The New York Times is running (hah!) a story about the much touted Nike+ site, one of the best examples out there of what a lot of us have started to call the branded application. The Nike+ site is done all in Flash and is a rich Internet application that brings users together and gives them a great experience around running. It tracks the users runs (distance, time, etc) and let them compare with other people on the site. It brings users back to the web and also encourages them to buy Nike shoes. As the paper notes the combination of lots of shoes out there and the coolness of the site helped generate buzz for Nike. In the process...