Today is the first anniversary of this blog. I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve ignored it, I’ve used and abused it. I thank you for the interaction, and the support. Now…I will be making some changes around here very shortly, and if you’ve been reading regularly or have subscribed, you may want to stop now.

After the surprising increase in traffic during my most recent Google Garbage™ experiment, I’ve decided for the time being to spend some of this blog’s precious PageRank on more such specious pursuits.

The fact is, posting a bunch of nonsense is good for business. I supposed the television networks figured this out decades ago, didn’t they?

Putting up posts on hot topics and/or “long-tail” niche keywords has made me a pretty nice little chunk of change over the past few months, here and elsewhere. Apparently this is how kids can make money these days. Since I don’t particularly have the time to do much else, that’s what I’ll be using this blog for, at least for the foreseeable future.

This is just to announce the change to the handful of readers who have stuck around through the garbage posts. If I have anything interesting to say or show, I’ll probably post it at my Tumblr blog.

Again, I suggest you unsubscribe and stop reading now, or you’ll find yourself reading about car radiator repair, rapid drug detox, natural snoring remedies, home surveillance cameras and Bowling Green State University.

Thanks all!

Fresh research from America confirms that online social networks are in fact playthings of the devil. Ohio profs say that use of Facebook leads to lower college grades, and others in California have found that Twitter gradually renders its users’ moral compasses untrustworthy.

First up comes Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State Uni, with the news that Facebook users (at least those in her survey) are lazy, self-deluding thickies.

“There’s a disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying,” says Karpinski.

The PhD candidate collaborated with Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican Uni, surveying 219 students at Ohio State. These included 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account. Some 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.

The Facebook users had grade point averages (GPAs) between 3.0 and 3.5 (in other words getting more Bs than As), while non-users averaged between 3.5 and 4.0 (more As than Bs)*.

Also, “students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook,” according to Ohio State.

“There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades,” adds Karpinski, who doesn’t have a Facebook account herself.

“It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.”

Meanwhile, neuroscientists at the University of Southern California (USC) have suggested that too much use “rapid-fire media” – specifically, Twitter – “may confuse your moral compass”.

“Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention,” says Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC.

It seems that USC neuro-boffins hooked people up to brain monitoring gear and measured their responses to stories told in different ways about different subjects.

According to the USC statement:

The study raises questions about the emotional cost — particularly for the developing brain — of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, prof at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

The USC researchers seem to suggest that learning things mainly through a constant stream of short, depersonalised info-nuggs will restrict a person’s ability to empathise with the people in the stories being told – to admire them, feel their pain or whatever.

Essentially, over-heavy Twitter use will make you cold, cynical and facile – ultimately leaving you heartless and dead inside.

“Indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in,” says Castells.

There’s more from Ohio on Facebook making you thick/appealing primarily to lazy thickies here, and from California on Twitter making you dead inside/appealing primarily to the facile and amoral here.

On Friday I executed a crude proof-of-concept experiment, sacrificing this blog (and my own integrity) at the altar of scientific research. I made a total of 10 posts in the course of this experiment, which covered two updates of Google Trends (about four hours apart). I used different formats for each, ranging from all pictures to all text, from well-formatted for human eyes to pure data dump, intended only for Google’s robotic eyes.

I also posted on a wide variety of hot topics, from the death of painter Andrew Wyeth, to the Presidential Oath of Office, to some things I still have no clue about. Who is the “Numbers Lady”? Why were people seeking information about her on Friday? I have no idea, but I simply dumped the first page of Google results about that phrase into a post.

So what were the results? 

The Good

Google BlogSearch was easy to dominate. These posts had the number one position for most of these topics within a few minutes. However, Google web search was another matter. Since this blog is only three weeks old, has no PageRank yet, and few incoming links, these pages were buried deep in the web results.

Traffic tripled compared to normal. This will artificially pump up the numbers for the month – something I could use if I was negotiating with advertisers. Also, virtually all of these visitors were “uniques“, making the numbers look even better. And if I had CPM (pay-per-impression) ads on the pages, that would have made me some easy money. 

The Bad

On the other side of that coin: these unique visitors are people who will not return, so there is no long-term benefit.

Also, some of the pages had few hits. In retrospect I can see that they simply had too much competition – for example, a bio of the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson River. Every major news outlet had this covered, so almost no one found this little corner of the web.

The Ugly

Because all that traffic was hit-and-run, there were no comments and zero interaction. Because I was posting on topics I knew nothing about, the experience was completely clinical, and in the end somewhat soul-crushing.

Worst of all, the most popular post by far was one entitled “Amanda Knox pics“. I had no idea when I posted this that Amanda Knox is apparently an attractive 21-year-old alleged murderer and sex criminal. I only knew that she was a hot search topic, and probably some new starlet – not far from the truth, as it turns out. So I did a Google image search for pictures of her, and dumped the results into a post. 

It was hugely popular; by far the most-visited of the day.

