Putting the blogosphere under a magnifying glass
Someone out there knows I’m a connoisseur of “fake” Twitter accounts, and late this morning, forwarded me an e-mail that I cannot help but screencap and share:
Twelve hours later, there is one perfunctory tweet. In fact, it appears this account was created with one purpose in mind. That’s reflected in the e-mail above and, publicly, in the sidebar:
Count this as an overlooked reason why Twitter will succeed: its endless capacity for mischief.
Yesterday at the Gawker-owned Valleywag blog, contributor Paul Boutin reported on, then expanded upon, a phrase he says is going around the Silicon Valley: “the 250.” According to Boutin, the term is
a cruelly sarcastic euphemism used in real-life conversations for the small, cliquey group of self-appointed Web 2.0 insiders who seem to spend their days blogging and Twittering about one another. The gist is that The 250 are the 250 people who matter to The 250.
I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds to me like the “Gang of 500,” coined by Mark Halperin for ABC’s once-influential The Note. Its usage has fallen off in the past year; the phrase doesn’t appear in The Note’s archives since Halperin left to create Time’s The Page. I can’t be sure Halperin isn’t still using it, at least until Time introduces The Search.
In any case, these insidery nicknames are innocuous enough if a little annoying. As if the Beltway and Valley cultures aren’t insular enough, apparently we also have to give the elites of this elite an arbitrary fixed number to serve as a nickname.
As we’re all well aware, it’s said that DC is Hollywood for ugly people. But maybe this is wrong. Equating the District with LA is a bit presumptuous on our part. It might be more accurate to say that New York City is Hollywood for busy people. Or that Hollywood is New York for flaky people.
We shouldn’t pretend the Beltway is in their league. No, the Valley is our proper analogue. Heck, even Northern Virginia has its share of high tech companies. But then, they’ve got an Apple and a Google and a Cisco and we’ve got… AOL, which is relocating to NYC in hopes of turning itself around. I guess that means the Valley is DC for people who are good at math. Which I suppose means DC is the Valley for poor people. So, maybe our 500 doesn’t beat your 250 after all.
A few hours from now, Eliot Spitzer will surrender the office of New York governor to David Paterson. A few hours from now, it will be exactly a week since the New York Times posted the first report on its website about Spitzer being “linked” to a prostitution ring.
So what did that initial explosion look like, online? All it takes is a little bit of trial-and-error on Memeorandum, the live-updated aggregation of the political blogosphere, find out where the Spitzer scandal first popped into online consciousness. Specifically, it appeared about midway down the page of the 2:20 p.m. update like so:
Just kinda sandwiched in there between a couple other articles getting some contemporaneous linkage from around the ’sphere. Hats off to Jammie Wearing Fool and New York Magazine — one pure blogger, one blogging MSM outlet — for getting there first, even if some luck played a part in their picking up the Times report ahead of the pack. And it didn’t take an hour for the rest of the pack to join in. The article reached its highest point of linkage at 5:15 in the evening, just shy of three hours after it was first posted:
The rest is recent history: the offline mediasphere swooped in after, Gov. Spitzer threw in the towel after 48 hours’ thought, and his consort, Ashley Alexandra Dupre/DiPietro/Youmans joined Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails among the few musical artists to earn millions releasing music online. Aside from a “60 Minutes” interview a few years down the road (his) or a reality show on E! (hers) this story is about done. Coincidentally, just in time for the McGreevey sex scandal to make headlines and bloglines once again.
Bonus pre-scandal tidbit: Lest we fgorget, here’s Hotline’s Quote of the Day from Feb. 27:
“I’ll be there maybe later in the week or next week, if this continues.”
NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer, explaining why he won’t be campaigning for HRC in OH 2/27
In retrospect, I’m sure he would have rather spent that week campaigning for Sen. Clinton.
Two of my (relatively) recent obsessions are fairly unrelated: HBO’s The Wire and Obvious’ Twitter. Since I started tracking “the wire” on Twitter, the two have converged.
For those whom I’ve just confused: Twitter-tracking is a neat and non-obvious function of the popular micro-blogging service. If you’re a casual Twitterino, you may not even know of it. Put as simply as possible, in addition to receiving every tweet from those I follow, I also receive tweets from users across the entire network whenever they use a phrase I’m tracking, whether I’m following them or not. Tracked tweets won’t show up in your web interface, but they will be delivered by IM or text message (and I get both).
With the fifth and final season nearing an end, I started tracking the show’s title about a week ago. I got about a dozen or so relevant tweets per day — until last night’s airing of the ninth and penultimate episode. Although most Wire-heads I know have been watching episodes early via On Demand this year, the avalanche of Wire-related tweets give me the impression that most people are still watching at the appointed hour.
And with three different air times across four time zones, some West Coast reactions didn’t arrive until well after I was asleep. Out of sheer novelty and devotion to the television show, here are the tracked feeds I got last night and early this morning. If you aren’t caught up, yes there are spoilers, and the whole thing continues below the jump.
And as you’ll quickly notice, not every mention of “wire” has to do with “The Wire”:
8:41 PM (marcowill): cooking red beans and rice and getting ready for The Wire. My name is my name!
8:50 PM (ChrisLove): Almost time for the Wire!!!!!!
8:56 PM (melanig): @arsepoetica We aren’t allowed to watch “The Wire” until 12am your time because it is not in HD until then, so don’t tell me if anyone dies.
8:59 PM (seedoflife): Off to strap in for THE WIRE:)
9:00 PM (freddymini): Did go fly the kite with my son. it crashed and the wire, in less than 2 secs, made a gazillion of nodes. Drove me nuts!
9:07 PM (codeslinger): watching ep 9 of The Wire
9:08 PM (arsepoetica): I’m out! “The Wire” beckons. ‘Night, all.
(deantrippe): Watching the scramble-HBO version of The Wire.
Continue reading ‘The Wire Wire’