Nice grammar.

Previously I’ve written of my hatred for Twitter, including 15 Reasons Twitter Must Die, 1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die, Twitter Fails Again, Twitter Officially Goes Mainstream, and Why is Mashable Obsessed with Twitter?. Not belabor the point (well perhaps), I’m afraid we need to revisit the issue. So let’s call this a series.

If your cell phone service occasionally went dead for an hour, would you be ranting all over the internet about how great it was? 

If the post office sometimes just didn’t deliver the mail for a day…OK, bad example.

How about if your cable or satellite TV went down during a big game like the Superbowl – even if you were watching something else? And next, during the World Series of Poker? And then during fairly-popular episodes of Oprah? Would you be excitedly proclaiming your provider’s greatness in your blog and encouraging others to use it?

As of today, Twitter worship continues, and yet this glorified Fisher-Price toy remains as unreliable as ever. This morning, TechCrunch reports on another Twitter outage, this time due to a “database problem“.

OK, fine. We all have our database problems now and then. My problem isn’t with the people at Twitter, though their Jack and Jill Magazine attitude toward their own failures must even get on their fans’ nerves sometimes:

No, my problem is with the slobbering fanboys and fangirls who are basing their monumentally pointless lives around it.

An exaggeration, you say? Let’s look again at Mashable, whose Twitter fandom remains unabated. On Monday, they posted the horrible “HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive“  by Elliott Kosmicki, which recommends using Twitter to accomplish various important tasks. A few of his most ridiculous:

• Manage to do lists (“Next time you’re telling your followers what you ate for lunch, you can also make a note to call the cute waitress you met while you were there.” Yes, I’m sure she’ll be impressed when you tell her the story of how you twittered yourself a to-do note about her.)
• Set a timer (Be sure and use it for really important things, like “remember to feed the baby”. And what device are you using to access Twitter anyway? Does it not have a built-in clock?)
• Get your flight information (Are you really going to depend on Twitter to help you get to the airport on time? If so, you deserve to miss that plane.)
• Track your expenses (Sounds like a solid plan. I’m sure the security is top-notch.)
• Get news alerts (Because you can never have enough news alerts. Hey, have they found Caylee yet?)
• Track packages (“If you’re like me and spend too much time tracking your latest Amazon order…” No, thankfully, I am nothing like you.)

Elliott isn’t the only offender, of course. In fact he’s not even close to the worst. Take Darren Rowse of the execrable Problogger.net (How to make your blog stand out? “Pick a unique topic”). Darren smelled the money and started a Twitter-specific site, the atrociously-named Twitip.com. Are these people unaware of the meaning of the word “twit”, or is there some type of irony involved?

The titles of the posts tell an ugly tale of pointlessness: 

• How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche (because we don’t just want ordinary readers, we want “high-quality niche eyeballs”) 
• Would you say what you say on Twitter if it was a Real Life Face to Face Interaction? (What would you say if I suggested you had no social skills?) 
• Helping others leads to Twitter Success (which contains the odious terms “Twitterating” and “Twitternation”)
• Using your Blog to Promote Twitter, (“Twitterverse”, “Tweeple”)
• The Quest for 5000 – How many Followers are Enough
• And the question on all our minds, Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?.

There are so many more examples of sites like this, but my brain hurts already. So in summation: if you find yourself acting anything like these people, please seek help. And please don’t tweet about it.

In a previous post, Google Trends: The Borg Speaks, I talked about the strange and sometimes disturbing movements of Google Trends.

In that post I had some fun using Google Trends as a radar of our bizarre cultural zeitgeist. But that is far from its only use. For one thing, bloggers have found a clever, perhaps less than scrupulous way to use Google Trends to gain a large bump in their site traffic, and thus their advertising income.

Now, I’m not necessarily advising this technique, but in the spirit of full disclosure of the black arts, I’ll tell you how to do it.

For this to work well, your site needs to already be a) reasonably popular in terms of traffic, b) already listed by Google, and c) indexed quickly by Google Blog Search after each post – quickly meaning a matter of minutes. If c) isn’t happening, make sure your blogging software is set to ping “http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2″ after each post. The faster your post is indexed, the better this will work.

Step One: Find It

Google Trends is updated frequently throughout the day. As it updates, wait for a newly popular subject to bubble up. Look for one without much competition in the search results – something new or uncommon. That’s not too difficult in a society which creates new “celebrities” on a pace of about twice a day. Sometimes a neologism will pop up, usually after being spoken by someone on a popular TV show. Grab it.

