So exactly how effective is saturation of commercials? I guess getting songs stuck in the head of the TV-watching masses is a plus, if and only if they know what the hell the song is peddling. For a while I thought the “Lollipop” song was dedicated to selling scads upon scads of Verizon phones, namely because phones are all sorts of goofy colors these days. [Conceals orange BlackBerry to prove a point]
But no. Upon looking for the video, it’s actually a Dell commercial, because they’re selling those little mini laptops (kneetops?), and they needed to remake an old song that nobody exactly liked in the first place. Ergo, it’s about effective as a knapsack full of coconuts to the solar plexus.
Jolly! I now hate the entire concept of miniature laptops.
I’m the king of lost blogs. I lost two Futon Reports and a couple of impeccable Blogcritics articles. They’re just gone. GONE. Unrecoverable.
It’s really a sad feeling. After all, those were some great phrases I used. I may have coined a new meme that would have been bigger than the cat playing the keyboard. But alas, clumsy me, I closed without hitting save. I typed directly into an article entry, never hit save, and hit close/refresh/back/thumbupyourbutt. What a terrible feeling. We’ve all been there.
It happened to me Wednesday night, in the first iteration of this LeBron James article. I mean, it was pretty good. Moreover, it was 1 a.m. I was only going to be awake for, like, three more hours! And most of that was going to be playing Adventure Island II. It was inconvenient, to say the least.
So I closed the laptop and attempted to fall asleep rather pissed off. Of course, I’ve seen all the sitcoms episodes where married couples do this. I didn’t want to have a dream where a giant beard ate me, or Wordpress took a dump on my head, so I got back up, and wrote the whole shebang again. Only I wrote it in a different way. And you know what? It turned out better than the first one. (As if that was possible!)
The big lesson may be “save your work,” and if we’re playing Family Feud, it’s probably the No. 1 answer. Always write on your hard drive first, and try to find a word processor that autosaves. Secondly, always, ALWAYS, question your writing. Could it be better? Should you re-write the whole thing?
The context is way off, because it involved one man (Leonard Pitts) publicly writing to another man (Chris Cecil) who plagiarized him, but it applies here:
Here’s how you write a newspaper column. First, you find a topic that engages you. Then you spend a few hours banging your head against a computer screen until what you’ve written there no longer makes you want to hurl.
And when all that work is destroyed by a foolish thing like forgetting to save, it stings even worse, but the feeling of doing it all again is somewhat rewarding.
I’m glad I got back out of bed and tackled the beast again. Maybe I should forget to save more often.
Last night I was tipped off from a reliable, prominent individual that my Twitter account was going to get some more traffic. This is always a beneficial thing. More people are going to see my paranoid thoughts about the Tigers blowing late leads. Hooray!
And then, there it was. On his blog, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra (the boss that signs my Blogcritics paycheck, were one to exist) announced the launch of a site called Twittorati, which picked off the top echelon of bloggers affiliated with the top 100 bloggers and put them on some kind of pedestal. As an example page, he linked to mine. Verbatim:
You can also really dig into the information source: writer pages display each tweeter’s blogs and Twitter information and Technorati Authority
Ergo, Deadspin is a top 100 blog, so they get a page, and there are all the Deadspin mothertwitters. I mean, they actually hand-wrote in my Deadspin title. Why did they spend their time on that? (I mean, you can understand why I would. They forgot to put that on all the business cards.
Like Twitter itself, it took me over two years to figure out what the hell to do with the medium. Maybe by 2011 I’ll know the purpose of Twittorati, and perhaps by 2021 I’ll know why I was selected.
So here’s a guess. What Twittorati may address is a flaw in Twitter’s metric of prominent users. All the most widely followed Twitter accounts are very famous people. Martha Stewart uses Twitter? I know who she is, so I’ll see what she has to say. But how do you find the top tweetin’ bloggers, a.k.a the people who make a name for themselves by writing interesting things? They try just a bit harder than the average celebrity who can make lazy waves by simply telling them what they recently did, or heard about. Therefore the quality of a blogger’s 140 characters is probably going to be, on average, slightly better.
