Technically Incorrect

Cool is a slippery customer. One minute, you have it, and the next, it seems to desert you like a bon mot on a date.

Once, for perhaps four minutes, Boy George was cool. Yet today he appears to be somewhat over the weight limit for the dohyo, and he was in court apparently admitting to handcuffing a male escort. Against, in this case, the escort's will.

Which leads me to thinking of Microsoft. A fine company that still sometimes endures the image vestiges of an accountant in, um, an office building. So very PC. Yet, like so many accountants, Microsoft knows how (and where) to stash a little cash, which, in times of recession, can prove to be very seductive.

So what if Seattle's finest decided to spend a little of that money on buying itself some cool? You know, the tech equivalents of a Viktor & Rolf shirt and a Comme Des Garcons jacket.

Yes, Twitter and Digg.

Oh, of course, these bastions of sexitude might say they're not willing to sell. But what if Microsoft put enough Splenda (and that might not be so very much Splenda just at the moment) into the deal that even Messrs. Williams and Rose could not avoid the rush?

(Credit: CC Zappowbang)

Naturally, there would be massive aversion, and riots both online and in the streets. Just as there were when News Corp. bought MySpace. You don't remember the riots?

I'm not suggesting that Microsoft, instead of the discreet manner in which it has involved itself with Facebook, would create an ad campaign around its new acquisitions. On the other hand, what if it went along the marketing path of General Electric and slipped the magic words "a Microsoft company" under, say, the Digg logo?

Would the cool techy kids head for the hills? Or are they already so wedded to brands like Twitter and Digg that they'd roll with it? Especially if the Twitter and Digg offerings actually improved with Microsoft's munificence?

I know that Microsoft wants to reduce its reliance on the desktop and head for the clouds. But wouldn't that be a far more enjoyable and, dare one suggest it, image-friendly trip, with Digg and Twitter safely tucked under its perspiring armpit?

Yes, Microsoft's ideal future cloud-filled mesh platform could ultimately see many Twitters and Diggs come and go like NBC pilots. But in the short term, with Mac's market share crawling up Windows' trouser leg like a highly skilled ferret, perhaps a little financially reckless splurge on two brands with some Web cool might have a strangely emotionally positive effect on the Microsoft entity.

Let Windows, Vista and future operating systems carry on as a jiggly infrastructure somewhere below the human eyeline, and allow a variety of "Microsoft-powered" cool brands blossom. In our faces, just where we get seduced the quickest.

See, I wondered about this as I was wandering around Ross Dress For Less on Black Friday. I found myself counting all the coolness that is actually owned by one company, LVMH: Kenzo, DeBeers, Donna Karan, Tag Heuer, Fendi, and Marc Jacobs. Oh, and let's not forget Dom Perignon.

They all sit, apparently happily, next to slightly more mundane names such as Thomas Pink and Sephora. No one seems to mind. Perhaps few even know. Even though there was a time when Louis Vuitton, the LV of LVMH, really wasn't so cool at all. Now, strangely, not only is LVMH daddy to many cool schools, but its own Louis Vuitton brand has enjoyed quite the renaissance.

This is a poor analogy, of course, because there is no such thing as trendiness in tech, right?

But they once said men would never wear Spanx. Now look at this. Yes, "helix-mapping body-response technology" to hide your every manboob.

You see, recessions do have a tendency of creating the strangest of occurrences. Strangest of bedfellows, too.

How many of us are really comfortable crossing over to the other side?

You know, those people who do and believe things that you really don't like.

For some, that might be David Duke. For others, Doris Duke. And, for me, the Duke of Edinburgh.

Nowhere is this reluctance greater than in politics.

The media, each as objective as a Vegas casino owner, have abdicated their objectivity throne and decided to cater to their own skewed crowd.

Those barely left of center wander off to the New York Times, the Huffington Post and the Bill Maher Bible Study Group.

Those on the other side to Fox News, the Drudge Report and the Michael Richards stand-up show.

This means that independents, or anyone even vaguely still in control of their own faculties, have to do a lot of work to separate the wheat from the gaffe.

And this is where Kevin Rose and his Oligarchy of Objectivity at Digg might just step in.

(Credit: i.m. indraneel)

While Mr. Murdoch at Fox is known as the Dirty Digger, perhaps Mr. Rose might don the mantle of the Clean Digger. (Quick, before he sells to MySpace)

Here's how it might work.

Digg could create an Election Special Section on its site.

In order for an article to make it into this de-cessed pool, it would have to have been Dug by at least one Republican and one Democrat.

Any article that achieved this hallowed status would be deemed to have a Double Digg.

Independents could then go to the Double Diggs in order to make their trawl for intelligent information a little easier than being a skipper on the Deadliest Catch.

