On August 14, 2009, Google put the "doodle" at right on their homepage to remind the world that it was the birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted — the father of the study of electromagnetism. Why? Because they have a design sensibility for the marketspace age in which they understand that all brands are verbs; all logos need to be clickable, and when they are clicked upon, they should communicate something interesting about your brand.

In this case, what does it mean that Google pointed to Hans Christian Ørsted? Few have heard of him despite the fact that he was the first to observe "invisible fields" created by current passing through a wire. If you are in the market for the best technical people in the world, as Google is, this sends a message of substance and style and even a bit of the "inside track" — all done with a clever and beautiful change to their iconic brand logo.

As most of us know, Google often morphs their logo to send a message — whether it is for the presidential elections or Valentine's day. Yet few other brands have followed suit. Click on the Wall Street Journal — you always come to the same home page. Amazon — nothing of interest. Coke, Microsoft, Cisco — nada!

Given the fact that all media is becoming interactive — and either touchable, as with the Apple iPhone or Blackberry Storm, or clickable with a mouse — every company needs to create a new design sensibility to make their logo into a device for interaction, messaging and brand building. Billions of people are moving to smart cell phones where the first and most frequent impression you give to them is your icon on a tiny screen. It is time to think about not only what that little icon means, but how you will morph it over time to signal what your firm is all about.

Branding is now where movies were in the early 1920s. It took creative geniuses like Sergei Eizenshtein to create new camera angles and montages thereby opening up the power of the new medium to tell stories more dramatically. Google, like Eizenshtein, is breaking new ground with branding, in a playful yet powerful new way.

My question is: what should your brand do when someone clicks on you?

Today, let us celebrate the end of an unjstifiable drain on the US taxpayer: the Cash for Clunkers (C4C) program.

True, C4C greatly boosted the number of consumers visiting car dealers. Doubtless, some new cars were sold to consumers who thought they had a clunker to trade in but, on discovering it didn't qualify, they bought a new car regardless.

But why did taxpayers, having already bailed out GM and Chrysler once, have to do so again to the tune of $3 billion through the $3,500-$4,500 C4C incentives? This taxpayer money simply enabled the dealers to avoid having to offer discounts off sticker prices and extract higher profit margins than they would have otherwise obtained on the qualifying new cars. The program proved so popular that inventories of the qualifying cars soon dwindled, further boosting the dealers' negotiating leverage and unit profit margin.

Did C4C sell more cars? Maybe in the short term but, in reality, the promotion stole largely from future sales with taxpayers subsidizing over a quarter of a million new car sales that would have occurred anyway.

C4C disrupted the even flow of supply and demand. New car buyers held back in advance of the launch of the program; in fact, many prenegotiated with dealers to do so. And, now the promotion is over, expect year-on-year sales to be lower than they would have been because so much consumer demand has been concentrated in the promotion period.

And were these C4C sales helping poor people trade in unsafe vehicles or buy a new car for the first time? Hardly likely, because auto loans still aren't readily available and many poorer people would buy a better quality used car rather than a new car.

Who came up with the $4,500 figure, way higher than any prior manufacturer incentive? No doubt, our friends in Detroit. American consumers know a good deal when they see one and burned through the first $1 billion in five days. The promotion was way more generous than it need have been.

A $2,500 incentive would have attracted the older, most fuel inefficient used cars. Instead, a $4,500 incentive attracted many perfectly serviceable vehicles. Because of government concerns over fraudulent recycling of traded in, vehicles had to be destroyed.

Signs point to the C4C program failing from an environmental impact standpoint. Whatever the mpg improvement of the new car over the clunker, premature scrapping of functioning vehicles is hardly a contribution to environmental sustainability. In addition, C4C buyers may well drive their higher mpg cars more miles per year than they did their clunkers. And two car families that traded in their old SUVs for high mpg sedans may later trade in the existing family sedan for another SUV, resulting in minimal mpg improvement on a per houselod basis.

The administration of the C4C program has been cumbersome. Each clunker required dealer salespeople to complete 11 forms, the online computer system set up by Citi was slow and sometimes crashed, and extra workers had to be hired to process C4C claims. Only $145 million of $1.9 billion in claims have so far been refunded to dealers. Ironically, GM and Chrysler are using taxpayer bailout money to advance dealers the refund money they are waiting for from the US government! In the end, administration expenses might well reach 10 percent of total program costs.

The Federal government should not be in the business of initiating and administering short-term incentive programs designed to shape consumer purchase behavior. It has no experience in such initiatives and proved itself incapable of forecasting demand associated with different incentive levels.

And the auto industry hardly deserved special treatment, when home appliance and furniture sales, for example, are equally in the doldrums.

For the last week or so, I've been reaching out to our Twitter followers with a question: What one person should every entrepreneur on Twitter be following?

The response has been great, and today (just in time for #FollowFriday), we're excited to publish a list of 20 people every entrepreneur should follow on Twitter. It's a mix of your suggestions and our own picks -- Twitter celebrities alongside lesser known people, some of whom I only just discovered. We also selected a compelling tweet from each to demonstrate why they made the list.

This isn't the first attempt at such an effort. And our picks are neither definitive nor comprehensive. But they can be a place to start for entrepreneurs still exploring the service, and I hope even seasoned Twitter users will find one new person worth following. I think just following these 20 people alone on Twitter will make most entrepreneurs smarter and help them discover better ways of doing business. But if we made a glaring omission (likely) or included someone who wouldn't make the cut on your own list, let us know in a comment below, or find us on Twitter: @newentrepreneur.