Yammering at work is not a waste of time, concludes The Economist. What is a waste of time, though, is calculating how much time is being wasted on social networks. And with that, we bring you a list of ten things we yammered over the past week or so in a post whose title rhymes with Les Miserables.

We were fascinated about all things iPad, of course:

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This week, Creativity Magazine published its selection of the top 20 Super Bowl Ads Ever. Hill Holliday is on the list with two Budweiser spots:  “Respect”, created after the tragic events of September 11th, and “Replay” that takes a humorous poke at referees.

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Sitting across the hall from each other, Greg and I have been enjoying a lively debate about the hopes that publishers of “traditional” periodicals (that is, newspapers and magazines) are reportedly nurturing for the upcoming iPad device.  We’ve now laid out our opposing views in a recent AdAge post, with Greg arguing that iPad will do for newspapers what iPod has done for the music industry and me saying that there is a big difference between paying for music and paying for newspaper articles. We are duking it out on the pages of AdAge here; they also have a poll open on the topic until tomorrow.

January marked the Boston Usability Professional Association’s (UPA) monthly meeting hosted by Fidelity, with speaker Colleen Roller.  The evening began with the Boston chapter’s president Chris Hass boasting about the popularity of the Boston chapter.  Boston has 1,000 members (myself included), whereas the UPA international has 2,000 (way to go Beantown).

About halfway through the event, I realized I was sitting next to Steve Krug, author of best selling Don’t Make Me Think.  I felt like I was sitting next to a celebrity since that book has been one of my personal favorites for a very long time.  Besides rubbing elbows with Krug, Colleen gave an amazing presentation.  It peaked my interest because it touched upon a lot of the concepts in the book I am currently reading, Neuro Web Design.  Colleen’s talk was about designing to persuade and how to get people to make certain decisions.  She went into how the brain actually works – the old, mid, and new.  She also discussed how our subconscious affects decision making, whether we realize it or not.  One example Roller gives is to think of the middle two numbers of your social security number.  If you were asked how much an item costs, there would be a direct association with that number in your head.

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Christina Warren did a great job on Mashable breaking down the marketing strategy of the motion picture: “Hot Tub Time Machine” which releases in March. More and more, movie studios are recognizing the power that word of mouth (via social media channels) has on ticket sales and the folks at MGM are off to a powerful start in energizing movie fans.

While this campaign’s social media components are well thought out (and you can read all about them on Mashable), the brilliance behind MGM’s marketing strategy is, once again, integrating media across channels.

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Apple’s recent acquisition of Quattro Wireless has flipped a switch in our collective minds — Apple is an ad network now! The very idea of putting the name of the famous gadget manufacturer on our media plans feels  unusual. With details on Apple’s plans still sparse, I asked my colleagues for their thoughts about how things could unfold.

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