You know that apocalypse thing we're always being told might be just around the corner? Well, do you feel the chilling breeze? Do you feel the troubled twittering in the trees?
For here is a tale that I know you will discuss with your loved ones, perhaps with other people's loved ones, even with your psychological professional, the minute you hear it.
It appears a man called Dana Hanna is standing at the altar on November 21. He utters those most solemn vows about how he will love and obey or whatever it is that married people claim to do these days.
The officiant pronounces that Dana and his lovely bride, Tracy, are now married. Does Dana weep? Does he kiss his bride?
Ah, no. For Dana's Twitter moniker is TheSoftwareJedi and his first loyalty is to his digital followers. So, much to his wife's surprise, he whips out his cell phone and updates his statuses on both Twitter and Facebook. Right there at the altar. He also hands his wife's cell phone over to her.
Now that he has uploaded the evidence (which we're assuming isn't staged), Dana insists that this was all done for fun.
Indeed, he explained on YouTube: "I have a lot of family scattered around the country and we all use Facebook a lot to keep in touch. So when Tracy and I were engaged, most of my family found out via Facebook because we updated our statuses."
If you're wondering what it is he tweeted from the altar, here it is: "Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where just a second ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #weddingday"
However, another tweet sent on Monday night by Hanna, who is chief architect of NextDayPets.com and president of Torian Technologies, might perhaps offer an even greater insight into his complex and socially networked psyche: "Just changed over the laundry for @TracyPage and was thrown off by the fact a bra was in there. Not used to living with a woman again."
Oh, Tracy, are you sure about this? I only ask because I just tried to access the Tracy Page Twitter feed and received the message "this page doesn't exist."
Vermont is an interesting place with some very interesting residents. Brigham Young and John Deere are both said to hail from this mountainous state.
But will either turn out to be quite as fascinating as Jacob Rehm?
According to WCAX News, Rehm stands accused of illegally borrowing a $500,000 tour bus and taking it for a little spin. Rehm is a former employee of the bus company and will make an appearance in the Vermont District Court on Tuesday.
However, something else will also be making a court appearance at the same time--a video entitled "The Fabulous Bus Ride," which was posted on YouTube on November 5.
It does not appear to have been made by a concerned and civic-minded passerby. No, it is alleged to have been made by Rehm.
In the notes accompanying the YouTube posting, someone whose handle is vudushuz, says: "Vermont to Connecticut in the Middle-O-the-Night :)Originally thought about heading to Pennsylvania but... anyways, stopped in Bradford for GREAT pizza at the Exit."
As you will see from the embedded piece, the video is quite a work of art, with music by Yes and some very interesting camera work.
I wonder what the judge will think of the alleged director.
Miley Cyrus is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest and most important musical artists.
So when she recently decided to leave Twitter and rapped on YouTube about it, one imagined that investors in the supposedly billion-dollar company shivered uncontrollably for several days.
As did some who watched the haunting performance in her rap video.
However, now the teeny singer has gone further. She believes that Twitter should be banished from our firmament. And I mean firmament.
You see, in an interview with the B96 radio show in Chicago, embedded for your pleasure, the pop divette declared: "Twitter should just be, like, banned from this universe."
I should say that Miley's speaking voice isn't quite as mellifluous as her singing. What could be? However, please peruse this video and, when it gets to around the 3.30 mark, you might enjoy Miley's Twitter tirade.
A highlight of her invective was, perhaps: "Because people, like, honestly, like, I mean people wanna know why, like, you're, like, unhealthy, and, like, you need, like, get out and do stuff and, like, be in the world instead of being like this (pretends to be hunched over a keyboard) all the time. And, like, all I did was, like, lay in bed all the time."
I know there will be some who might fear that Miley has removed herself from Twitter because the 140 character limit did not allow her full expression of her likes and thoughts.
However, I am confident that this deeply introspective performer is merely trying to warn her fellow teens of the dangers of immersing yourself far too much in, well, yourself.
As she further cautioned: "I"m not really a big fan of the Internet any more. I don't really get online."
Should you or your children be concerned that Miley might disappear entirely from the Internet, please rush to purchase some of Miley's fine recordings, which are available at iTunes.
Moreover, at MileyCyrus.com, you can secure examples of her highly stylish, Miley stylish collection of clothing. Regretfully, the current link doesn't go through directly to the Miley Cyrus collection on Walmart.com, which might be something of an oversight. You can also still find Miley on Myspace.com/mileycyrus.
