Screw Iran! Guess who we’re invading next!

• The “I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Does” Department — the annual RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Awards were recently announced and among the winners were CBS Evening News With Katie Couric for best national newscast and Boston’s WHDH (Channel 7, NBC) for its 11:00 p.m. newscast. Either the RTNDA has a great sense of humor or a very poor grasp of the term “Excellence In Journalism”….or standards have gone WAAAAAY downhill.
• The “Did I Say That?” Department — Writing at 3QuarksDaily recently, Morgan Meis came clean and admitted his complete and utter hatred for journalist/author/trendspotter Malcolm Gladwell. Well, you can probably guess what happened next. Malcolm Gladwell heard about it and got in touch with him. A couple of days later, Meis had to eat a little crow and publicly apologize, proving once again you should never say anything about someone on the Internet that you wouldn’t say to that same person face-to-face (or under oath in a court of law).
• The “One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter” Department — The mainstream media pretty well underplayed the story that the Bush Administration celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday the other day by finally removing him from their list of Most Wanted Terrorists. So the questionto the Bushies is: what changed?
• The “But How Are We Going To Put That On The Big Map?” Department — the recently-demised Saint Tim Russert usually gets the credit for popularizing the “Red State vs Blue State” meme with his live analysis (not to mention his little whiteboard) during the 2000 Presidential Election; even though all three major networks had been using red and blue to distinguish between the two political parties on their election coverage maps for years (NBC has been using their big light-up map since 1976), after that evening the red = Republican/blue= Democrat identification set itself in stone like the donkey and elephant symbols years before. Now, politcal pollster John Zogby has come up with a new metaphor to help keep us divided into two polarized, intractable camps: he says we should think of ourselves as either “Spring-Forward” voters or “Fall-Back” voters. While the clock metaphor is cute, what he’s saying is that some Americans have been able to prosper in spite of George Bush’s best attempts to destroy the economy (okay, that’s my editorializing) even in places that typically vote conservatively and these “Spring-Forwarders” may be far more amenable to a Democratic message this year than in elections past. Meanwhile, the people who have “fallen back” are more likely than ever to vote for the Republican triple-play of God, guns, and old white guys. So maybe the networks can come up with some kind of graphic of a clock set either to 11:00 or 1:00 depending on which group wins a state…or something…

Out from under the thumb of corporate IT security for a bit, I decided to give Twitter a try, given the enormous amount of hype it gets in some online quarters. If you have somehow managed not to hear about or know about Twitter, the basic idea is that it lets you post short messages that can be seen by other people who choose to follow your messages, and vice versa. In other words, it’s sort of like the way email was way back when, using the social networking concept of “get all your friends to do this RIGHT NOW!”

So far, I’m not wildly excited by it. The service is plagued by its own success and is so overwhelmed by people sending messages that it just plain stops working for hours at a time. They just got some funding from Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and another hot VC firm, so hopefully they can upgrade their server farm to the point where it’s at least reliable. But the quality of the technical aspect of the service is nothing compared to the issue of the quality of the content. I’m following about 30 people at the moment. Several of them (maybe 5) are very earnest Twitterers. They send out messages all day and night, very often use the service as a way to solicit information or feedback from others, and clearly are thinking about how this particular widget can be useful. But most of the messages from most of the people never go much beyond “What I had for lunch” or “I wish I could take a nap”. And even I am guilty of not being able to think up anything much more interesting to say, even though I somehow manage to write all these long blog posts every day.

One one hand, it reminds me of the early days of blogging, when the basic styles were not quite as well defined and people used them much in the same manner to post short, quippy updates about what was going on with them. So many of those people left blogging behind a long time ago; if 9/11 didn’t get them, the 2004 election cycle did. I would guess that many, if not most, of the people who liked blogs for that chatty, social interaction have become ardent Twitterers. It suits the need to say something directly to a guaranteed audience of willing lookers-on and does not demand the same level of creativity and committment that blogging turned out to have.

The IM-like character of Twitter is not nearly as compelling. Personally, I have always disliked instant messaging for its intrusiveness — maybe I really don’t wan’t to have a slightly-asynchronous conversation with someone right this minute. Because most Twitter posts (”tweets”, they call them…ugh) are general statements that do not necessarily require a response from anyone, it’s easier to let them slide without feeling that you’re snubbing someone in the process. When somebody does specifically direct a remark at you, it’s more like email than instant messaging. You can reply when you’ve had a chance to think about it and write a response without thinking someone is waiting for an immediate reply.

I find myself slightly amused by the earnest ones, because they were the same people who believed that blogs/IM/SecondLife/whatever were going to revolutionize everything and always bring that same degree of credulity to whatever online experience they have. I am more encouraged to see people recognize it as less of “The Next Big Thing” and more of “a less annoying form of e-mail”. I am a fairly chatty fellow when you get me engaged in a conversation, and I like the idea of being able to fire a quick message out to a friend or a small group of friends. I don’t like the idea of using it like a pulpit with a microphone to issue edicts and beneficent missives to my many any loyal subjects and followers. But, then, I never cared for blogs (and bloggers) who saw themselves as prophets or demi-celebrities either.

I found myself nodding my head in agreement (as usual) as I read Les’s post about not quite getting social networking in general and Twitter in particular. He clearly falls into the “why do I care what you had for lunch” camp, and, seriously, this sort of trivial and ephemeral status update messaging is absolutely worthless. Of course, the corollary to that is that there are quite a few people in this world who are not capable of conversation any more compelling than “how’s the weather?” You’re just being made far more aware of them because they can share this vacuity with you via the Internet.

But I think that very situation lays bare the real worthlessness of all the social network sites that are so popular at the moment. It seems that they really only exist for people to build lists of friends and thus create the appearance that these people are really interconnecting, when they’re mostly just swapping virtual trading cards. The better ones find some particular utility that can meet some sort of need. For example, I think LinkedIn is a particularly good application of social networking because it directly ties in to the eternal need for business contacts. But the MySpace/Facebook genre seems particularly devoid of utility. Fine for goofing around when you are a high schooler or college student with plenty of time to devote to the fine art of mindless fucking off, but vastly limited otherwise. Like some of the “Web 1.0″ websites that seemed like they were sure things, I just can’t imagine there being any lingering value to these. Twitter, if it is lucky, has the potential to turn into a useful enough thing to become a must-have app on just about everyone’s desktop the way that IM did, but it’s probably not because anybody needs to know that I ate ramen noodles with chicken today.

This is my friend Lester, a.k.a. Solonor Rasreth. Yes, he does look a lot like me. We could pass for brothers. Poor guy.

This is the impact crater left by the Tunguska Meteor, deep in the Siberian wilderness.

And here’s what they have in common:

Today is their shared birthday. This is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska impact. The meteor that struck Siberia left a hole as big as the District of Columbia and the blast wave was felt as far west as England, but was generally unnoticed until Soviet scientists found the blast site in the 1920s. According to this Novosti report, had the impact occurred 4 minutes and 47 seconds later, the meteor would have struck St. Petersburg, totally obliterating the city (which was the Czarist capital of Russia) and everything around it…which, presumably, would have gotten a bit more attention.

Lester is not as old as that, but he does know his ass from a hole in the ground. Happy birthday, you half-elf.