, replete with a Wonka-esque tour guide and private jam session with the group here.

You can create and distribute your own version of the album too, selecting your favorite ten new tracks (out of twenty), setting them in order and capping off the lineup with custom album art. Even better, the platform creates a new page for you to share, and every £7.50 copy purchased through your link drops  £1 in your PayPal account. Profits for music personalization? Sweet!

Kudos to our compatriots over in London for a creative volley at the music industry’s woes. You can also get their Kaiser Chiefs mix here, with the going to the Alzheimer’s Society.

After slaking my online thirst on Rapture jokes long before the weekend was over, I awoke to find two gifts from the Internet today. First up, radio host and soon-t0-be erstwhile TV personality Glenn Beck unveiled his answer to Groupon,  LivingSocial, Facebook Deals, Google Offers et al.: Markdown. It operates very much like the other online coupon distributors, only promoting itself as the place for “Value and Values.” The first offer is 50% off from Chocolate.com, a distributor of artisanal treats. Would Ayn Rand approve?

Beck’s politics aside, building a discount site on the premise that you’re supporting worthy businesses  is not that crazy of an idea. It’s a glutted market; is Beck’s pull big enough to sustain a model that’s built on volume? Even more important, can Beck’s curation (frequency/quality/variety of the deals) keep up with his agnostic competitors? Ironically enough, having a message may hinder Glenn more than it helps.

Also launched today: A.plus, Ashton Kutcher’s desktop social media and browsing client built by UberMedia. Essentially a response to TweetDeck (recently bought by Twitter themselves), the program integrates your Twitter activity with a web browser client, including channels supervised by the actor.

From a tech standpoint A.plus ran pokey on my laptop. It’s several years old, but I’m wondering if the decision to go with such graphics-heavy requirements is a smart move on the developers’ part. Otherwise it’s not particularly hard to navigate; anyone who’s used a Twitter app won’t have a problem with the basic functions.

Again, the value lies in the curation. I’m not sure what the A-campus channel is there for since to my knowledge Kutcher isn’t attending school; does Ashton really need to look up textbook prices on Chegg? To Kutcher’s credit and advantage, he’s already proven to his 7 million+ fans that he’s invested in social media. If this model has any legs, it’s going to require a pretty active hand behind the moving parts.

It’s been an historic day for smart phone photographers, social networks and aerospace enthusiasts thanks to a timely use of Twitter. Stefanie Gordon was en route to Palm Beach on a Delta flight from NYC when the captain announced there might be an opportunity to witness the final launch of the space shuttle Endeavor. While nearing their destination she managed to snap some photo and video of the ascent on her iPhone. Once landed, she posted a shot to her Twitter feed.

Fast forward a few hours and she’s not only gained more than 1,000 new followers but interview requests from local news affiliates and apparently a mention on the national anchor broadcasts. In a savvy move, Gordon also tweeted out her LinkedIn profile — the same day LinkedIn announced that its IPO is set for Thursday.

Meanwhile, back in NYC, your humble(bragging) blogger was checking the ol’ Tweetdeck feed and noticed that pal  “Leokitty” was having a Twitter conversation with Gordon just as I was beginning to track the story. A quick call confirmed that the die-hard Yankees fan had been flying with W+K NYC client Delta Air Lines, who just wrapped up their #DeltaDugout Yankees road game tix+airfare  promotion today. Oh, and NASA also launched a social media initiative, too.

Twitter, LinkedIn, NASA, Delta … everybody’s a winner! And now I’m a conspiracy theorist.

Unfortunately ladies, Agent Anything isn’t as suave as Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. It’s not even a dude. It’s actually a website created to set up fair trade between two groups of people: college students (aka agents) looking to make a quick buck and busy, hardworking people (aka clients) who don’t have time to complete their daily tasks (aka missions). The client simply posts their mission and how much their willing to pay for its completion and if the agent deems it worthy of their time, they accept. Once the mission is completed, the agent gets paid. Pretty amazing concept, right? For now, it’s only available in New York and New Jersey, but that’ll change shortly.

I took a tour of the missions and it’s pretty unreal what people are willing to pay for these days …

I was so intrigued I posted my own mission this past weekend. Being an amateur food snob that’s friends with two professional food snobs I decided it was time to try Fedora, a West Village hot-spot that all the food blogs are raving about. They don’t take reservations and my friends and I live on the East side so it didn’t make sense for us to trek to the West Village knowing the wait would be close to three hours. I signed up for Agent Anything and posted the following mission:

Within minutes my mission was accepted. I called the agent — some NYU undergrad who was tired of eating Top Ramen every night — and laid out the instructions a second time. The dude called me 30 minutes later to let me know my name was on Fedora’s list and I was to show up between 9:30 and 10 to be seated. My friends and I played some Mario Kart and had some drinks at my place before heading to Fedora at the requested time. I checked in with the hostess and was seated in 15 minutes! The meal was fantastic and easily worth the $10 I paid the student — mission accomplished. *** I highly recommend the arctic char.

I haven’t posted any other missions yet, but here’s my Agent Anything bucket list:

1) Wake up at 3 am to pick up free agents for me in my fantasy football league: $2
2) Pick up Ralph’s Ices (Lex and 24th) and bring to my apartment before melting. Two scoops rainbow cookie, one scoop vanilla fudge brownie: $3 + cost of the ices
3) Call CIGNA, deal with the automated machine, handle my current medical claim: $5

As a Seattle Mariners fan there are stretches where no matter of small-market charm can coerce me to check last night’s box score or pony up for another t-shirt. It’ll happen when your team’s lost 100 games the previous season. However, one of the lone brights spots from 2010 was the Cy Young-winning form of 25-year-old pitcher “King” Felix Hernandez. Even though my Spanish is a few Sesame Street words away from worthless, I decided to follow the Venezuelan ace on Twitter.

Last Monday (May 2) Felix asked a simple question to his fans: “Should I tweet more in English? What do you think?”

As a fan of the player and polyglots in general I decided to reply.

A bit of background to my response. Every year the Mariners release a batch of commercials during Spring Training, a long-running campaign that’s yielded such classics as Randy Johnson as a knife-throwing circus act and the stand-up comedy stylings of Jay Buhner.  This year yielded an instant classic, with Felix attempting to sneak in more playing time under the guise of “Larry Bernandez”:

My @reply using an online translator and a little chutzpah: “Larry Bernandez can tweet in English. King Felix en Espanol = no hay problema.”

A minute later, he @replied back:

Now at this point I’m already flipping reverse back handsprings in my head, because that is one of the few processes allowed after rampant fanboyism shuts down most major brain function. But what happened in the next few minutes nearly rendered me catatonic for the rest of the workday:

Felix swapped out his profile picture with Larry Bernandez’s.

Suffice to say that at this point my susceptibility to ordering a new jersey and buying a ticket to Felix’s next start at Yankee Stadium is at an all-time high.

What did this exchange cost the Mariners and Major League Baseball? Probably the time it took a social media-savvy employee to verify Felix’s account with Twitter, skin a background wallpaper and write up general behavior guidelines for all its personnel. For for Felix, it’s a few moments to screengrab a shot from the commercial and upload it to his account. Regardless of how much I pony up, it made my week. How many initiatives can commisioner Bud Selig boast with that kind of effort-to-payoff ratio?