Spoiler alert: If you really hate reading anything about episodes of Lost that you haven't seen yet--and you haven't seen the episode that first aired Wednesday--you might not want to read ahead.
I know we have more pressing things to talk about these days--the economy, climate change, the new president--but I'm going to barge in this morning with a warning about something a bit more niche.
When you're posting to Twitter about something you're watching on TV, make sure nobody thinks it's really happening!
Background: I've been watching this season of Lost at a local bar that shows it on a couple of massive screens every week. The place is packed full of total fanatics: it's like football, except with flaming arrows in lieu of pigskin. Highly recommended.
So in Wednesday night's episode, something happens. I'm going to be very vague to avoid spoiling it, but basically, there's one point in which a character is holding a gun, and the important part is that we have never learned what said character's name is. There's an argument, and another character, whose name we do know, addresses the anonymous gun-wielder by name. It's a name that would shock even mildly avid Lost-watchers. Most of those in the bar expressed their surprise by gasping, shrieking, or otherwise effusing.
A commercial break followed, and--of course--I posted a Twitter message: "'Put the gun down, [redacted].' OMG WHOA. Whole bar gasped."
Well, a few minutes later I received a direct message from someone I know on Twitter--I'll keep this person anonymous. The message read, "someone pulled out a gun???" Apparently, my Twitter contact hadn't seen the earlier messages that made it clear I was watching Lost and seemed to think I was at a bar where someone had pulled out a gun. Oops.
Luckily, no panic ensued. It was, after all, only a single Twitter post. A few direct messages and a public clarification later, I'd explained the reality of the situation, and my Twitter contact responded with, "There must be a term for this: 'taken out of twontext?'" I'm generally not a fan of corny Twitter puns, but he hit the nail on the head.
I guess putting things into "twontext" is why we have Twitter hash tags, the searchable keywords that many people tack onto the end of Twitter messages, often to tie them to discussion surrounding an event--say, "#davos" for the World Economic Forum or "#inaug09" for this month's presidential inauguration. I typically don't use them unless I'm at a conference where we've been asked to tag for aggregation purposes, but Wednesday night hinted to me that considering how much banter and noise fills up a Twitter feed, it's really easy to get the wrong idea about something.
I mean, goodness knows what might happen on Lost next week.
OK, this makes more sense.
CNET News.com reported earlier on a collaboration between crafts site Etsy and the NASA Ames Research Center on a new contest that encourages members of the Etsy community to design NASA-inspired handmade goods. The announcement was made at the PSFK Conference in New York during a panel discussion featuring NASA's Andrew Hoppin and Etsy founder Robert Kalin.
In an unintended verbal gaffe, Kalin said, "We'll send the two winners into space." The audience, along with this reporter, assumed he meant that the Etsy crafters who won the contest would get to be astronauts--in this world of Microsoft space tourists and Virgin Galactic, it didn't seem all that ridiculous.
Unfortunately for any wannabe astronauts, it'll be the winning artwork, not the artists, who get to go to space. Hoppin said later that he clarified the matter shortly thereafter, but that a malfunctioning microphone (there had been some sound issues earlier in the morning) may have that it wasn't widely heard.
So if you're an avid Etsy artist, you probably still won't fulfill your dreams of going into orbit--but your crocheted pillows might.
According to an e-mail copied to the CenterNetworks blog, Facebook's much-touted developer grant program may be off to a rocky start. The FBFund initiative is apparently restructuring its application process and is asking that all previous applicants re-submit their materials. Initially, applications were to be submitted via e-mail; now, a submission form is available.
"To make sure that everyone understands the conditions of submitting a grant application, we will not review any materials you have sent via email, and any materials you may have sent have been deleted," the copy-pasted e-mail read. It's apparently to ensure that applicants know that the company "can't promise that any materials or information (they) submit here will be kept confidential, or specifically that (Facebook) or others might not develop similar or identical products or services."
Presumably, it'll also streamline the process. CenterNetworks blogger Allen Stern noted that he "couldn't imagine for a minute the management via email" and noted that if Facebook had to reorganize the process, at least the company "called a mulligan" within a few weeks of the fund's debut.
Representatives from Facebook have not yet responded to an inquiry asking to confirm the contents of the e-mail posted to CenterNetworks.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the FBFund incentive program at the TechCrunch40 conference last month, designed as a way to provide venture cash to developers who want to create applications for the uber-hyped Facebook Platform. With an initial $10 million flowing in from Facebook investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund, approved developers can net from $25,000 to $250,000 to develop their apps.
