I’ve heard lots of guys say they like a woman who can eat… Really?

Anyway, have you ever thought a zombie was, maybe, a little sexy? If not, you might consider the possibility when you see My Zombie Pinup. These lovely, flesh munchers not only want you…they will go great on the wall of your office!

Why? ‘Cause My Zombie Pinup is a wall calendar. Plus, you can get great swag like t-shirts and hoodies.

My Zombie Pinup is an homage to the classic pin up. With several of the shots directly references some of our favorite works by the master of the pinup Gil Elvgren. [More Inspiration]

The photos, as you can see above, are top notch. The background settings are flawless and the models look great. In fact, some of them are downright creepy! The contrast of sexy pinup and bloody zombie is intriguing and creates a unique appeal.

If you haven’t picked up a 2010 wall calendar, you should consider My Zombie Pinup. I mean, where else will you see girl-on-girl zombie action?

Thank you to Shalaco, co-founder of My Zombie Pinup, for bringing the site to my attention and talking with me via email.

Most news articles tend to be long with few readers making it past the first few lines. Net News Daily is working to bring you bite size news stories. This way you can get the main idea and facts but not get bogged down by the fluff. As Net News Daily likes to say, “We take the news and mash it up.”

Net News Daily was launched in January 2009 by two young British men – Nathan Adam and Scott Campbell. Along with about 15 writers, they keep the site constantly updated with stories from around the world.

Editor-in-Chief Nathan Adam told me they started Net News Daily because, “We had a small ‘news’ blog before and we thought that we could create a new, more professional and informative news website.”

When it comes to their mashup style Nathan says, “…we like to strive to keep our news short so that it gives the key information in a good and well understood style. For those who don’t have much time to read the news.”

They seem to be on the right track. For being so new, the site has quite a bit of traffic. According to Compete, the site receives about 4,500 unique visitors per month. Not bad for being less than a year old. You’ll also find that the sites layout is fairly typical for a news page, so it should be familiar and simple to navigate.

NND could be a nice alternative, or addition, to the usual stuff you find on CNN, MSNBC and others.

Would you give up a $50,000 a year job with a Fortune 100 company to launch your own business? Most people probably wouldn’t. But that’s exactly what Celestine Chua, author of CelestineChua.com, did and she’s loving it!

Celestine is a life coach who works 1-on-1 to help others strive for personal excellence and achieve their goals and dreams. Celes explains it on her site like this:

If you find yourself stuck in some area, life coaching will help you to get unstuck and make progress. If you want to get more results out of a certain area of your life, be it career, health, relationships, finance, etc, life coaching will help you to attain your desired results.

When you visit her site, you’re going to find a lot of great information you can put to use immediately to improve your life.

I first heard about Celestine from a guest post she did on Darren Rowse’s site ProBlogger.net. I was impressed, not only with her personal story, but also with the awesome tips she was giving on how to earn press coverage. Lucky for us, she agreed to an interview!

First, I’d like to congratulate you on pursuing your ideal career! Was there a specific moment or event that motivated you to make such a drastic change?

Hi Tim, thanks a lot! I would say there were numerous trigger points which culminated to my decision, just like how many different things in our life add up to lead to where we are. I’ll share my two biggest triggers.

The first point came when I was still in university. I was in business school and a year away from graduation. My grades were among the top percentile (I was on the dean’s list); I had already secured a placement with my dream employer and it was as if I had my life set before me. Having achieved what many would see as the ultimate objective of education (to secure a good job), my last year of university became a year of deep introspection and search for myself. I started looking ahead in my life – what I saw for myself in 5 years, 10 years, 20, 30, 50, my death bed, and even beyond death. What I found, to my horror, was that all the things I had been pursuing were just empty goals. Money, recognition, success (for the sake of success) were just empty, impermanent goals which crumbled away after death. When I realized that, I started looking deep within me on what exactly was the meaning of my life and human life. I went on a deep introspective journey, and to cut the long story short, I eventually realized that the highest meaning I could embark on in my life is to achieve my highest level of consciousness and help others do the same too. From that point on, I adopted that as my life’s meaning and started aligning everything toward that.

As I looked onward, I realized working for my employer wasn’t something which would let me fully realize my purpose, but I went ahead anyway because I figured the experience from working in one of the top corporations in the world would greatly aid me in my long-term plans. I joined the company with the intent to learn as much as I could. After about 2 years, the second trigger point came – I felt I had learned a great deal, and felt I was ready to start off and fully embrace my purpose. Everything worked out great eventually – it’s been almost a year since I’d left and my personal development business has made great headway in the 6 months it has been up. I can’t wait to see what’s up next.

How did your family respond to the news?

My parents were shocked definitely, because up till that point, I had never really shared about the higher vision I had for my life. While they had their misgivings and stigmas (for example, self employment is regarded as risky and unstable especially in Singapore where I’m from), they understood my life was mine to lead and the ultimate decision was mine to make. Their understanding is something which I’m grateful for.