Alternatively, you could spend all of your energies trying to save Fuzzy.
You see, Fuzzy's owner, who is possibly humorous or perhaps, like, demented, has declared that she will kill her cat Fuzzy on November 16 unless Miley returns to the world of the tweet.
At Twitter.com/mileysavefuzzy, you can participate in the important debate concerning Fuzzy's future.
You can also go to Mileysavefuzzy.com to learn more about how Fuzzy is to be cooked in the event of his demise. Eating a cat is not, allegedly, illegal in the country in which Fuzzy resides.
How can anyone not, like, like the Internet?
Rumors have begun to trickle from Googleville that the Jolly Search Giant is beginning to change its mind about those fickle fellows who espouse creativity.
You know, the sort who don't necessarily think you should research 41 different shades of blue. The sort, indeed, who sleep under their desks at ad agencies.
Which leads me to wonder whether a certain rebalancing might shortly occur in the tender relationship between the left-brainers and right-brainers of product selling.
The Web largely began as a functional experience, where everything you looked at was created by those who felt that what it does would always be a little more more important than how it looks. Partly because these people had no idea, nor did they really care, how to create something that actually looked truly inviting.
Few might agree that Google and YouTube, despite the fact that huge numbers of fingers populate them daily, are the most aesthetic of locations. Utilitarian would be the polite way of describing their sense of design.
A 10-year-old mathematician's idea of pulchritude would be a less charitable version. Somehow, every time I go to YouTube, in particular, it feels like the crummiest of Blockbusters, with DVD boxes that are fraying at the corners.
Ad agencies, very heavy on pretty and very light on engineering, at first tried to mimic print ads and billboards and squeezed them into a medium that was far more individual, far more personal than any seen before.
The Googlies thought ad agencies somewhat risible relics of a disappearing world--like a bunch of Don Johnsons trying to deal with the brainy world of CSI.
Yet while the Web is still very functional, it is also the place where we increasingly live far too much of our lives. We watch TV on the Web. We read papers on the Web. We find lovers on the Web. And we continue to tell them how much we love them on the Web.
I know that some people feel that the pages of, for example, Yahoo Sports and the Huffington Post have been occasionally enhanced by wallpaper ads that add energy to the home pages without taking away from the content.
So advertising, done right, surely has a chance to make Web pages more attractive, more involving, and more inspiring.
There was a time in the U.K., for example, when the TV ads were actually more interesting than much of the programing. It is possible. It does happen. Brazil is another country where advertising can be far more involving far than the latest soap opera.
As Google decides that display advertising is where the new money will inevitably be, ad agencies might just think about creating work that makes Google's pages a little more inviting, a little more, dare one say it, exciting.
How strange it might be, in some optimistic future, if advertising created by outsiders actually helped Google with its business as well as advertisers with theirs.
The advent of Bing has shown that just a little aesthetic sense might, in fact, help to attract real people out there, those scouring the Web for anything that might brighten their day.
Just imagine if Google's and YouTube's pages were adorned with ads that offered wit, charm, and design sense as opposed to little blue words offering last minute vacations or little yellow words promising erectile function.
Might that be good for business? Might it even encourage YouTube, in particular, into a redesign?
Prince Philip is the tall chap who married the queen of England, enjoys making beautifully inappropriate comments, and feels intimate contact with his television might be necessary in order to make it work.
In a revealing interview, only some of which seems to have appeared on the Buckingham Palace YouTube channel, the prince laid bare his electrical dysfunction, one that many might, secretly or not, actually share.
His interviewer, a rather well spoken chap called Kevin McCloud, brightened up the pages of London's Times newspaper with some of the prince's heartfelt words.
Perhaps the most elegant of the phrases turned by the 88-year-old prince was: "To work out how to operate a television set, you practically have to make love to the thing."
It has never been my habit to wonder about the conjugal behavior of the regal.
However, once one's mind goes quickly beyond boggling in order to consider how one might make one's plasma pulse race, one begins to appreciate that many people do find it rather difficult to grasp even 10 percent of their gizmos' workings.
Of course, the prince's imagery is so disconcerting that I wonder just what actions came immediately before the creation of, for example, Prince Charles.
However, Phil the Greek, as he is sometimes known in pejorative circles, will no doubt receive some sympathy for his giddy criticism of technology's grave new world. Why can't things be just blindingly simple, especially for those whose eyes are not quite what they used to be?
Not satiated with his criticism of televisual operations, the prince turned his mind and, one feared, his devilishly seductive eyes, toward the Web.
