Have you guys ever heard of Elan Gale? I hadn’t either, but his Twitter bio says he produces The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and The Bachelor Pad, and he has a blue check mark next to his name so he must be important. Still not ringing a bell? It’s okay. All you really need to know is he live-tweeted a blind date, and it was hilarious. Witness the madness below.
Update: The entire thing was fake. Continue reading
Hey folks, great news! Ann Romney is going to take care of Mittsey’s gender gap by showing us all she’s the gold standard of American womanhood; white, more or less Christian, stay-at-home mom, and ideal help meet. How is she doing this? By joining Twitter. See her first two Tweets and join our game, below the fold. Continue reading
Ever think that Tweet or Facebook status or Crasstalk comment is just going out into the webosphere void to be swallowed up and eventually forgotten? In most cases we pray for this after a night of drunken internet ramblings. Or do you ever think you are just wasting your time writing into this void that gives you so little in return? Well fear not! You can now rest assured that many libraries are on the job making sure that your contribution to the “social memory” of our times is being preserved for future generations! Continue reading
An eighteen-year-old Kansas high school student, Emma Sullivan went on a field trip to Topeka, where she got to enjoy a speech from Kansas governor and laughable 2008 presidential candidate Sam Brownback. The speech–probably as electrifying the stirring oratory that vaulted Brownback to almost seventh place in Iowa’s caucus in 2008–was so moving that Emma couldn’t wait to tweet about it. “OMG Sam Brownback is awesome! A dreamboat!” she tweeted enthusiastically. Continue reading
Who would have thought the star of one of the best out-of-body movies EVAR, Ellen Barkin, would be one of the funniest mofos to ever grace Twitter?
Writing a book is probably not something you think about doing 140 characters at a time. But that’s exactly what Dan Sinker did with “The F*cking Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel.” He might not intended for his parody of Rahm Emanuel’s 5 month long mayoral campaign to become a book, but that’s what happened.
I originally read the @MayorEmanuel twitter feed in real time. It was one of the reasons I finally ended my boycott of twitter. The feed was hilarious then and it translated well as a book. The annotations in the book provided additional background of the characters featured in the twitter feed – both fictional and non fictional. Most tweets on their own are comedic gold, but read again in book form you can see the whole story come together. Continue reading
Last Friday I spent the day “working from home” because I was anxiously awaiting my new iPhone 4S. It arrived around 1:30 PM Central and activated after about five angry hours. iOS 5 has some nifty new features, many of which where previously available if you got them by jail-breaking your iPhone. The hows and whys of which are a little outside of the scope of this post. Here’s a keen video about why you’d want to jail-break your iPhone, in case you live under a rock or haven’t been paying attention. Continue reading
A little while ago, Twitter published their top trending topics for the first half of 2011. For all that has been said about Twitter promoting triviality, thoughtlessness, Biebermania and every other sign of the apocalypse, the trending topics reveal a bit of hope for the Twitter generation after all – and also emphasise Twitter’s international spread.
Apparently Hitler drives a Prius.
The 405 freeway is an important artery in Los Angeles, and is one of the main ways of connecting the Westside to the Valley. There isn’t a train or bus route that effectively duplicates the route that the 405 takes, so shutting down the freeway for a weekend to demolish the Mulholland Drive Bridge as part of a highway widening project was considered a big deal for the residents of those neighborhoods. The build-up to the closing of the 405 was heralded by a massive public information campaign that could basically be summed up as “do not drive to the Westside on the weekend of July 16-17, because it will literally be hell on earth.” Granted, if Los Angeles, and particularly the Westside, were more multi-modal, the need for mass panic probably wouldn’t exist. It still would be a big deal but people wouldn’t be urged to just hide in their homes and barricade their doors. However, the information still needed to be disseminated. Continue reading
Remember the data visualization of racial and ethnic divides in America we saw a few months ago? The man behind it all, Eric Fischer, is back. This time he looked at geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter tweets to create See something or say something. He used red dots to represent Flickr photo locations and blue dots to represent the locations of tweets. If something was posted to both, a white dot was used. Like his previous projects, the results are pretty and informative. Continue reading