Step Two: Write It

Write a quick, keyword-heavy post on this hot subject. The content can be cribbed from Wikipedia, imdb, or AP News – it just needs to be relevant to the subject. The first couple of lines should be inviting to a searcher (i.e. “Everything you want to know about _____”, “Hot nude pics of _____”, etc.). Use the popular term by itself as the post title, for maximum keyword density.

Step Three: Ping It

The final step is to ping Google as quickly as possible and get indexed. If it works, searchers will see this post in the top few results for one of the most popular searches of the day. That can mean thousands of clicks. If you have advertising which pays by the impression, you just made some money. Even if you have pay-per-click ads, you’re likely to get quite a few extra clicks from people simply looking for somewhere else to go after they’re done with your page.

Now, that’s how to do it unethically. But do you really want to post solely for the sake of gaining traffic? If you were a store owner, do you just want to get people inside your store with a window display, or would you rather work on having satisfied repeat customers?

Then again, how unethical is it really? Isn’t this really just another form of what the Huffington Post does – re-packaging other people’s work and putting it in front of more noses? Don’t get me started; let’s save that for another post.

So there are open questions and gray areas. If your post is relevant to your site and to the subject, and you manage to add some value, then clearly you’ve served a purpose, even if you’ve marketed your goods in an manipulative way. And isn’t all marketing inherently manipulative? Doesn’t a consumerist, advertising-based society favor manipulative tactics over quality, innovation, humanity and all that other bullshit people still seem to care about despite decades of soul-crushing propaganda? 

I think the only way to answer these questions is with an experiment. Tune in tomorrow for a Google Garbage™ Special!

By far.

If you’re not familiar with Tumblr, don’t let the stupid name put you off. While everyone has been nattering on about Twitter, Tumblr has built what is very nearly the perfect tool for publishing on the web. It’s easily the best blogging platform in existence. Why?

It’s incredibly easy, and it scales effortlessly from Twitter-length messages to full-length blog posts with images, multimedia – whatever you like.

Some elitist techie gatekeepers may not like this ease of use, but I say screw ‘em.  It’s a new day, people.

Here’s how you do it with Tumblr:

1. Go to tumblr.com (time: 1 second).
    
2. Sign up. Fill in three text fields – your email, a password, and the name you want, i.e. xxxx.tumblr.com (time: maybe 10 seconds).
    
3. You are taken to your Dashboard page. From there, click one of these buttons, and share something: (time: whatever you like).

   Each type of post has a built-in code snippet that tells it to treat each type of post differently, with zero effort on your part. Audio files you upload are served up in a sweet little Flash-based player. Quotes are pre-formatted with blockquote styling. Everything looks like it should – automatically.

4. Done. You don’t even need a title for your post. It’s amazing how freeing that is.
    
5. (optional) Put a “Share on Tumblr” button in your toolbar (get it from the “Goodies” page). When you see something you want to share on the web, click the button. Absurdly easy.
    
6. (optional) Surf other tumblelogs (yes, that’s what they call them), and when you like a post, click the “re-blog” button. It’s added to your blog, with the proper attribution.
    
7. (optional) Customize your look. Although Tumblr is the first and only platform whose default style looks absolutely great, there are plenty of excellent, free styles to chose from.
    
8. (optional) Make your own style (if you’re handy with CSS), point your own domain at your blog, add custom html/javascript…do your thing.
    
9. (optional) Get fancy. Publish RSS feeds, post via email, phone, IM, OSX widget. Import posts from your other blog with one click. Embed this blog in your other one with a tiny bit of code. Use third party tools and mash it up. Follow other users – yes, like Twitter, only much much better.

You’ll soon see that Tumblr scales up and down with your thoughts, from random asides to lengthy manifestos. Find something on the web, and want to share it without jumping through hoops? No problem, click one button. Just had a funny thought, but not enough for a blog post? Scribble it out and click a button. Found a great photo of Mr. T and Nancy Reagan smoking crack? Please send it to me privately – I think we could get some money for that. Everything else, put it on Tumblr.

Oh, and all the cool kids are doing it:

For a few examples of what you can do with this amazing tool, check out the winners of this year’s Tumblr Awards, announced on Friday.

And have I mentioned that this is all free? 

There is no longer any excuse. Take your passion. Make it happen. Et cetera.

p.s. Yes, I’m using WordPress for this blog. Though it is annoying, complicated, time-consuming and difficult to maintain, it’s still more suitable for long, editorial-style posts, and some of the plug-ins are must-haves for a blog of this type. But I may just switch over any day now. Meanwhile, I’ve been toying around with it here.

p.p.s.: As with anything, there are disadvantages: the data is on their servers, with no back-up option. If they perceive you as a spammer, they’ll “disappear” you faster than Dick Cheney. But if you own your own domain, use a roll-your-own backup tool (Google “Tumblr backup”), and play nice, you should stay happy.