"The Web sites I've seen are so awful it's untrue," he told McCloud. "They're so unfit for purpose I'm surprised anyone tolerates them."
Surely he has a point. There are so many ill-designed sites on the Web that one's eyes sometimes water with pain. However, given the prince's somewhat outre position on the subject of televisions, many will find themselves caught in the uncomfortable posture of now considering which Web sites the prince has, um, actually visited.
Please might readers suggest something appropriate, as I fear my own thinking has been addled and muddled by the prince's highly colorful imagery.
There are those moments in the business cycle of a young dynamic brand when people look back and say: "If only that hadn't happened."
And so it is with Twitter. And so it is with Miley Cyrus.
You see Miley, she who is sometimes Hannah Montana, was rapidly becoming one of Twitter's most trusted Swiss Guards. She had almost 2 million followers.
Now the sheep have lost their shepherdess. For Miley Cyrus has silenced her tweets, starved her Twitter feed, and drifted off into the uncertain socially not-working darkness from which some stars never return.
This is clearly a disaster for Twitter. Microblogging needs micro people to bring in the macro crowds. Cyrus, who is possibly only four or five years old in real life, was one of Twitter's most durable pre-pubescent predilections.
After her painful and dramatic departure, how can coming generations take the brand seriously?
Perhaps worse, though, is the means Cyrus chose to deliver her beating on tweeting. Yes, she went on YouTube. And, yes, she performed a "Good-Bye, Twitter" rap.
In the rap, she dismisses the idea that she was forced to quit Twitter by her boyfriend, Liam Hemsworth, an Australian actor perhaps most famous for his role as, well, Miley Cyrus's boyfriend.
If my ears served me correctly, Cyrus seems to suggest in this musical tour-de-farce that she was concerned that she had begun to "tweet her pimples."
I was not aware that she had pimples, nor that she had attempted to tweet them. But I am concerned that she may have tried to do this without the appropriate medical supervision.
However, before my cup of concern overflowed into my glass of cabernet, I could hear the world's next Streisand rap that no one really cares if she's "playing with Noah" or "doing my hair."
I am not sure who Noah might be, but the underlying arc of pain seems to have been caused by those horrid gossipy tabloids trawling through her tweets, like investigative journalists digging into Elton John's garbage cans, in search of juicy information.
In a disturbingly out-of-sync climax, Cyrus declares she wants "her private life private" and that is done "trying to please."
It is a confessional that will surely make so many of the world's parents weep. Indeed, Cyrus admits that she became a little obsessed with Katy Perry and Britney, but that she is now "peacin' out."
As I peace together this seminal moment in social-networking history, I find myself saddened beyond measure that one of the world's great Twitterers may have been forever lost.
Nonethless, I know that you, together with the Twitter hierarchy, will cling on to the fact that one of the world's other great rappers, Kevin Federline, appears to still have a Twitter account.
Should you be one of those who believe that men are neanderthal, socially awkward hairy animals while women are socially aware, smoothly sensitive beings, then I have some statistics that might increase your estimation of your own superior judgment.
According to research by Brian Solis, sourcing his data from Google's Ad Planner, the majority of functioning beings on almost all social networking sites are women.
Published on Information Is Beautiful, the numbers might create an encouraging belief that if social networking is the future, then the future is female.
Solis's figures suggest that there is only one major social-networking site that is predominantly male: Digg. I know you'll recoil uncontrollably when I tell you that Digg appears to be 64 percent male.
(Credit:
Information Is Beautiful)
On the other hand, LinkedIn and YouTube seem to enjoy an equality of fraternity and sorority. While Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr and MySpace, to name but a few, are all, like the population of Brazil, queendoms.
Perhaps the most extraordinary numbers come from MySpace. Somehow, the rather messy nature of the site, the tradition of an excess of spam and porn, might suggest that this was a male-oriented (slightly sleazy males, some might imagine) haven.
These numbers, however, suggest that MySpace is 64 percent female. Which makes one ruminate as to why the home page currently has so much blue and so little fuchsia.
It will be tempting, indeed, for many to put these figures down to traditional psychological differences between the sexes: women like people and men like, well, peeing in public.
However, one might also conclude that women simply resort to more virtual contact because their real world physical everyday life leaves them rather more dissatisfied than it does men.
Lately there seems to have been much evidence that women are increasingly miserable.