When News Groper, an entire site full of "fake celebrity" blogs in the vein of Fake Steve Jobs, launched earlier this summer, some people (myself included) thought it would have a rough time making a name for itself on the Web. There's so much online comedy already out there, and after the rise and fall of Fake Steve, I thought the blog community would've had enough of celebrity satire (celebritire?)
Now, however, it looks like News Groper may have had its big break--MSNBC reporter Alex Johnson mistook one of its blogs for real, and quoted it in an article. A soundbite from News Groper's Al Sharpton blog originally appeared in Johnson's story about African American leaders' reactions to the Michael Vick dogfighting case.
The faux Rev. Al blog post used an over-the-top analogy to explain that Vick, who is African American, was a victim of racist justice. "Consider this: If the police caught Brett Favre running a dolphin-fighting ring out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other to the death, would they bust him? Of course not," the satirical piece read, as quoted by Mashable's Pete Cashmore. "They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly-spiraled forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins."
The fake quotation is no longer there, but some suspiciously small fine print explains the situation: "An earlier version of this article quoted from a blog entry purportedly by the Rev. Al Sharpton. MSNBC.com has determined that the blog is a hoax." Considering the title of every News Groper page contains the terms "Fake parody blogs, Political humor, Celebrity Satire, Funny Commentary," this is quite the little screw-up.
Oops.
Fake Al Sharpton, naturally, wouldn't remain silent. "Excuse me, Mr. Alex 'Investigative Reporter' Johnson of MSNBC, but before you go calling people a hoax, maybe you should take a long look in the mirror," the shadowy satirist behind the blog wrote. "When I said that Brett Favre was probably fighting dolphins against each other to the death with swords crudely attached by duct tape, it obviously wasn't real; it was a METAPHOR. First of all, the adhesive in the tape wouldn't hold up in salt water, and also, how many backyard saline pools have you ever swam in?"
Apparently, what happens on MySpace doesn't always float in Vegas: A substitute judge in the North Las Vegas Justice Court got sacked last week because of some nasty stuff he said on his social-networking profile about prosecutors.
The 34-year-old criminal defense attorney, Jonathan MacArthur, had been appointed as a judge pro tempore in anticipation of a full judicial post that would be available in 2009. Unfortunately, MacArthur wrote on his MySpace profile that his interests included "Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's a**...and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's a**." That line caught the attention of the Clark County District Attorney, who alerted the administrator for the court where MacArthur served. The aspiring judge said he was just being tongue-in-cheek, but the court didn't take it as a laughing matter, and MacArthur was promptly sacked from his pro-tem gig.
"A judge's job is to be unbiased in all matters," commented Natalie Tyrrell, North Las Vegas Justice of the Peace. "On that MySpace page, it appears he definitely has a bias against prosecutors."
MacArthur's other MySpace interests allegedly included "anything relating to the NFL, video games, sex," and he professed to being a Denver Broncos fan. Yikes, talk about biased!
For more in MySpace lesson-learning, read about 'Smokey McBlunt'--no, it wasn't a pot bust.
(Las Vegas Review-Journal via Techdirt via Valleywag)
(Credit:
Facebook/Slate)
It's a classroom-warning-video-worthy example of "be careful what you put on your Facebook profile"--or at least that's what it looks like on the surface. Slate columnist Lucy Morrow Campbell was tipped off to the fact that Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's daughter, Caroline, had semi-openly declared on the social-networking site that her political views are "liberal" (OK, that'd be more shocking if it were Mitt Romney's kid) and that she's a Barack Obama supporter.
Yes, really.
Giuliani, who is 17 and uses a slight variation on her last name for her Facebook profile, had been a member of the "One Million Strong for Barack" Facebook group, something that was visible to all Facebook members in the "networks" she'd joined (the elite Trinity School in Manhattan, as well as Harvard, which she will enter in the fall). After a Slate inquiry--it appears that someone on staff was also a member of the Harvard network--the younger Giuliani withdrew her membership from the Obama supporters' group.
There's been a lot of press gossip, especially in the New York media, over reports that Rudy Giuliani doesn't get along with his kids (in addition to Caroline, he has a 21-year-old son who attends Duke University). That still doesn't mean the whole thing wasn't a joke in the first place--albeit not a very smart one, considering the levels of online political scrutiny these days.
Either way, Jon Stewart will likely have some fun with it--probably involving the notorious "Obama Girl" YouTube video in one way or another.
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