Celebrities Tweet and Plunk WAY too much!

I know I started out with my blog discussing celebrities...but I have more info to blog about alright?! If I was a famous actress, I too could have 38,919,023 followers on my famed Twitter or Plunk or Yammer or Friendfeed account! And I would use these too as a way of marketing my product, aka MYSELF! The paparazzi create their own type of status updates: where is Cristina Applegate feeding her pregnancy cravings today? How much legal trouble has Lindsey Lohan found her self in? If she even blinks, people think she is on heroine. Stars could use microblogging to create moments in time to counter the moments in time captured by the cameras bright flash, and the magnified lenses. With a good publicist, they can make even better choices, literally re-presenting themselves to their audience. Microblogging is just one way that celebrities, and important people today are changing their personas. Did you know there is a celebrity twitter internet site that gives ranking, mistakes, who is the most liked, etc. etc. etc?! It probably wouldn't surprise you to know that some of our most troubled, or enigmatic stars are ranked at the top--Lady Gaga and Britney Spears are the two most followed celebrities on Twitter (over 58 million followers.) Can you guess who ranks third and fourth? Thats right....Ashton Kutcher is third, followed by our countries leader at a mere 4th place! Maybe Lady Gaga should give our president some advice on fashion stir, or lyrics that craze millions because she obviously knows how to draw attention to herself! Maybe the president could shave his head with a lightning bolt down the back, or dress himself in plastic bubbles? Though these four have millions of followers, they are not necessarily the ones who tweet the most. Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Apple employee, has used Twitter 82 times today, and its only 1:55 in the afternoon. Similarly, the person who has posted the most photos today is also using Twitter as a marketing tool. June Ambrose, a celebrity stylist and author, posts pictures (8 today already) of outfits she has put together for clients, or what she considers to be the next 'hit' in the fashion world. Or how about last week on Jersey Shore when two of the guidos went to get their hair cut in a specific barber shop and allowed the hairdresser to take a pic, attracting more clients, and showing off the new hair style of Pauly D or the Situation. Stars are stars for the moment. Microblogs capture their moment to moment lifestyle, allowing the normal Dick's and Jane's of society to feel connected to the extreme lifestyle, the Hollywood wannabes. Microblogging allows stars, capitalists, the notorious, and the beloved to manipulate how their image is projected to the public. They are after all marketing an image, who am I to judge.

Microblogging in Education

140 characters doesn't seem like quite enough to learn anything! 140 characters, really? But education is finding itself greatly added by this recent discovered technology we like to call microblogging. It has only been four years since the first tweet was posted around the world. Education has already found microblogging to be a useful tool in more than one realm of teaching and learning. With the new emphasis on communities of practice, collaborative learning, and authentic use of technology, teachers in high schools and colleges are beginning to use sites like edmodo, twitter, plurk, identi.ca, and friendfeed to foster a sense of community in well, cyberspace. Teacher's can use microblogs educationally to create personal learning networks, to assess opinion, for project management, conferences, research, and for sharing new ideas. Edmodo, a strictly teacher or student microblogging site, has over 17 applications that the network considers to be useful to both teacher and student. Does microblogging about education really create a community, foster new ideas, and support the learning process? Who knows.... but we are going to find out pretty soon considering that the realm of teaching is becoming influenced by technology at a rapid pace.


I talked to my friend who is a teacher and she said that as classrooms move towards the idea of situated learning, community has to be constantly redefined and reexamined. Given how important microblogging is in creating networks of friends, it should be functional in uniting networks of learners.

Ladies and Gentlemen....The Future of Microblogging

The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte Listen to this after you read my amazing blog post fooooooools!

