The Twitter account known as @horse_ebooks has taken over a certain segment of the ultra-plugged-in internet--38,000+ followers strong, at least--for its bizarre non sequitirs and sentence fragments, like "Dear Reader, You are reading" or "You re the best. I am all fired up now. I have been doing this for years and it has Read More
In addition to her @Courtney Twitter account, sometimes a source of entertainment, consternation and lawsuits, kaleidoscopic rock queen Courtney Love has a second, private and much more personal account on the microblogging site: @Cbabymichelle. "Personal" as in Cbabymichelle is actually written by Ms. Love and not an assistant. According to former Radar Magazine chief and current Fix-meister Maer Roshan's new eBook about Ms. Love, Courtney Comes Clean: The High Life and Dark Depths of Music's Most Controversial Icon, Ms. Love has used the lesser-known account to have barbarically yawping dialogues with her public persona, one online voice acting as a PR-friendly saint to Cbabymichelle's heckling sinner. Mr. Roshan writes: Read More
Consider the social media editor: Her background and ambitions are journalistic, but because she possesses the very basic people skills required to navigate social networks, she awakens one morning to discover she's become a so-called "Twitter monkey." Read More
You'd have thought that Taco Bell's tweet on Martin Luther King Day-- "Have you ever dreamed about eating @TacoBell and then woke up and made that dream come true?" --would have been bad enough to scare off any other fast food chains from making another social media blunder this week. But like a line of delicious, deep-fried dominoes, McDonald's has now toppled in the face of the almighty force that is thousands of bored, scabby teens.
Read More
The Huffington Post's Twitter account was hacked Sunday afternoon and it wasn't even fun, just offensive. In a rapid-fire series of tweets containing grandiloquent soliloquies like "hello gay boys" and "lol wes is a gay boy," a hacker who claimed the nom de hack "cloverfdch" locked the feed down tight, amusing and puzzling HuffPo's 1.5 million or so followers for several minutes until he was locked out again and HuffPo resumed tweeting links to its posts as if nothing had happened. Read More
You would think: There you are, you've made it to the New York Times. You, with all of your hard-work, talent, and moxie have lead yourself to a place Gay Talese identified—in the title of his book on the place—as The Kingdom. And how majestic is it, this Renzo Piano building. Nothing can stop you now.
Except for the persistent smell of burning animal flesh beginning from the moment you get to work. Read More
How can you tell 2012 has begun with a bang? Just log onto Twitter: the hot topics since Jan. 1 are a Venn diagram of American life—from pop culture to politics, to sports and even race relations. It’s beginning to feel an awful lot like looking into a microcosm not too dissimilar to those sea monkey kits we cried enough about to have Mom and Dad buy one, only to have it sitting in garage next to whatever Santa had brought us the year before. In fact, Twitter has morphed into This American Life. Well, again, for sea monkeys. At least there’s a community spirit in the barrage of 140-character thought bubblettes: it’s one of the few times that you’ll find New Yorkers venturing outside their insular world and joining in the national dialogue … even if it’s only online and it turns out that our sea monkeys are just brine shrimp with great marketing.
So here was your week on Twitter. Read More
Our long national nightmare is over and a time of miracles has come. Alec Baldwin, of the Amazing Flying and Words With Friends-Playing Acting Baldwins, has returned to Twitter. Baldwin left the social networking site and his half-million-plus faithful followers bereft of his gruff but avuncular presence in early December after his storied blowup with American Airlines. Mr. Baldwin would not comply with a flight attendant's commands to turn off Words With Friends, reasonably noting on Twitter at the time that the plane wasn't even moving yet. American Airlines responded swiftly to the incident but for the famously crotchety actor didn't seem mollified. For his own mysterious reasons, Baldwin shortly thereafter tweeted that he wanted everyone to unfollow him.
Read More
Here's a fun one to close the week out with: We recently discovered the unequivocal joy that is Vanity Fair's fashion market director, Michael Carl, on Twitter. He is, in a word, fantastic. This is also the most public insight into the inner-workings of Conde Nast since the world has been without Conde Elevator. Read More
Hmmm...this new Christmas single, released by Lady Gaga via Twitter on Christmas, is the type of shenanigans we are used to seeing from Ke$ha. "Stuck on Fuckin' You" is 5 1/2 minutes long, with the last 90 seconds totally improvised (according to Gaga). You can barely tell!
Read More
Kim Kardashian, back from Australia and on the West Coast, kept up her style of tweeting things the rest of the world is dying to know this Christmas. As in:
"Stephen, did you know that despite receiving a new iPhone for Christmas, Kim Kardashian finds people with two phones 'shady'?"
"No, Robert, I had no idea!"
"Well, me neither!"
But she does.
Read More
Interesting: Most soon-to-be parents squabble for months over baby names. But if you work at Tina Brown's Newsweek, one of the nice perks is that you can just put the question to your magazine's 1,500,000+ Twitter and Tumblr followers and let them decide for you! At least, that's what Deputy Editor Paula Szuchman was forced by Tina Brown to do in an attempt to boost the company's image as a warm, friendly work environment chose to do.
Read More
NY Post whipping boy Alec Baldwin was unceremoniously kicked off an American Airlines flight today for playing Words with Friends on his smartphone iPad, reports Mr. Baldwin, the NY Post, Mr. Baldwin later tweeted that he was moved to a 3:00 p.m. PST American Airlines flight, blasted the airline's flight staff Read More
The journalism community prides itself on its social media use, but a study released yesterday reveals that mainstream news organizations are using Twitter wrong, i.e. to advance their own material as opposed to engaging with readers and followers. Researchers from The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University's School Read More
Poor Salman Rushdie: there seems to be a social networking fatwa against his digital presence. First there was that incident where he tried to claim his Twitter handle, only to find out there was someone already squatting on @salmanrushdie. Humiliated, the Satanic Verses author was forced to claim @salmanrushdie1 until he gained enough support to push out the faker and reign over his rightful tweets.
To add insult to injury, Facebook deactivated his account yesterday, thinking he was an imposter. Then they refused to let him back under the name "Salman Rushdie."
Read More