The lessons of this experiment are not pretty. What do the people want? Sex and death. How do they want it? In color.

So there it is: I did what I had to do; I visited the Dark Side, and I don’t care how much it pays – I’m not going back.

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Content via Google.

What is this post? See here.

Hello everyone. Today’s content will consist exclusively of experimental Google Garbage™, as discussed in yesterday’s post. This is a proof of concept exercise, and I actively encourage you to ignore any post with today’s date, if you value your soul. It’s going to get very ugly here for the next 12 hours or so.

RSS subscribers: apologies in advance for the junk in your feed today.

I’ll report back Monday on the results. Have a lovely weekend.

I can report to you today: the question has been definitively answered.

This morning I awoke to an email from my friend Paul, which read in part:

They had a piece on the news last night about Twitter, and having Twitter parties and I was mortified. 

 

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/video?id=6600808&rss=rss-cs-wls-video-6600808

 

Not to sound like a wet blanket but JC, give me a FN break. 

[Editor's note: I advise you to watch that video on an empty stomach.]

I wrote back:

I think this is part of the normal cycle of anything new becoming popular: the local news story about ______ parties. 

Probably because old people vaguely remember having parties themed around the fads of their day, like ”hula-hoop parties”. This gives them a frame to understand new things. 

The report follows the classic pattern: the lead anchor takes a dismissive tone, the younger reporter is in the know, and (go figure!) the wacky weatherman’s been tweeting for months!

The next phase - techie backlash - has already begun in some quarters, with blog posts complaining about Twitter being misused by all the new people, and how much better it was in the old days of…what, 2007? 

If history is any guide, I would expect this to be followed by a proliferation of spam, more system outages, more attempts at Twitter-killing apps, a Google tweet search, Twitter SEO and full-time Twitter experts, a generally agreed-upon “authority” ranking (which will then be gamed by scammers with paid fake followers), news stories about the dangers of predators on Twitter, a “get rich quick with Twitter” late-night infomercial, and an annual Twitter convention with an embarrassingly stupid name.

And in the end, especially here in the U.S., we will use Twitter not despite its 140 character limit, but because of it. We will communicate in 140-character segments because that is all we have to give.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and a new art form will develop. I hope so.

But please, keep your lunch plans to yourself.

In a previous post titles “15 Reasons Twitter Must Die“, I accused Twitter users of oversharing the petty, mundane details of their sad, pointless lives. 

Incensed Twitterers jumped to its defense. Twitter was a useful tool, they said, and wasn’t just reducing conversation to idle noise. It could be used for sharing ideas, networking, and gauging the zeitgeist.

Thinking I might have been a bit hard on the Twittersphere, I thought I’d revisit the issue. Using the much-celebrated (though hardly revolutionary) search technology recently added to Twitter, I set out to see just how illuminating the average Tweet was.

The idea that Twitter seemed to frequently be a report on what the user was having for lunch seemed to particularly gall the Twitterers who wrote in. So let’s see how many tweets in the last 24 hours concerned the topic of “lunch”.

Off we go.

Well it appears we’ve found the limit of Twitter search: 1500 results. And in the time it took to write that sentence, 16 more results were added.

Keep in mind that as I write this, it is 8:00 am Central Time, which means that unless Greenland is taking an early break, it is not lunch hour in any populated area on Earth. 

Just a few sample results:

technobohemia: Playing WOW, but craving Chinese food…when will it be lunchtime?

half a minute ago

SamShepherd: went to M&S to get lunch and came back with sushi. I’ve never eaten sushi. don’t know what inspired that

1 minute ago

dihsjp: waiting for lunch

2 minutes ago

qwghlm: Right, feeling vaguely progressive and have tidied the living room. Now for lunch

2 minutes ago

Rebecca_Agra: lunch…

4 minutes ago

einerlei: back to library…finally, after having a nice lunch with a friend

4 minutes ago

Wehtam: Back home in sunny Manchester. Off to cash checks after lunch.

4 minutes ago

mauricio_kimura: Hungry and ready to go for lunch !!!

5 minutes ago

timwasted: having some lunch and watching bad tv – but at least its warm inside

6 minutes ago

Jedbeck: 2 hours til lunch with my girls

6 minutes ago

Knicki: is going to skin some potatos for lunch.

8 minutes ago

eburgosgarcia: back from lunch & hairdresser..

9 minutes ago

The disturbing tendency here is toward externalizing what should remain, in a reasonably civilized society, the inner monologue. This is partly the medium’s fault for restricting itself to 140 characters. Even Oscar Wilde would have a hard time coming up with 20 pithy quips a day under those conditions.

Now, to make this experiment somewhat scientific, we need a control phrase.  If “lunch” brings up a list of 1500 mundane tweets that no one needs to see, what word or phrase will reveal the intelligent, illuminating, useful tweets I keep hearing about?

This where you come in. Please make your suggestions in the comments, and if I don’t hear from you, have a great lunch.