For first-time visitors, what 3-5 articles would you recommend they read to understand you and your message?

The first one will be Are You Sleepwalking Your Life Away? There are so many people in our society today just living life for the sake of living and not really experiencing life the way it is meant to be. I refer to these people as the “sleepwalkers”. In this article, I urge the reader to wake up from this state and start taking the step to live the life of his/her dreams. Posted in 3rd week since the blog launched , it has quickly become a site classic and has spurred many to start taking action on their lives.

The second one is Discover Your Real Purpose series. It’s a very detailed, comprehensive 7-part series I wrote on life purpose, including how to tell if you are living your purpose now, the difference between false and real purposes and an exercise on how to discover your real purpose. The exercise I shared is the same exercise I used to discover my purpose. Many of my readers have also found their purpose from the exercise as well. The purpose is the starting point of living a conscious life, so I highly recommend everyone who hasn’t found their purpose yet or isn’t sure if they know their purpose to check it out.

The third is Passion or Money? It addresses a popular conundrum many in our society face regarding whether to pursue passion or money, and is something I had to address when I was planning how to best pursue my passion. I eventually came up with a best fit solution which addressed everything I wanted. Check out the article for the full answer.

I heard you are working on a book. What can we expect to see when that comes out?

Gosh, the plans for the book have changed quite a bit! My intended topic for the book is on passion – specifically, how to discover and pursue it. I figured it was the best topic I could write about since I have personally experienced the journey and overcame various obstacles to finally live in resonance with my passion.

I initially intended for it to be a free ebook to be released this year. However, after some thought, I decided to release it as a published book instead. Given the long lead times of the publishing world (a year), the book probably isn’t going to be out anytime soon. In addition, I’m committed to producing the best possible content for this book, so I’m taking good time to write it. There are going to be people who will look toward it for answers to their questions – questions they’ve had for a long time, and I want to be sure the content is as holistic as possible.

At the present moment, my immediate project is getting my school up and running. It’s going to be called The School of Personal Excellence and will be up sometime this year. I’m extremely blessed to have the support of a few generous and highly committed partners for this. There are lots of things to plan out – school vision, goals, marketing activities, program curriculum, logistics, etc, but I’m really having fun doing all of it. Can’t wait to see how everything turn out eventually!

If I wanted to start creating my best life, what three things would you recommend I do today?

1. Discover and start pursuing your passion. What is it you absolutely love to do? What is it that will get you up and going every day? If you haven’t found your passion, the exercise on how to discover your purpose is applicable for finding your passion.
2. Map out your long-term goals. What do you want to see your life to be in 10 years? What are your biggest goals and dreams you want to see fulfilled? Don’t limit yourself by anything.
3. From there, start acting toward your goals. Break them down into 5, 3, 1 year goals, then monthly milestones. Create specific measurables. Then to act on them and bring them to life. It is through action that we direct manifest the things we want in our life.

This is a great start for anyone interested in getting the most out of life. Celes, thank you for joining me today to talk about your work!

About Twibbon

Twibbon.com launched on July 17, 2009 (just 4 days after Talk with Tim!) and has captured the attention of tens of thousands of people around the world. The most supported cause, IndonesiaUnite, has over 14,000 followers! This earns them a Twibute and a place in Twibbon history – the first cause to have over 10,000 followers. Amazingly, they achieved this in only 2 days.

From Twibbon.com:

Twibbon is the easiest and most powerful way to promote awareness of your cause on Twitter.

So…

What is a Twibbon?

A Twibbon is a small icon or phrase that is layered on top of your Twitter profile picture. This way, everyone can see what causes you support. Whether you want to champion cancer research, a political party or something less serious (say, The Sims 3 or the TV show Trueblood) you can either find it or create it.

I’m a curious kind of guy, so I decided to find out a bit more about the company. Lucky for me, I was able to get in touch with Jonathan Joyce and Bob Thomson, the co-founders of the site!

Like a map, this interview comes equipped with a legend.

• My questions appear in bold, as usual.
• JJ is Jonathan Joyce
• BT is Bob Thomson.

The rapid success of Twibbon has been pretty amazing. Did you anticipate such a large response?

JJ: Hi Tim. We were convinced that the concept behind Twibbon had universal appeal, but it’s a testament to the extraordinary spontaneous power of Twitter that such a rapid viral response has been possible. It’s brilliant that our community uses the fastest-growing social networking site on the internet.

As of July 31st, almost 3,800 Twibbons have been created. How fast are new Twibbons being added?

BT: It’s hard to keep track! One of the new features that you’re going to see in an upcoming release of Twibbon will be detailed statistical analysis that deals with exactly these kinds of questions. We’re experiencing a steady stream of causes being created, but it really varies. When Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, referenced the application in a tweet, we had our record rate of Twibbon creations – it was off the charts.

