Continuing our weekly posts, here are the things that got us talking this week:

• MIT's Media Lab is home to some fantastic mad scientists. Their latest project to go live is the Junkyard Jumbotron, which let's you take any variety of devices that can display a browser and combine them to display one fully interactive image.

• Walking back to the office after a social media meeting with a client Dave uttered the highly retweetable quote "You don't choose social media, social media chooses you." My response, "don't wait until social media happens to you."

• The New York Times has erected the great wall of pay around their digital content, and while they wait and see how this decision affects their business model, we would like to point them to the March 17, HBR The Daily Stat newsletter, that includes the following nugget: "39% of people surveyed said they would feel no impact if their local newspapers shut down. 30% said it would have a minor impact, but only 28% said the impact would be major, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. About three-quarters of respondents to the survey of 2,251 U.S. adults said they wouldn't be willing to pay anything for online news if their newspapers failed to survive." The full Pew Research Center report, titled "How mobile devices are changing community information environments," is available here.

• This post would not be complete without a mention of the recently ended SXSW Interactive. It seems that beyond all the discussions of buzzy "branded journalism," adding "game layers" to everything and replacing ironic air quotes with ironic air hashtags, the main reason to attend this year was to be able to get a brand new iPad 2 on the day of release at Apple's SXSW pop-up store with a minimal amount of waiting in line. Dave said it best today, SXSW has become the Burning Man of interactive, growing too big, too fast, for its own good.