If you're sick of reading about crises, whether of this economic or pirate variety, help has arrived. Leo Burnett Lisbon has created a Firefox browser plug-in that will swap out the word "crisis" on sites you visit with "opportunity." (The word gets highlighted in a sickly green.) It works in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The idea is to remind people to see the positives in the drumbeat of bad tidings. It's a neat trick and useful reminder, although I'm not willing to go as far as the agency's executive creative director, Chacho Puebla, in preaching its world-changing possibilities. "Thousands of words were considered, studied, and analyzed, but none of them sounded better than 'opportunity.' Both words are feminine, and between them there is a known relation in the Chinese alphabet where the last ideograms of the word 'crisis' are the first ones of the word 'opportunity.' This, without a doubt, reflects the reason why we want to make this hateful word disappear. We want people to start seeing things from a different point of view. We want to help make the world a better place, and that is an opportunity for sure."

—Posted by Brian Morrissey