Celebrated and, one might have imagined, happy women such as Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (The Sad Shocking Truth of How Women Are Feeling) and Maureen Dowd of The New York Times (Blue is the New Black) have lamented the lot of Lot's Wife, Mother, Sister and Daughter.
Might misery be driving women to MySpace?
Have you ever written a text message and then failed to correctly multiply 3 by 7 right after you pressed "send"?
Have you ever posted an update on Facebook and instantly reached for your Proust? And have you ever sent a tweet, looked in the mirror, and suddenly believed that you had a twin?
Well, according to the Telegraph, Dr. Tracy Alloway, a psychologist from the University of Stirling in Scotland, can explain all of this.
The good doctor has spent many of her days studying working memory, which allows people to retain and use information. She believes it to be a far more significant measure of the well-being and intelligence of humanity than, say, IQ.
Alloway spoke Sunday to the British Science Festival at the University of Surrey and rather gushed about the success she has had in training children to enhance their working memory.
And she happened to mention that certain social-media behaviors are rather more conducive at developing working memory than others.
While Facebook apparently expands the working memory and therefore "enhances intelligence" because the mind has to work in keeping up with one's 500 friends, Twitter does not deserve such glowing praise.
Instead, Alloway released both barrels of her working memory in a critical appraisal of microblogging. She said that because Twitter was so succinct, "your attention span is being reduced and you're not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections."
She was equally critical of anything she deemed "instant"--YouTube and texting, for example. On the other hand, video games and Sudoku allegedly involve more thinking depth, more tracking of past actions, and more mapping of those things you might do in the future. Therefore, they enhance working memory.
I find myself instantly recoiling from the doctor's pleasantly radical analysis. I begin to wonder whether, for example, it makes a difference if you are watching a four-minute video on YouTube about, say, the Large Hadron Collider.
I wonder if it counts that you find a link on Twitter that leads you to a deeply intellectual debunking of all research methods in psychology.
And I wonder whether it really can be true that keeping up with a bunch of supposed friends on Facebook can make you just that little bit smarter.
Surely when you think of all the time some people spend on Facebook, doesn't it make you think that perhaps, just perhaps, they need to get a life? Or at least a better working memory of one?
When it comes to things viral, Microsoft is in an interesting period.
Recently, there was the wife vomiting in the direction of her porn-embracing husband--something of a dubious affair.
But now please welcome a delightful amuse-oeil that is reportedly from Microsoft Germany.
The video features someone supposedly named Bruno Kammerl, who appears to be zooming down a waterslide and flying into a kiddie pool several hundred feet away.
He comes out full of bonhomie and achievement--as one should feel when using Microsoft Office 2007.
Yes, there may have been a leap of faith in that last sentence. However, it appears that when you go to Mach-es-Machbar.de, you discover the waterslide video, entirely surrounded by ads for Microsoft Office 2007.
ViralBlog.com declared that Microsoft is behind this fine stunt and that it is part of Office Project 2007.
Not everyone believes the video is real, of course, and Microsoft even hints that it may be a fiction. But the debate seems to be part of the attraction.
The video has already snagged nearly 1.7 million views on YouTube in less than two weeks and reflects Microsoft's new refreshing enthusiasm for ads that people actually like.
Last week, at this here mental-research facility, we asked the question, YouTube, how much are you making off Jill and Kevin's wedding? And those fine boffins over at the Tube have decided to answer--kind of, at least.
In an announcement entitled, "I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study," posted by Chris LaRosa, technical account manager, and Ali Sandler, music partner manager, the Tubers' hoops are cocked at the joy of the video's success (now more than 12 million views).
They also were rather happy with the performance of "Forever," the Chris Brown song to which the wedding party waddles and wafts into the church. According to the announcement:
At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for "Forever" used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes.
YouTube goes on to declare that the rights holders capitalized on the huge popularity of this visual ode to marital joy. Searches for "Chris Brown Forever" also leaped like a heart at the words "I do."
The song sold extremely well on iTunes and in Amazon's MP3 store. It reached Nos. 4 and 3 on those charts, respectively.
Still, there is one small item that appears to have been omitted in the answer to our question: what does this all mean, in terms of dollars?
I only ask because, well, when you see the word "monetization," you hope to also see a reference to the actual money that was "tized."
It is healthy for this nation's economy that someone is making some money out of YouTube. It would merely be interesting to understand precisely, or even vaguely, how monetizable the site--or even a single video on the site--truly is.
You see, if I ever want to get married, my brave and lovely bride and I would try to get some sense of which artists might deserve our profit-seeking attention.
