Idol Twitter moment

Was Paula Abdul’s resignation as Idol judge via Twitter really a “watershed” moment? Broadcasting and Cable seem to think so:

Twitter ruffled a few more journalistic feathers this week when American Idol judge Paula Abdul became the latest household name to usurp the breaking news power of traditional media by making a big announcement on the social networking site.

“I think it’s kind of a watershed moment,” says Rob Silverstein, executive producer for Access Hollywood. “The biggest show in the history of television; one of the biggest stars of the show decides to leave via Twitter.”

Abdul’s scoop came on the heels of the July 27 announcement that Ben Silverman would be departing NBC. The news broke via the Twitter page of Silverman’s good friend Ryan Seacrest, who alerted his 2 million followers well ahead of an NBC press release.

“It’s the democratization of media,” says Brad Adgate, senior VP of research for Horizon Media. “This is just going to continue. You follow Paula [on Twitter], you knew she was leaving before it was announced.”

I’d say the Twitter response to the Iran elections was more relevant to the ‘democratization of the media’ than Abdul’s announcement. 

 

Organising Twitter

New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan has some interesting things to say about new ways of self organising information on Twitter:

Enter #freeskip and hashtags. Hashtags are curious words and mashed-together phrases earmarked with a hash symbol (better known, perhaps, as the pound sign). When a hashtag is included in a Twitter post, it signals which topic the tweet is believed to address. It’s shorthand that works sort of like the moment in a conversation when a big talker might say — generously to a newcomer, pointedly to a dummy — “We’re talking about the future of the Democratic Party here.” A hashtag (think #futureofthedemocraticparty) is also a link, so anyone who encounters one on Twitter can instantly search the network for that phrase. (This week’s On Language, on Page 12, has more on the etymology.)

Where library science uses shared, intuitive and (in principle) value-neutral systems for organizing information, Twitter users often classify their tweets in the most condensed, most charged and least transparent way possible. While aiming to draw people in, Twitter users nonetheless strive for unique hashtags (#freeskip instead of #gates, for example) so that searches don’t retrieve off-topic stuff. I can say this from experience: If you urgently want to know about the Gates arrest, you want to dodge tweets about Bill Gates’s quittingFacebook. That nonnews is for #billgates people.

Twitter users increasingly follow hashtags as attentively as they do single-author Twitter feeds. 

Thanks to Julie Posetti’s tweet for link

The viral world of web & the wonders of tagging

I just tagged my last few posts viral video so decided to use the tag to see what other people are saying about viral videos.

That led me to this post at Inner Kor with the following video links:

The recently hyped Evian baby ad:

And this viral dance from the British T-Mobile campaign:

Which led me to a selection of other T-mobile videos including this mass sing-a-long of Hey Jude in Trafalgar Square:

And that reminded me of a similar video that someone sent to me earlier in the year. This time the sound of music takes over Antwerp Stations:

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