Jaiku! Pownce! Plurk! Twitter! (Who comes up with these names?) If I am tweeting and you are plurking I can't hear you! When I Jaiku, don't Pownce, got it? Good! The subject of this blog is that microblogging platforms are incompatable. The future looks bright for creating new and improved ways of telling you that I just fried an egg, and learning that you just got new summer highlights. In fact, if we look at the history of the microblogging universe, we will see that it is about to mirror what happened with email. Email started out requiring people to belong to the same service in order to communicate, and next thing you know there is a movie made about finding love over email and you have 50 thousand emails in your inbox these days! AOL may have found competition from Gmail, Yahoo, Comcast, and a billion smaller providers when it came to electronic mail, but the instant messaging never became codified and still to this day, instant messages are fragmented and service specific. Providers like Pidgin will work across multiple types of protocols, but I know more people who use carrier pidgins, than the real networking service. So who is working to make microblogs work across platforms? Ping and Friendfeed let people post to multiple microblogs at once, and as a lot of people found out when Facebook had one of their infamous outages, identi.ca came in to save the day. Identi.ca comes from some guy named Evan who spearheaded a new open source application called Laconica which is in its infancy and calls its approach "federated" meaning that when I tweet, eventually you can Plurk back. This is clearly a consumer driven advancement, but it will also have a profound effect on businesses that use social networking sites to target consumers.

Total Information Awareness

Though Facebook is a social network website, and not simply a forum for microblogging, it is a type of status update to use the Facebook Place to tell people where you are at any given moment. This is a new feature added last week by Facebook, and so far many people have been updating their places just as often as they update their status--microblog overload! BrightKite is one of many new location based social networking services that let people communicate by microblogging pictures of their current location, and where they are. There are three basic reasons for using this specific type of microblog: it can be a lackadaisical diary, it can be used the same geo-caching is used but with cool travel as the reward, or it can be used to plan get togethers and spontaneous, impromptu events. The service is another example of consumer's guiding the development of a product. Since last week when Facebook released Facebook Place, I have been reading the Place feed, as much as I read the update statuses. While some might immediately become worried that a one could be stalked by such an application, the American Civil Liberties Union sees this type of technology as part of a larger threat. The pentagon's "total information awareness" allows "government officials easy, unified access to every possible government and commercial database in the world." While travel patterns were already included under the Patriot Act, this new type of government surveillance can use facebook place feeds and information from BrightKite, or any other location based social network service as part of the creation of a portrait of any person, even if they are not suspected of a crime. I think we would all agree that video surveillance is one thing, but when the average Joe is at Wal-Mart he doesn't expect the pentagon to be aware that he is shopping for dog food and canoe paddles. Most people don't consider their daily actions to be important enough to be part of a federal investigation, but they do consider these important enough to tweet about them to the whole world. Boy do we live in funny times!

I hope I don't become this attached to Twitter by the end of this blog!

Microblogging: The Laws and Regulations

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently documented a free speech case in which a woman was harassed and slandered over microblogs. The entire case caused Twitter to re-evaluate what their policies and procedures are in regards to profanities, identifying other users, privacy, and freedom of speech. In other news, the FBI has been using microblogs to accuse people of organizing protests that go badly--the most recent example was a man in Pittsburgh microblogging over the G-20 summit. John Burkoff, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh said, "Anyone can tweet, but the truth is, sometimes speech can be criminal." So how is expression on microblogs different than any other form of speech. Issues about legality of speech in the internet realm was not even generally resolved, now a whole other realm of gray area has emerged. This is not a little problem, the UK is struggling with microblogging laws as well. A newspaper in the UK was blamed for tweeting information about parliament. Extreme cases about mis-use of microblogs are also becoming a problem. For a new user who accidentally tweeted about mold in her house, ended up with a $50,000 dollar lawsuit thrown in her face. Some cases where one would expect a lawsuit simply go down as issues of really poor taste. Take Attorney Mark Shurtleff for example, tweeting about a death row man's impending execution. Where are we going to draw the line? When will laws and regulations about microblogging be set in stone?

Read more about Mark Shurtleff here: http://www.blogherald.com/2010/06/18/twitter-execution-message/

FBI: Watch out what you say on the internet

Microblogging in times of emergency!