You're going to ask how Digg will know that the Double Diggers are, indeed, members of the respective (if not always respected) parties.

Well, they could either have a direct connection to voter registration all around the country. (They're techies. They can hack into anything.)

Or there could be a simple test question.

To ascertain whether someone is a Republican, you might ask them: DO THE WORDS 'LIBERAL' AND 'COMMUNIST' MEAN THE SAME THING?

Or, if we're going for a less cerebral demographic: WHICH BAND DID MARTIN LUTHER KING PLAY WITH?

To ascertain whether someone is a Democrat, the question might be: HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ABLE TO EXPLAIN A SINGLE THING YOU BELIEVE IN USING LESS THAN FIVE THOUSAND WORDS?

Or, perhaps, HAVE YOU EVER HAD SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH A WHOLE COMMITTEE?

Once an article has entered the Double Digg area, entry should only be permitted to undecideds.

Of course, those undecideds could then keep on Digging, until there is a hierarchy of the most useful information available.

Which would surely be if not a nirvana of journalistic objectivity, then at least a near-vana.

This election is too important to leave to the entrenched biases of media types.

The truly informative articles (and they surely exist on both sides) must be treated like porcelain and preserved in a vault for all well-meaning people to peruse with haste and without pressure.

The Double Digg.

A swing voter just can't swing without it.

Wallowing in my neophytical state with respect to technology, I remain fascinated by the demons of humanity that take new inventions and use them to bolster their own deficiencies.

Last night, my news.com handler, in an attempt to thrust me into the bosom of Techworld, led me by my shortest hairs to an elegant launch reception for Charlene Li's book "Groundswell", a measured and soothing work about the Twilight Zone that is social media.

There I encountered surprisingly well-dressed people, some of whom appeared to be famous and others who told me they were.

I also met a girl with a 9mm Glock. (Apparently, letting off steam with a real gun is far more therapeutic than paintball. Better for team-building too.)

At one point in the evening, I fell into conversation with an extremely well-known (and, frankly, hugely entertaining) editor of a much-lauded tech site.

While discussing the inner workings of several marriages in the tech world, a couple of seriously deranged affairs, Russian etymology and brie versus cheddar (no, nothing to do with Desperate Housewives, although, either way, I would be loyal to cheddar), he told me that he has an rss feed for any Twitter that mentions the name of his site.

I turned around for a translation. But there was the girl with the Glock. So please indulge me if I misspeak as to some technical detail.

However, as I understand it, any time anyone anywhere Twitters anything to anyone anywhere and includes the site name in his or her Tweet, the Erudite Editor gets a ping, pong, pang, or some other audio squeak created by Brian Eno to put him on at least an orange alert.

(Credit: YuvalH)

I tried to imagine the garbage the poor man must go through:

HOWARD COWARD IS SITTING IN HIS ONESIE AND BIB READING WEBSITENAME.

JANET SPLICEBONCE READ ON WEBSITENAME THAT DIGG'S GONNA B BIG.

So I asked him why he did this. Was it really in the hope that people couldn't help blurting his name to their furthest and sweetest? "Nyet," he said. (His Russian is excellent.) Then what? "It's one of the only ways I can find out if the site made an error."

Apparently, there are many wise people reading techy sites who, if they see something they think is not quite right, don't bother to contact the actual site. They just emit a Tweet to everyone they know. Which seems a curiously playgroundish form of nah-nah-na-nah-nah, you're not wearing any knickers, are ya?

I suppose the possibilities are endless. Or, rather, interminable.

Will we soon encounter mass bullying by Twitter? (TAKE THIS HEADBUTT, SCROGGINS. AND DON'T TELL YOUR MOM!) Will rumors circulate about us in a nanosecond, rumors that we will never hear about until it's too late (ELTON JOHN IS GAY!!!! SO IS GEORGE MICHAEL!!!)?

The strange thing is, so Erudite Editor tells me, that when he spots something on his rss Twitter feed that should be corrected, he contacts the Tweeter.

And the Tweeter is as surprised as the first girl who saw Kenny Chesney with his hat off. (I have nothing to confirm that this was Renee Zellweger.)

Perhaps the Tweeter even feels a bit of a twit. Perhaps.

In my naive moments (usually between dusk and dawn) I always think that technology exists to remove the irritants that have plagued us. Like typewriters, deteriorating body parts and spelling.

And Twitter undoubtedly has its excellent uses. Like attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing and keeping up with friends whom you can touch no other way at that moment.

However, I suppose we should always be prepared for the twit factor, in which humanity reveals its less than pretty chops and declares it's far more fun just to whine.

I just hope not every Twitterer has a 9mm Glock.