Now that the service is up and running, what are you focused on?

BT: Our main priority right now is to establish Twibbon as part of the essential fabric of the Twitter and wider web experience. We’re spending the majority of our time maintaining the site, responding to the needs and suggestions of our userbase and developing innovative new features that we hope our growing community will enjoy.

What features can we look forward to in the future?

JJ: In the coming days and weeks, Twitterers can look forward to an exciting range of developments, including as a ‘Versus’ feature, and a huge injection of new content, both user-generated and fed from the web. As Twibbon develops, we hope that ‘Cause’ pages will become unique social micro-hubs – destinations that Twitterers will recurrently visit for real-time news updates, to discuss relevant issues and to enjoy each other’s company.

BT: Another feature we are expanding is our creation of ‘Twibutes’ to causes who have generated an impressive number of followers. A great example of this can be seen at http://twibbon.com/twibute/Indonesiaunite, which we created when that campaign exceeded 10,000 followers. ‘Twibutes’ are massive mosaics that comprise all the Twitter users who lent their avatars to their chosen cause. These can be downloaded for posterity, but to get the fullest experience, you can DeepZoom the image – from a distance, the mosaic takes on the appearance of the Twibbon design, but when you zoom in really close, you can see the minute detail of each individual avatar. It’s breathtaking.

Thanks for the info guys!

Follow Twibbon on Twitter here.

Spreading the word about charities – that is the goal of Lovebox. The company describes it as a “digital wristband” to show your support for a new charity every month. Lovebox gets the message out utilizing social media like Facebook, MySpace and the new media giant – Twitter.

So, how does this work? You simply swap out your profile image for one of their colorful heart logos and, hopefully, donate a bit of change to a good cause.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to talk with Michael Murdoch, one of the co-founders of Lovebox. Here’s our conversation.

Lovebox

The idea was sparked by the take up of Twitter. Myself, Michael Murdoch and my friend, Kaushik Bhattacharya soon realised how powerful messages on Twitter can be. We wanted to harness this power for good causes. We then noticed Twitter avatars changing to black, due to the Blockout campaign in New Zealand. The idea was born, the name Lovebox was created and the plan was put in motion. May 1st 2009 we launched.

How do you decide which charities to support?

We chose Cancer Research UK as the first charity. This was due to cancer personally touching our lives, but also due to the awareness already surrounding the charity and the illness. A high profile charity helps launch a new digital wristband.

Our second charity was chosen by Lovebox viewers via a poll on our ‘Get involved’ page. We continue with this each month. Vote now at Get Involved!

When you choose a charity to support, is there coordination with that charity group?

We approach the charities we have so far and confirm they are happy for us to support them. So far the charities have been very keen. After all they don’t actually have to do anything but agree to our support, sit back and enjoy the raised awareness and funds! After just a few months we now have charities approaching us left, right and centre and are currently working out how we can support them all in different ways.

Other than growing your followers/supporters, what is the biggest challenge facing Lovebox and how do you plan to address it?

Our followers and supporters have been great. We have raised money and awareness and it’s still early days. The press have written about us too which is awesome. The next steps are to make this even more viral with customisable avatars, banners, widgets, video players etc. We also plan to allow people to take the Lovebox brand as their own, put on events and organise fundraisers on their own but with our support.

The biggest challenge is growth. It all takes time and we are allowing it to be organic.

Charity Tuesday (or #charitytuesday) on Twitter seems to have really taken off, were you surprised by this?

We were surprised by the speed of which it took off, only two hours, but we did expect it to take off eventually. It’s an easy and effective way to show your support for a good cause or charity, so hey why not!

Do you plan to host or sponsor real-life charity events?

In a way yes. We will hold our own events in the future, but in the mean time we’re happy for the public to host events in our name. In fact, there will be one this month in Shoreditch held by some supporters!

I really like the idea of self-hosted fundraisers and events. Speaking of, what is the event in Shoreditch about?

This is being organised by a tweet-up group as we speak. They found us through Twitter and liked the idea. They put on monthly events in an Italian restaurant which involved great food, drinks and good conversation. We plan to attend but the date is still up in the air for the moment. Should be the end of July.

The design business, The House London, seems to be the main business. Is Lovebox sort of a complimentary project that showcases your design and marketing skills or is it a wholly separate business?

Currently it’s as you suggest. The long term plan is for Lovebox to turn into a full digital solution for charities around the world and become a company in its own right!

Michael, thank you for your time!

Thank you for stopping by Talk with Tim, be sure to subscribe so you can stay updated!

Lovebox Around the Web:

• The Guardian – Lovebox’s Charity Tuesday
• Top Floor Flat – Give A Little Lovebox
• Killer Startups – Raise Money & Awareness
• Springwise – Social Cause
• Philanthropy.com – CharityTuesday
• TechnicaVita – Are You Involved in CharityTuesday?