Instead of using some cryptic quadratic formula to determine the most widely read, responded to, and therefore “the best Twitter user in the world,” they’re using humans to manually reap bloggers and package them to everybody else. I suppose it’s a start, albeit very blogocentric.
Hey, it got my attention. Then again, I was used as an example. And I have no problem with that.
Written on July 8, 2009 | Posted in Tech | 1 Comment
So here’s an idea where I can make some money off Twitter. It may not work, and I haven’t worked out all the details, but it’s better than just doing nothing and blogging about it, am I right?
One cent is not a lot of money. It’s enough to let someone drop it into that little dirty gas station tray. “Here, let someone else use it.” Even in this economy, we don’t literally have to pinch pennies. Just larger coins and paper rectangles with dead people on it.
One penny to subscribe to someone’s Twitter account per month. Not anyone’s account — hell, you’re not that special, but suppose one could designate their account as a “premium” feed. They’re not talking about what they ate for breakfast or looking for any recommendations on where to park downtown. They’re offering up links, insights, jokes, and every other microbial cornerstone of the Internet. For a penny.
Of course, like the plan on Office Space, the pennies add up. Suppose all my Twitter followers were giving me a penny. That’s, like, almost four bucks a month. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll charge two pennies. But I don’t want to get greedy.
Need to find out where it’s snowing? Need to look up the number of someone you call quite often? Trying to impress your non-iPhone friends? There are apps for those. There are also apps that do things you didn’t even think you could do.
But is there an app for everything? This is what I intend to find out.
The answer is no. (Damn, that was quick.)
Using a highly difficult mathematic formula that HTML cannot handle and therefore I cannot share with you, the following is a list of apps that do not exist for the iPhone that could conceivably make your life better:
• Hide your stutter
• Mask your body odor
• Find a restaurant with the touch of a button … that isn’t in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles
• Find a block of text you like and copy it so you can paste it somewhere else
• Get this song out of your head
• Beat Gauntlet
• Bring your childhood puppy back to life
• Make Oregon Trail as fun as it was when you were little
I think it’s everyone’s goal on Twitter to be followed more than they are following. That, or to cure cancer. (One of those.)
So if you’re looking to gain a bunch of followers, you have so many options, and a ton of them are golden by-ways to popularity. Be witty! Be useful! Retweet interesting sentences! Follow the entire world then quickly drop them!
Or just write the following tweets verbatim:
New York Yankees Boston Red Sox Baltimore Orioles Toronto Blue Jays Tampa Bay Rays Detroit Tigers Cleveland Indians Kansas City Royals
Chicago White Sox Minnesota Twins Oakland Athletics Texas Rangers Seattle Mariners Los Angeles Angels New York Mets Washington Nationals
Philadelphia Phillies Florida Marlins Atlanta Braves Milwaukee Brewers Cincinnati Reds St. Louis Cardinals Cincinnati Reds Chicago Cubs
Pittsburgh Pirates Arizona Diamondbacks Colorado Rockies San Francisco Giants San Diego Padres Los Angeles Dodgers
Per my experiment last night on the National League East, the following occurred:
Later, this happened:
Before you know it, people won’t be able to distinguish between you and Ashton Kutcher until they look at your LSAT score.
So exactly how effective is saturation of commercials? I guess getting songs stuck in the head of the TV-watching masses is a plus, if and only if they know what the hell the song is peddling. For a while I thought the “Lollipop” song was dedicated to selling scads upon scads of Verizon phones, namely because phones are all sorts of goofy colors these days. [Conceals orange BlackBerry to prove a point]
Need to find out where it’s snowing? Need to look up the number of someone you call quite often? Trying to impress your non-iPhone friends? There are apps for those. There are also apps that do things you didn’t even think you could do.