2009 is here, and the web is full of predictions for the year (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

However, many of these “leading thinkers” are frustratingly vague in their prognostications. “Facebook will continue to be popular” and “Twitter goes mainstream” do not qualify as bold predictions.

Unlike these “thought leaders”, I am willing to go out on a limb for you the reader, and come back with real specifics. Here then are the Agitationist’s predictions for the web world in 2009:

JANUARY

“Identity aggregation” is the prevailing theme of 2009. This gains momentum throughout January, as Facebook acquires OpenID, FriendConnect and FriendFeed, and folds them into Facebook Connect, which will now be used to log on to all social networks, bank accounts, and porn sites.

FEBRUARY

CPT (cost-per-tweet) becomes a primary advertising metric. Google buys Twitter for a record sum; Twitter admits this was its long-awaited “monetization plan“.

In February, someone claims to be a “Pro Twitterer“; there is no way to refute the claim.

MARCH

Microsoft products worldwide cease to function at 12:00am on March 1st 2009, as they fail to adjust to the non-leap year. A fix (code-named “Toaster”) is be scheduled to be released by July, but fails to materialize.

APRIL

After a fierce battle with Yahoo, Google acquires Facebook, and mashes up Facebook Connect with its own ID service OpenSocial (ironically using Yahoo Pipes). Google shuts down Orkut; no one is affected.

The triumphant Google launches a new social platform, connecting all your tweets, text messages, emails, bookmarks, contacts, comments, feeds, photos, calendars, status updates, and Wikipedia entries into one SocialID™.

Google then uses a proprietary algorithm to assign you a PeopleRank™, which determines your online authority, social status, earning potential and suitability for employment.

GFriends™ on your TrustList™ are able to follow your LifeFeed™ and GoogleMap™ your real-world location (or “meat-spot“), thanks to your SocialID™-enabled mobile device.

MAY

Controversy ensues when a whistle-blower claims the US government has covertly installed its own server room in the Googleplex to monitor private citizens’ LifeFeeds™. However, this is widely seen as a necessary protection against terrorism, and a class-action lawsuit is quickly dismissed.

Oversharing becomes expected social behavior, and the desire for privacy is seen as petty and prudish. Within three years, PeopleRank™ is planned to include fingerprints, SAT scores, credit reports, and criminal records.

“Identity theft” is replaced by the more serious crime of “Aggregated Identity Theft“, and companies compete to offer PeopleRank™ monitoring services for a monthly fee.

JUNE

A new phone is released that is so cool, it makes you think your phone sucks. You purchase this phone, but someone you know then gets a newer, cooler phone.

In late June, Oprah does a show on getting negative people out of your LifeFeed™.

JULY

With online identities consolidating rapidly, screen-name squatting becomes the domain-name squatting of 2009. Shaquille O’Neal buys the right to tweet under his own name for an undisclosed sum. After receiving a cease-and-desist letter, eBay shuts down an auction for the screen name “Beyoncé”. Diff’rent Strokes star Gary Coleman attempts to auction off his own name; the reserve price is not met.

AUGUST

Google is contracted to provide airport screening services for the TSA. President Obama defends this move as part of his “Google for Government” initiative.

However, there is a dark spot for Google in August, when it discovers that AdSense is nothing more than a massive pay-per-link scheme. Google penalizes itself by reducing its own PageRank from 10 to 0.

SEPTEMBER

Throughout the summer there has been a growing backlash against Google’s hegemony, and rebellious users begin moving to Yahoo.

However, there is a scandal in September, as a Yahoo employee leaves a briefcase containing Yahoo’s exclamation point in an airport lounge. Yahoo rapidly loses consumer trust and market share, and its stock price dives under $2.00. Microsoft succeeds in a hostile takeover, breaks up Yahoo and sells it for parts.

The exclamation point is found, and donated to the new “Web 1.0 Museum”, which opens in September on the campus of Stanford University, in a building shaped like a giant bubble.

OCTOBER

YouTube covers 75% of its video frame with advertising, adds pop-up balloons containing sponsored messages, and randomly replaces video soundtracks with jingles for the new YouTube-brand energy drink. Somehow, competitors still fail to gain significant market share.

NOVEMBER

NewsCorp buys the “Girls Gone Wild” franchise and folds it into MySpace, completing the site’s transition into the teen soft-porn market. Market share plummets, but profits skyrocket.

