Eideard

Says something about what constitutes “female” nowadays, eh?

Barbie – the famous Mattel doll that is loved by girls (and boys) all over the world – appears to have taken on a new career, and a starlet and movie maker. And what’s more is that she’s also joined social media website Foursquare, to celebrate the new Barbie Video Girl.

According to Jennifer Van Grove at mashable.com, Barbie – as a celebrity Foursquare user – will be using the social media service to promote location-based scavenger hunts. She’ll also be using the popular social networking site Twitter, to tweet text, photo and video clues…

The new Barbie Video Girl doll doubles as a video camera, with an LCD screen. It also comes with video editing software. Both the doll and the Foursquare scavenger hunt has showed how Mattel is tuned into the digital and social media world of today.

Ah, tuned-in. As in Hard Day’s Night and the saxophone replacing the guitar as lead instrument?

Foursquare has inked a partnership with the Canadian version of Metro, the free newspaper that gets distributed on subway trains and other locations in various cities, that will give its users the ability to see local news and reviews related to a specific location they are “checking in” at using the service’s iPhone or BlackBerry app.

Metro International, a Swedish company that publishes free papers in more than 100 cities around the world, says this is the first time the location-based startup has partnered with a news organization in any country.

In Canada, the paper is in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and claims circulation of some 800,000. So if a Foursquare user is near a restaurant in one of those cities for which Metro has a review, that will be displayed as a choice for the user. Although the Metro release doesn’t say whether other forms of news will be available as well, the potential is there for Metro reports on fires, break-ins, celebrity sightings or other news to be provided to users of Foursquare based on their location as well…

Mark Briggs at Lost Remote makes a good point that in the long term, location-based news would be better accomplished by way of an open API and open data-sharing rather than proprietary relationships between news services and app vendors. But at least in the short term a deal like that of Foursquare/Metro could provide some interesting evidence as to what’s possible when you blend location and news (or marketing) content.

Any of our Canadian readers have a chance to try this, yet?