I admit it: I'm a complete pushover for slapstick humor. And today's meme on Twitter, #unseenprequels*, has me in stitches. The idea: take a movie and slightly alter the title to come up with its prequel, which no one would have ever, ever paid to see. Hilarity ensues.
My favorites, in no particular order:
- @Bryce1984 The Lambs That Wouldn't Shut Up #unseenprequels
- @jchinchar #unseenprequels Some Like It Tepid
- @matthasarms: Apocalypse Soon. #unseenprequels
- @steviedunn: The Day the Earth Continued Spinning #unseenprequels
- @PCTim: #unseenprequels The OK, The not so OK, and the unattractive
- @blogdiva: #unseenprequels Second-Base and The City
- @Alcudiabarfly: #unseenprequels dry-spell in the city
- @stealyourself: Madamoiselle Bovary #UnseenPrequels
- @lizzwinstead: The 5k run/walk Man #unseenprequels
- @jnjoiner: Thursday #unseenprequels
- @LParry: Shaun of the feeling peaky. #unseenprequels
- @KagroX: Still Plenty of Mohicans #unseenprequels
- @drywall: A Bunch of Mohicans #unseenprequels
- @RedGray: #unseenprequels Raiders of the Misplaced Ark
- @islandis: Sex, Lies, and Kinescope. #unseenprequels
- @macphoenix: Undocumented-Immigrant Kane #unseenprequels
- @mcsweater: American History IX #unseenprequels
- @AdamSerwer: The Dark Squire #unseenprequels
- @lizzwinstead: Conception of a Nation #unseenprequels
- @lizzwinstead: Still Going Back and Forth On Some Major Points of Endearments #unseenprequels
- (my own, heh): #unseenprequels Before Harry Met Sally
- UPDATE: via many others, this one clearly wins: @KagroX: Groundhog Day #unseenprequels
UPDATE: More fun titles are posted over at Ben Byrne's blog!
* Wondering what the deal with the # is? That's the marker for a "hashtag" on Twitter. It's how Twitter users easily add or denote a keyword, allowing everyone else to either find or refer to a topic easily. Search for all #unseenprequel tweets!
I've been following the NYC public advocate race for the past few weeks, and noticed a while ago that all of the candidates are on Twitter. As I started following each of them, it became clear that they might not understand the full potential of social media and networking, because most of their tweets have been one-way broadcast tweets–posting how they feel about an issue, where they're speaking that night, etc.
I griped a little yesterday about this, and Elana over at Wellstone Action asked me what advice I'd give candidates running for office. Here's a quick, handy-dandy list of pointers for candidates, from the position of a voter:
- Talk with me, not to me. Twitter is a media platform for conversation, not broadcast. A rule of thumb that's used for organizations also applies to candidates: only about 20-30% of your tweets should be about you. The rest should be about what your community cares about. Which leads me to…
- Find out what your community cares about. Read what your followers are tweeting and respond with helpful information. It doesn't just have to be related to the office you're running for, either… in fact, it's better if you mix it up a little. For example, someone you follow tweets about heading to a restaurant you love. Respond and say you go there often, too, and be sure to try the blackened sea bass.
- Stay on top of hot topics. Look for people talking about issues you care about with Twitter search. You can either save them as saved search in your Twitter app (Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, etc.), or as an RSS feed for your news reader (Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) Then respond to those tweets, even if you're not following each other.
- Give back to the community. Retweeting others' ideas and suggestions is a great way to show appreciation, and to spead the good word.
- Use your own, authentic voice, not a press release voice. I'm a voter, a human, and I want you to be a human too. Robots don't do so well in the voting booth.
- If you don't have time, assign a staff person to monitor and respond to items — just make sure they're clear that they're your staff person, and not you. For example, NYC mayoral candidate Reverend Billy Talen has a personal account, as well as his campaign staff's group account. If your staff person uses your account, ask them to note that they're a staffer.
In short, act like a normal person who cares about the people around them, because we know you do!
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Note: Bill de Blasio was the only public advocate candidate who responded to my gripe, and he gets extra Twitter points for both that and at least retweeting people once in a while. Go Bill!
It's been an interesting morning in the wonderful world of social media, hasn't it? First, Twitter went dark. Then Facebook started acting janky. Then we all sat there and just stared at the blinking cursors on our screens, with their telepathic messages of "get back to work." But did we? No! Of course not– we went over to FriendFeed to discuss.
Twitter reported its outage being caused by a denial-of-service attack. (Quick explanation: when skilled nerds/hackers write programs to flood a server with tasks and requests, so that the server is overloaded and taken down.) What happens when we come to rely on the social web for all kinds of things, and then those services disappear? Sure, we can all merrily hop over to the next one, but as Allyson Kapin pointed out, to a certain degree, we'd all have to start over on building our networks. Our social capital translates across platforms, sure, but the physical reconnecting of users to users is one big pain in the butt.
[read the rest of this post » ]
As you may have heard, I've signed a contract with Berrett-Koehler to write a book about social media this summer. But! I need a tremendous amount of support — monetary, moral and otherwise — to get it done in the super-fast timeframe that I'm working within. Can you help? Here's the email that I sent out to all my friends and colleagues. Please use the ChipIn to the right, or click here to make a donation.
Update, 7/13/09: Two things. There's a post on my progress and thoughts here, and also, to reflect the offline donations I'm getting, I'm now gradually lowering the goal of the ChipIn.
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Friends, colleagues, clients! Lend me your ears…
I'm writing you with some exciting news that makes me very happy. I just signed a contract from Berrett-Koehler publishers to write a book I've been imagining for a long time. But it's going to take some very hard work on my part, and I hope you can help me succeed.
[read the rest of this post » ]
Here's the interview I did this morning with the Morning News Hour crew at Hofstra University — great conversation and lots of fun, too. We cover Iran, other countries with repressive Internet policies, Net Neutrality, the big picture of social media and so much more! A jam-packed 17 minutes of goodness:
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There's a ton of great material out there on the nuances of the Iranian election and protests, and I just want to quickly throw some thoughts into the ring.
First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent — in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag1 #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN's decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.
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