There is controversy when it is revealed that MySpace’s “Tom” has been dead for several years, and his profile is being operated by a low-paid employee in Bangalore. “Tom” is de-friended by 2.5 million people in one day, a Guinness world record in this newly-created category.

DECEMBER

Predictions for the year are reviewed, and found to be either eerily accurate or totally off-base.

–FIN–

Get millions of people to sit down at computers simultaneously, and type their innermost thoughts into a box. Their burning questions, their idle meanderings, their secret desires, their compulsions, their curiosities…whatever generates just enough psychic energy to move their fingers to type.

Send these hundreds of millions of thoughts to a massive database, and publish the results in real time.

Ladies and gentlemen: welcome to Google Trends.

So what’s on our collective hive mind today? Well, aside from “leftover ham recipes” and “post holiday sales“, there are a few surprises.

Take Marci Ladakokos, a woman who is suing after being strip-searched at a Maine jail. Something tell me a lot of these are image searches.

Or Bruce Pardo, a man who shot at least 8 people and then committed suicide, all while dressed in a Santa Claus outfit. Bruce Pardo, come on down, you’re our newest GoogleStar™!

Sometimes we can guess how the Borg makes these choices. Why would Julie Newmar be a top search trend today? Because Eartha Kitt died yesterday, of course. Eartha Kitt played Catwoman, who was also played by Julie Newmar. The hive swarms rapidly from thought to thought. Ask not why.

But my favorite of the day has to be Marvalyn Foster. There are no pictures available yet, but the story says it all:

Woman Awarded $198,000 For ‘Horse Teeth’

Patient Says Dentist Promised Celebrity Smile

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. – A Bridgeport jury has awarded more than $198,000 to a woman who claims her dentist promised her a celebrity smile, but gave her what her attorney called “horse teeth.”  Attorney Richard Meehan Jr. said his client, Marvalyn Foster sued Stamford dentist Darren Martinez because he promised her a “big, beautiful Hollywood celebrity smile.”       

Foster wanted Martinez to give her a permanent bridge to replace a false tooth.Meehan said that Foster woke up from the procedure to discover that Martinez extracted three teeth and made a large bridge that resembled horse teeth.

 

The collective consciousness has spoken. Marvalyn Foster, today is all yours.

“What are you doing?”

That’s the question Twitter asks. And it requests your answer in a 140-character text box.

Stay connected with your friends! Be part of a global community! Join the conversation!

No thanks.

Sorry, I know it’s last year’s news, but Twitter sucks. Here is a starter list of reasons why. Please feel free to add your own.

1. “What we’re doing” is usually petty, mundane and boring. No one cares what you have for lunch, even if you are Shaquille O’Neal. You are just not as important as you think you are. I say this with love.
2. Random replies and disjointed conversations that make no sense to anyone else, except when arranged in a thread by a plug-in, add-on or widget. It’s like instant messaging without features!
3. The inevitable plug-ins, add-ons and widgets to make Twitter useful. If it’s not useful in the first place, why use it?
4. If you can express it in 140 characters, it probably took less time to actually do it live than to “tweet” it. Whatever you said you were doing, you just stopped to tweet about it.
5. The word “tweet“.
6. Text messaging achieves the same purpose without sending your micro-details to everyone. Anywhere else that’s called “spamming”. Yes, I know they opted in as your “followers“, but they’ll be opting back out soon enough.
7. “Following” someone is not healthy, whether you’re a stalker, a cult member or a Twitter user.
8. Transparency is not always good. Public toilets should not have glass walls. The word of the year for 2008: “oversharing“.
9. The word of 2009: “micro-fame“. You heard it here first. It’s somewhere below reality show fame, and just above getting your mug shot on the Smoking Gun. I also predict this will lead to the unfortunate word of 2010: “micro-lame”.
10. Twitter is cutesy and bubbly and looks like a toy. Because it is a toy.
11. “But the San Diego fires/San Francisco mudslides/(insert big news) story was broken on Twitter!” Fine, but shouldn’t those people have called 911 and then maybe tried to help, instead of attempting to gain some micro-fame (see?) by “breaking” a story we all would have heard about 5 minutes later?
12. The inevitable “I was fired because I Twittered about my employer” lawsuit and “Twitter addiction” news stories.
13. The constant conversation about ”how to monetize Twitter“, and the inevitable $19.95 e-book to explain how it can make you rich with little or no effort.
14. The more popular it gets, the worse it gets. I’m no elitist (well, maybe), but have you looked at MySpace lately? QED.
15. Twitter is just another tool to replace the voices in your head, ignore your soul-crushing job, and numb you to the yawning chasm of emptiness that is your life.

And did I mention the word “tweet“?