Cuppacafe

I so totally can't believe there is so much coverage of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize when the news about Miley Cyrus no longer Twittering is so mad-hot!

Love to social network, but MySpace is too busy, Facebook too Farmville, and Twitter too time consuming? well then, perhaps Twitteleh is for you:

No? then perhaps Flutter is the way to go.

Then, of course, there is what our old pal Jon Stewart has to say.

Yeah, we thought so.

The Perfessor

Apparently, as online job boards have grown crowded amid the recession, many big companies, (according to The Wall Street Journal), including Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Raytheon Corp. and Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks, are now listing some job openings on the Twitter microblogging site.

For employers, Twitter—where users post updates, or "tweets," of no more than 140 characters—offers one more way to find and attract candidates, and a cheaper alternative to big online job boards. It also helps companies target social-media-savvy job hunters and convey an innovative image. For job seekers, Twitter offers the chance to interact one-on-one with companies' recruiters and can be more convenient than job boards.

The article goes on to say:

Indeed, people trolling for jobs on Twitter need to tweet with care—not just when they're interacting with employers, says Cynthia Shapiro, a former human-resources executive and career coach in Woodland Hills, Calif. Hiring managers could use information they find on Twitter, just as on Facebook, to form opinions about an applicant's employability. People sometimes disclose personal things over Twitter, like work-family challenges, that an employer couldn't ask about in an interview but which might color their impression if they knew. For example, if an employer sees on Twitter that a candidate is going through a messy divorce, they might "assume you're going to be distracted," Ms. Shapiro says.

So, perhaps there is a reason to Tweet after all...

The Perfessor

Unless you were living in a cave yesterday you missed the prelude to the end of all things.

I kid you not.

Twitter went down for several hours (and no, that isn’t code for some sexually-deviant thing) Settle down, Walt. What I mean to say is that the self-serving, ego-centric electronic posting service Twitter was unavailable to its subscribers for several hours yesterday.

According to The Financial Times, what might have been no more than a teenage prank completely knocked Twitter offline for over two hours yesterday.

The micro-blogging firm, whose service allows text and web posting of messages of 140 characters or less, said it was hit by a denial-of-service attack, in which thousands of personal computers attempt simultaneous connections, slowing the target site’s response to a virtual standstill.

According to The Wall Street Journal it was more than just Twitter that was hit, but Facebook as well (which jives with this blogger experienced, as I was having some difficulty posting, which ticked me off to no end).

Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were working together with Google Inc. to investigate what happened, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another person familiar with the attack said it may have been targeted at a single Russian activist blogger with accounts across the impacted services.

The New York Times indicated that Google was also targeted:

Many of Twitter’s 45 million legitimate visitors were unable to use the service for hours. Analysts characterized the disruption as a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers overwhelm a Web site by sending it a deluge of junk requests, and one suggested the attack might have originated in Russia or Georgia.

While it is still not clear where the attack originated, or who was behind the digital assault, it is clear that someone out there was looking to jam the rest of us up.

Oh, and that isn’t even the the worst news; apparently stats confirm that teens don’t tweet:

If you’re under 25 and use Twitter, you’re not the source of the site’s tremendous growth. While we recently questioned the findings of a largely anecdotal report from Morgan Stanley written by a 15 year old, Nielsen has now produced figures that confirm the trend: young people don’t Tweet.

So stay wary my friends.

The Perfessor

The great Twitterpocolpyse continues

Apparently, not everyone does the Tweet, and there are still some old-school holdouts (like Dave Letterman) who simply don’t have the time, or inclination to make the (digital) jump. How do I know? well, here’s a truly priceless video segment from David Letterman’s “Late Show” last night, as he is taught how to use Twitter by actor Kevin Spacey.

See, I knew that I hadn’t been left behind, but was merely ahead of the curve.