Police are starting to use microblogging, especially the well known microblogging site known as Twitter, as an alert tool. We all heard about the uses of technology during the September 11th tragedy as people tried to find love ones, reconnect with others, and even find lost pets. But even during peaceful times, microblogging can be a useful tool for easily alerting and communicating. Neighborhood watch programs are common in most suburban settings; imagine how much easier it would be to post a warning or alert, instead of using the old phone tree. Last year when my house got broken into, it would have been useful and beneficial for all of my neighbors if I could have tweeted to 'watch out and lock your doors tonight!' Perhaps I would have even read a neighbor's tweet warning me of the same, and avoided the whole traumatic event. For police, there is not a phone tree that they can even use to efficiently describe an abductor or escapee. Imagine a 3 year old got kidnapped--wouldn't it be great to have a group of concerned citizens already looking for your child because of that one tweet that was sent out to the group immediately? Not only could microblogging be useful for apprehending petty criminals, or even violent criminals, but microblogging is becoming a useful tool in helping the absent minded criminal who is posting his master plans in cyberspace. The complications arise when people are just plain stupid--the government official who tweeted about a secret mission in Iraq is the perfect example of what NOT to do! Microblogging can be an asset to government, law officials, and to the public when used in the right way, plain and simple.

Building a Sweet Business, Tweet by Tweet

Will Tweet for Food

In this information society, highly specialized jobs are springing up around innovative technological bodies. This week I read about social media managers who are essentially people who harness the seemingly trivial power of microblogs, email, and any other form of cyber space communication, including youtube and itune podcasts. The person chosen to handle social media in an organization is uniquely qualified to view the world through the eyes of upper management, fellow employees, and the consuming public. It is their job to make the company pretty much sound cool. This is a serious example of a decentralized organizational structure. A person smack dab in the middle of an organization is updating the public on the status of the business. Sounds pretty radical?! The only way that this can possibly work is by having a solid structural design incorporated with rules and procedures for disclosure, defined objective, a knowledge of both the mission and values of the organizations, and the culture of the intended target audience. In an informational society, data moves so quickly that microblogging allows for easily updated, and quick results for managing any business or organizations social life.

Yamas! (Cheers in Greek)

Over the last few weeks I have been traveling around Greece--Greece, home to mythology, oracles, and ruins; a beautiful country defined by its great food and see-through waters, is also a new owner of what we here in the states like to call 'economical downturn.' Over the last few months Greece has taken an unfortunate turn towards a broken economy that faces a large debt. Through my travels, one thing is true, everyone still has their cell phones--ancient relics of our technological past. Microblogging is simply not as prevalent on the older models of phones. Phones have adapted--actually mutated--to respond to, and even anticipate our needs, not to mention we have the money to keep up. While touring around Greece, just looking at the handheld devices people carry, I realized that technology is a visual device for separating people out by where they are economically. Perhaps adequate use of technology like Twitter would help with the economic downturn in Greece, and Europe at large. After researching I realized, most European companies have no idea what Twitter is, and the European mindset would probably see it as inefficient. According to Forbes, Tesco, the U.K.'s biggest retailer, is one of the few Twitter account in Europe and it has only had one outside comment from viewers (YIKES). If countries like Greece begin to employ technology effectively, I would assume that technology and economy could improve to some degree--at least to the point we won't see people trying to access status updates on Facebook via lozenge sized Motorola rejects.

Industrial Revolution

The pony express ran out a long time ago. Business strategies no longer hinge on railroads to establish economies of scale. Instead, networks are the ones transmitting all of our important data, information, and transactions. In other words, geographic expansion is no longer physical. The Industrial Revolution began with "big business" in the iconic sense of Monopoly (the board game ya know?) and morphed into what Pfeffer described as " a drive for sociological competitive advantage by structurally reformulation businesses and re-shaping the organizational cultures of businesses,"the environment in which businesses operate is becoming increasingly more innovative and microblogging is one of the more adaptable and customizable strategies. What can microblogging do for business and success? The uses are startling diverse. We are all familiar with product pushing, but humanizing the CEO and people in power positions is a more intangible idea. The ease with which companies expand networks, build partnership, get the most current information, research, and collaborate is mindboggling, or is it mindblogging?