The "Not-So_Great" Twitter Challenge 2009

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Poor Leo,

He's gotta talk About

Twitter THIS Week!

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TWiT, like iPhone, has a small i, and Stands for This Week in TECH. A nice catchy and fitting name for a very popular MP3 Podcast about the current goings-on in Technology.

One of Leo Laporte's biggest hangnails is the Microblogger Wunderkind called Twitter.

That sounds too similar to TWiT:
his Show.

Up until recently, Twitter was Best Known for being the Most Popular "Cloud" program that has yet to make "money".

Tough Problem in these Tough Times.

Well this Week, Twitter Became the Most Talked about "Thingy"

by Two unbelievable "Celebrity Stunts", yes Stunts.
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First and foremost was the

Ashton Kutcher-Larry King
Media-hyped Challenge.

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Stupid URL to the story (not Linked on purpose!)

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090415/on-the-net-twitter-kutcher/images/1db04644-0bbf-458e-927f-8600090fccf3.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/ashton-kutcher-vs-cnn-for_n_187263.html&usg=__sPx4mrPepgh32uix22hx03bW3HM=&h=512&w=383&sz=38&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=xqINBrqwW80ryM:&tbnh=131&tbnw=98&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dashton%2Bkutcher%2Band%2BLarry%2BKing%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

That's 446 "Freakin" characters of STUPID!

Run through the Twitter inspired TinyURL and it becomes:

http://tinyurl.com/dmocpd

and that's just 25.

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The 445 characters would be 3.18 tweets because "Tweets"

(twitter messages are limited to 140 characters each.)

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The Kutcher Challenge was a Face Off of Popularity between Kutcher and Larry King to see "Who" could reach 1,000,000 "followers" First.

A Day or so later, Ashton had won the Challenge and was the Larry King Show to accept his "Prize" a Pair of Larry Kings trademark suspenders.

Check the Video Bar Top Right...

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Not to be out done by this Self Promoting Stunt,

the Queen of Media,
Oprah
manufactures here own

"Media Circus" ,

by becoming a Live "Twitterer" on her

Oprah Show.

It's pretty sad when "Puff-Cakes" become supporters of
"New Technology" that's been around for OVER TWO YEARS.

Yep, Leo's going to have to

Talk about THIS ONE.

Wingman, shaking his Head....tsk..tsk...tsk
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Also sadly, Oprah's First Tweet was corrected (pawned) by Shaq,

a Media-Savy Basketball star...

Obviously, to be continued, unless we run out of

Celebs that Need "the Spotlight"

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3 EZ Steps to Blogging by Wingman

1. Search the Tech Headlines:

I open up Firefox and click on my Tech tag and the First Item I have there, which is Daily Rotation. Which grabs Headlines from

Roughly 333
TECH Web Sites!!!

I check the top ten headlines first for

something of Interest TO ME..

If I find nothing I go down the page scanning for a headline that

JUMPS out at me Like:

U.S. Travelers Lose 12,000 Laptops
a Week

a story at Gizmodo.com.
http://gizmodo.com/5022317/us-travelers-lose-12000-laptops-every-week

2. Snag an appropriate Picture. (usually something I find on Google images works fine).

On this story, Gizmodo has a good enough picture, snag it and be sure to reference where you got it. Fair is fair, you know.3. The Lead Paragraph, if too long rewrite in your words, if as is be sure to Credit the Writer.

U.S. Travelers Lose 12,000 Laptops a Week

a story at Gizmodo.com.

All you travelers coming home tomorrow from your wild and crazy Independence Day weekend vacations, don't be one of 12,000 people who lose their laptops at airports every week. That's right, that ain't no typo—12,000 dudes and dudettes somehow manage to misplace their portable computers every seven days. That's 600,000 machines a year, many containing sensitive information that companies need to account for.


3. Give Credit Where Credit Is DUE.
Include References:

picture credit: Mike Reger

Story by:
9:30 PM on Sat Jul 5 2008
By Elaine Chow
http://gizmodo.com/5022317/us-travelers-lose-12000-laptops-every-week
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That's Pretty much it. If the Snagged story has enough Human Interest (which I feel it does) You'll probably hear about it in the Major NEWS Channels, CNN, Fox News and even local network coverage.

Blogs have become a viable filter to Tech News and you'd be surprised how many stories get their Legs, IN THE BLOGS.

Wingman out.

Is Network News Still Relevant?

Newspapers are dying on the Presses, Ad dollars migrating to the Web. Local Newscasts are visual regurgitators of the Times, both New York and Los Angeles. And Network News are Glorified pulpits for Anchor Celebs that shuffle commentators faster than Johnny did on the "Tonight Show".

Even the venerable 60 minutes has become a ticking bomb of a newscast. Whatever happened to the Cronkites and the Brinkley's?

CNN has become a fireman with a camera chasing the latest catastrophe with silly YouTube styled clips.

The problem my friends is focus. And the focus is not news, it's advertisers. And everyone has something to sell, and the pitchmen and women are like the carpetbaggers of old. Prancing for the fast buck and then off to the next marketing hero.

It's better to go offshore, like the BBC to get a better perspective about is important for me to know about here in the States.

And the Web, without a 2.0 nailed to it, is still the best way to get access to it. And BBC podcasts are just a click away.

Right now, on GMA, someone is actually interviewing Adam Sandler.

Now that's news worthy...

Wingman way out.

Pipes, ANS Network and Bernice

Yahoo Pipes:
Yahoo came out swinging a big "pipe" last week to snag back some respectability from Search Leader Rival: Google.

Yahoo Pipes is a Web-based RSS "mash-up" tool that lets you graphically connect Source Information (from one or many rss-feed places), and add a bit of logic or filters and create a "New View" of the RSS data.

They say it's a tip-of-the-hat to Unix Pipes Tools, which for anyone running any recent distro of Linux knows, is alive and well in the Linux OS.

Scripting languages can do pretty much what Yahoo Pipes does, but the Web based GUI is a pretty big deal. It was supposedly developed by Yahoo In-House, and beats Google to a pretty nice New Tool.

REAL Competition IS Good.

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The BOOBs at Network News:

When oh when did they become PEOPLE Magazine?

CNN is now the ANS Channel.

You know what the letters stand for.

One of the cool and needed things you can do with Yahoo Pipes is grab the News RSS feeds and Filter-Out any mention of ANS.

Hopefully the "NETWORKS GONE WILD!" mentality will be over real-soon-now, before any more attention-starved nymphets shave their heads in protest.
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Bernice and Hair Bobbing:

"Huh! she giggled wildly. "Scalp the selfish thing!"

Quoted from Bernice Bobs Her Hair from the book Flappers and Philosophers.
New York:Scribners.1922.

A title of a short story from high school was "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", and it was mentioned at work recently. And Not having heard that title before I decided to "Look it up".

Wikipedia has become a very good place to start, and was so in this case too. I was surprised to find that it was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the same writer that gave us the "The Great Gatsby".

Sidenote: (also found on Wikipedia).

Louise Brooks of the film silent era became synoymous with the bobbed or flapper look of the twenties.

New MC2 BLOG: "Thursdays, we saved the World." Check it out.