Falcon Heene, a.k.a. “Balloon Boy,” has a mock Twitter account set up in his honor: @boyintheballoon. I’ve decided to follow it for the weekend and be totally obsessed with it until 5:30 on Sunday. That’s about the time that I expect everybody to be totally over this story.
Did you notice? You can now “like” things on Google Reader, just like on Tumblr and Facebook. Whichever site implements a “dislike” button first will be the one that wins my heart.
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.
As everyone knows, Michael Jackson died of a heart attack today. But you might not know that he nearly crashed Twitter posthumously. Mashable estimates that over 30% of tweets this afternoon were comments on Jackson’s death. Many people (like me) actually heard the news first via Twitter—founder Biz Stonetold the New York Times Bits blog, “We saw more than double the normal tweets per second the moment the news broke—the biggest increase since the US presidential election.”
As often happens during notable events, Twitter was visibly struggling under the heavy load of tweets this afternoon and evening, with slow load times. Twitter has become a tangible way to measure how much a news story is affecting people around the world—the conversation surrounding Jackson’s death just goes to show how monumental the news felt for so many people.
According to a Zogby Interactive survey, the Internet is the preferred channel of receiving news in the U.S. If given the choice, more than 50% of survey respondents would choose the Internet as a news source, followed by 21% for television and 10% for both newspapers and radio.
Friday Fun: Are You Ready For Some Footbaaallll?!?!?!
It’s that time of year again. Months of loyally watching each game on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, following each play yard-for-yard, has all led up to this moment: an unexpected (and if you’re not a Cardinals or Steelers fan, anticlimactic) matchup for Super Bowl 43. I could rattle on about this subject (in case you couldn’t already figure it out: I LOVE FOOTBALL), but that wouldn’t fit with the social media theme of this blog. I hope the following will.
Having spent a good deal of my time absorbed in following several teams this season, InGameNow could become my new best friend. Through Ryan Spoon’s blog I discovered that InGameNow has recently launched a widget which allows fans to bring live sports scoreboards to their websites. In addition to the new widget, InGameNow allows users to share analysis, gossip and more with other fans. According to his blog, during the AFC Championship game, over 2,500 new posts were exchanged.
I, for one, will definitely be logging on this Sunday. Now, if only we could get the Bears to the Super Bowl…(a girl can dream).
“ You never hear 20-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, 40- and 50-year-olds talking about it, 60-year-olds talking about it, because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we just don’t understand what’s going on.
Clay Shirky (via betaworks : Scott Heiferman)
The New York Times website has announced that it will be launching a “rapid response” Op-Ed section within the next month. Comprised of three editors and one web producer, the team will provide online Op-eds according to breaking news; this format will also allow for reader commentary, which will no doubt fuel some gripping dialogue. Or not.
In the best news story of the week, everyone’s favorite basketball player/actor/rapper/cop, Shaquille O’Neal, is now on Twitter! Shaq was getting fed up with an impostor posing as him on Twitter, so he decided to sign himself up.
Valleywag, one of the best tech blogs out there, is going to be folded into its parent site, Gawker, later this month. It’s Nick Denton’s latest cost-cutting move as he prepares for the media apocalypse he is anticipating.
April Fools for The New York Times? NYC subway riders were greeted by thousands of free copies of a spoof NYT this morning. The paper declared that the Iraq War has ended and included a dozen liberal “dream headlines.” Word in the blogosphere is that progressive pranksters The Yes Men are the culprits. Stay tuned…
Last night’s election resulted in record traffic for many news Web sites. Global visitors to news sites peaked last night at 11 PM (when the election was called for Obama) with 8,572,042 visitors per minute! I know I checked CNN.com and MSNBC.com at least 84,000 times last night for updates.
Google now allows you to receive your Google Alerts via an RSS feed in Google Reader rather than by e-mail. I might try this, because my Outlook and BlackBerry are constantly blowing up with hundreds of Google Alerts for my clients every day.
