Today, it’s been widelyreported that Twitter (please note: inanimate internet space) is up for the lofty title of TIME Magazine’s “Person of The Year Award.” Twitter’s stiff competition for the accolade is none other than he-man goliath The Economy.
Aside from my individual eye-rolling (what, no person did anything noteworthy this year?), this face-off does foreground the massive strides social media is making in our national consciousness. That Twitter, a still-nascent startup, is arguably as influential as our national and international economy is quite the statement.
Despite my own devotion to Twitter, and the incredible opportunities it has provided as a marketing tool, I can’t help but wonder and marvel and become exhausted by the media attention it so consistently garners. What makes Twitter so compelling? And aside from Twitter’s admittedly remarkable role in the Iranian elections, what has Twitter inspired or produced, aside from a very, very selective and navel-gazing national discourse?
- Elise
P.S. This post is dedicated to Rebecca Ruiz, FWD enthusiast and avid commenter.
Last week, we worked with our client, The Macallan Single Malt Scotch Whisky, to host a progressive Twitter tasting throughout the city of Dallas, Texas. While differing in format from our previous Twitter tasting last June, the marriage of Twitter and Scotch continues to be effective, allowing us to simultaneously interact with local enthusiasts and consumers worldwide—a much larger group than traditional tastings allow for.
To get a better idea of the tastings’ format and ambiance, watch the segment above, which aired last night during Dallas’ local CW news broadcast.
In today’s New York Times Op-Ed section, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google,defends his company’s initiative to digitize all books. As in: every single book ever published.
Google Books, as the company arm is called, has been met with profound outcry from publishers and authors alike, who claim that digitizing the world’s books robs rights-holders. In the five years since Google Books began its incredible project, they have had to go through several legal battles in order to continue their work.
This initial negative reaction to the digitization of books is quick and easy. But as Brin points out, his project is not an act of reformation or revolution (I’m looking at you, Kindle). Instead, it is an act of preservation, safeguarding a culture and knowledge base that is profoundly vulnerable when housed only on paper. And by digitizing (which is, in my mind, a synonym for democratizing) knowlege, we allow it to be accessed and experienced in ways that are impossible when culture is contained in orphan, out-of-print books in far-flung libraries. What’s worthier of our protection and attention than the full sum of our culture?
Must I even state my bias anymore? Okay, fine, blah, I’m obsessed with the NYT. And yet they make it so easy! Here’s the newest reason why: Mediaweekreports that The New York Times Company is building search products to search through Twitter, ultimately hoping to generate insightful commentary for news items. The company already employs a similar tool on its superluxe blog The Moment, which aggregates relevant Twitter fodder from its editors and readers.
I think Twitter’s internal search is pretty lame, so I’m excited about this development. It’ll certainly help those of us who rely on and monitor online media, plus it deepens the ever-widening boundaries of journalism—citizen and otherwise.
“People just love to look at pictures…That’s the killer app of all online social networks.”
Above are the words of Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who has spent years studying the behavior of people on online social networks. His research is full of information on how the separate genders spend their time online, the seduction of Twitter, and the futility of MySpace, but aside from the aforementioned quotation, my favorite insight was the following, for its simplicity: “Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks.”
As a way to publicize the new Sony Reader, Sony has launched “Words Move Me,” a site that allows bookworms (who, me?) to share their favorite quotations with one another.
This is, as TechCrunchpoints out, effectively a literary Twitter: Users are allowed to contribute “literary moments” of up to 225 characters, and tag it with whatever emotions the experience evokes.
We all know I’m just slightly biased regarding the supremacy of The New York Times. But in spite of that, let me just pose the following question: does any other news site create such incredible interactive graphs as NYTimes.com?
The above is a representation of how Americans spend their time, displayed on a minute-by-minute basis. The graph can be parsed by gender, race, employment status, age, education and number of children.
I’m constantly amazed by the creativity, artistry and genius behind the NYT interactive graphs (which I’ve blogged about before). But this kind of ingenious graphical representation takes supreme smarts and, ostensibly, cash. Thus, creations like the one above provide yet another reason to cross our fingers and hope that larger newspaper/media companies like the NYT stick around for a long, long time, as without them, this sort of invention could never be financed.