The Perfessor

Reposting from Blogging National, the best tweets from the Romance Writers of American conference:

"Shame can kill the imagination. It's hard to keep writing in the face of cultural derision."
--Eloisa James

"Some say writing is its own reward. I write for money, but writing for money is not so bad, especially when that writing brings you joy."
--Eloisa James

"Let go of the anger, hang on to the good lessons."
--Eloisa James

"Cows are the Devil's handmaidens."
--Linda Howard

"She was a stupid slut, bless her heart."
--Linda Howard

"I always thought writing erotica was its own reward."
--Pam Rosenthal

"[On porn vs. erotica] If it takes two hands to hold the book, it's erotica."
--Janet Mullany

"They're not buying writers, they're buying ideas."
--Madeleine Hunter

"Every writer needs an editor. I don't care how good you are or think you are."
--Nora Roberts
{Ed Note: replace think with thin??}

"Every time I hear writers talk about 'the muse,' I just want to bitch-slap them. It's a job. Do your job."
--Nora Roberts

Giving away @alisonkent 's latest book ONE GOOD MAN on Twitter.

College Humor has a funny new musical video up celebrating the most popular social websites of the net, done by a couple of over stuffed singers and, uh, a few musical theater majors.

Sound req'd.

So, you think that you are having a bad day, well imagine that you were being publicly jilted on Twitter — in front of your client's 19,305 followers. what could be worse than that?

Perhaps, having it reported on Legal Blog Watch:

Ga.-based celebrity attorney Randall Kessler, who was representing Tameka Foster-Raymond in a divorce proceeding initiated by her soon-to-be ex, R&B singer Usher. As reported at this source, just days after Kessler publicly praised his client as a faithful wife and loving mother, Raymond, who goes by @TamekaRaymond on Twitter, was tweeting her buddy, celebrity lawyer @StarJonesEsq in search of a new lawyer. Foster-Raymond's tweet, which was posted publicly, read: "My lawyer = horrible. Need the name/number of a good one in Atlanta."

Apparently Foster-Raymond claims never intended for her tweet to be read by thousands of her followers. Still, she did post a follow-up apology on her page (not sure what that comment could have been other than “Whoops, it never occurred to me that people were actually reading what I said.” Which is sort of like the Governor of South Carolina going on national television and saying “Hey, it never occurred to me that anyone in my family or state would notice (or, you know, care) if I disappeared for a week over Father’s Day Weekend to bang my mistress in another country.”

Meanwhile, there is still no comment from Kessler who has now gained no small amount of celebrity status in his own right — as the first (or at least among the very first) lawyer ditched on Twitter.

Man do I love this country!

The Perfessor

Good news boys and girls, it appears that your boss probably won’t discover that you are screwing around on company time updating your FaceBook page and blogging what an A-Hole your boss is because he’s apparently doing what he is getting paid to do.

Worried about bumping into your boss on a social media service, then having to explain some indiscrete comment you made in cyberspace? If you work for the world’s biggest companies, you can relax: Your CEO isn’t spending time on the social Web.

A survey of Fortune 100 CEOs finds that almost none of them are using Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn. Reuters:

Go figure...

You can read the rest of that report here.

The Perfessor

♫♫ By order of the prophet
♫ We ban that boogie sound
♫ Degenerate the faithful
♫ With that crazy casbah sound ♫♫

Twitter and YouTube are sputtering today because of the deluge of traffic because of the falsified Iran election. Just watching the firehose of info for the hash tag #iranelection is an eye opener. Using Twtterfall that self refreshes can stream #iranelection tweets so fast you can't read them all. Having one #iranelection tweet "fall" per second wasn't fast enough -- the queue backed up to over 3600 messages waiting to fall in just a few minutes this afternoon. Too bad it's mostly noise and "me too" supporters. After a while, retweeting is an echo of an echo, making much more noise than signal. Filtering out the madness seems futile, but can bring really important stuff out of the chaos.

=-- Sing along with the song made famous by Sting --=

With every flush you take
Every movement you make
Every pee you break
Every flush you take
I'll be Twittering you

http://aculei.net/~shardy/hacklabtoilet/

Now, to import my Twitters over here,
[evil voice]
AND THE PLAN WILL BE COMPLETE
[evil voice]

If you blog much with Wordpress and Twitter any at all, perhaps this new theme might be worth a trial

Watch the video below about the new theme from Wordpress.

As opposed to incorporating Twitter into blog posts, this replaces Twitter, allowing a bit of microblogging instead the, er, regular blogging...

I often use this blog to test things out, and I may put this theme up to test how it works in real time.