Using their twitter handle, @luxehunt, clues will be distributed as to the location of a Luxe Hunt branded sticker. The first intrepid detective to find the sticker wins a bottle of Mendis Coconut Brandy, valued at $100,000. (It’s golden. No, seriously.)
For $100,000, I’m pretty enthusiastic about looking for a sticker.
The hunt begins at 9 AM on August 21, 2009, and ends either at 11:59 PM that night or whenever the sticker is found. More info can be found at the luxehunt website.
After viewing the above video, sent to me in a daily newsletter from The Awl writer Choire Sicha, I knew it would be really selfish if I didn’t share something so special.
Soraya Sobreidad, talent behind the video, submitted the recording as a contestant in the NY1 Music Video Star Contest, which encourages viewers to send in videos of themselves performing their own version of the NY1 theme song. The winner who submits the best rendition wins a professionally-produced music video and recording session, and an interview on NY1.
I’m rooting for Soraya; Soraya has a gift.
Whether or not it was part of NY1’s original gameplan, circulating vidoes such as Soraya’s creates incredible buzz for the station. Not only does Soraya spend two and a half minutes singing about NY1 (a performance she dedicates to “hunk” Dominic Carter, host of Inside City Hall, the program she will leave even her “hottest dates” to watch), but with attention from the New York Observer and The Awl, she’s fast becoming an internet meme, spreading news of NY1’s contest and larger sense of humor.
TechCrunch reports that Google Books is getting an upgrade! In this newest iteration, Google Books is now more readable, readily searchable, navigable, and sharable. College thesis writers, rejoice! Your life just got significantly easier.
Amidst a tumultuous political atmosphere, where authorities have blocked text-messaging on cell phones and journalistic websites, Twitter has emerged as an invaluable way for Iranian citizens to swap information about protests and demonstrations. In a remarkable move, recognizing Twitter’s invaluable role, the US State Department asked the site to postpone its scheduled maitenance in order to maintain this conduit of information for those in Iran.
This entire chain of events is fascinating to me, from the politics itself to the foregrounding of social media, and is a powerful example of how the Internet frontier—with the democritization of information and access that many seem to decry—can be an incredibly powerful venue, one that may even enable social and political movements.
In addition, Twitter has become a funnel for videos of protests and information about the elections, information otherwise banned from leaving the country. At a time when many feel the decline of print newspapers will degrade the quality of journalism, the internet—Twitter and YouTube, specifically—have filled the gaps in news-gathering that bans on traditional journalism have created. Revolutions every which way.
Seeking submissions that address the subject of either perfection (defined by the contest as “The pursuit of excellence against all odds”) or sacrifice (defined as “Choosing what is right over what is convenient”), the contest will award the filmmaker who best demonstrates his/her subject with $50,000.
The alignment of spirits/alcohol and the arts is a trend we’ve been making specific note of in the past couple of months. Our own client, The Macallan, merged the dual arts of photography and whisky making, and the example above makes the case for the shared pursuit of perfection and triumph over sacrifice.
The picture above is from M Booth’s tasting for The Macallan, which took place this past Wednesday at a restuarant called eightyone (which is amazing, btw).
While we’re old pros at organizing tastings, this was slightly different, as we asked those who attended to live-tweet their experience so that people around the country could follow along and get a sense of The Macallan. Jean Aw from Notcot.com wrote a fantastic article about her own experience here.
We’re really excited about the response we’ve received and we’re really excited for the next one!
Wordnik, a new web venture devoted to expanding and cataloguing our lexicon, went live today, allowing word dweebs such as myself to have a social media resource for vocab.
Let me just say: I think it is completely genius.
After searching a word, one isn’t merely greeted with definitions from multiple online dictionaries, but also Flickr photos tagged with that word, quotations that use the word, statistics on how often the word is used, pronunciations, etymologies, synonyms, and tweets from people who have just used the word. My head is spinning! I love etymologies!
I think Wordnik is especially poignant at a time when many word-lovers are mourning the death of print and bemoaning the digitalization of books—this site, essentially a thoroughly modern Oxford English Dictionary, proves that much can be gained through the evolution of media.
Maureen Dowd: I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account.
Biz Stone (Twitter founder): Well, when you do find yourself in that position, you’re gonna want Twitter. You might want to type out the message “Help.”
Full dialogue, which discusses merits and pitfalls of Twitter, can be found here.
