Flour Power

Hey, Internet: What if We All Read the Same Book?

The idea was put forward by Jeff Howe last year, as a way to reinvent the book club concept and giving it a global reach, instead of being something you do with people in the neighbourhood (or city). So last summer One Book, One Twitter got around 12,000 people from all over the world reading and discussing (on Twitter) Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (great book, by the way, you should read it). And then it was over.

The same Jeff Howe is now trying to revive the idea, and the Twitter-based book club is back. The initiative has a new name – 1book140 – and it’s now monthly instead of a one-off thing. The book for this month is The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, as chosen by “the crowd”, and the discussion is already going strong on Twitter, in tweets annotated with the dedicated hashtag for each part (#1b140_1, #1b140_2, #1b140_3, etc.). Here’s the reading/discussion schedule for June, and an FAQ for those of you who want to quickly get into it.

I’m joining the club myself, and might even start tweeting about it.

On a funny note, 2 weeks ago Sir Alex Ferguson has publicly criticized Twitter by saying it’s a “waste of time” and that people should instead “go to a library and read a book”. Well, there you go.

Do you know those things that are so bad they’re good?

Well, this is not the case. This song is the perfect example of algorithmically-generated music, Auto-Tune-enhanced vocals and the best lyrics a 3 year-old could write. And of course, it went viral and is now one of the biggest things on Youtube and Twitter. It’s just so bad that people just feel the need to show it to everyone they know. Like I’m doing now, with this blog post. I know I’m feeding the beast, but here goes, Rebecca Black’s Friday:

This… thing… has garnered almost 30 million views on Youtube at the time of writing, and 1M of them just in the few hours since I’ve seen it this morning. It’s also a trending topic on Twitter and has already got the attention of music-mogul Simon Cowel. Not bad for the reported $2.000 paid to Ark Music Factory for the production of the video. And again thanks to the Internet, we now we can all enjoy the parodies.

What’s with all these songs with explanations of the ordering of the days of the week?

If you think that what Charlie Sheen has been saying to the media is edgy, just watch out for what’s to come now that he has a Twitter account – @CharlieSheen. The first image he posted? Himself and Bree Olsen, a porn actress:

The account was verified by Twitter on March 1st, and got 1 million followers in just over 25 hours. Which is a Guinness World Record, if you care about that sort of thing.

This is going to be so much fun.

The Iran election has been all over the Internet in the last few days, due to the post-election protests over a suspicious (some say statistically impossible) landslide victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president.

With the Iranian authorities blocking a lot of web sites, like Friendfeed, and major news outlets like CNN failing taking a lot of time to report what’s happening (it’s now finally the top story), Twitter has proved to be the most active news source for the post-election protests.

Recognising this, the Twitter team postponed the scheduled maintenance to try and minimize the impact in Iran:

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

This is a very significant step by Twitter and a great way to show that they’re serious about becoming a source of real time news. The #IranElection hashtag marks this as the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, and hundreds of tweets per minute keep flowing.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams predicts that Twitter will be something “that normal people do” within five years. He compares it to the early days of blogging (he was the founder of what became Blogger). When blogging started, most people didn’t get it and it seemed like a huge waste of time that only appealed to narcissists. Twitter gets a lot of the same criticisms, yet somehow more and more people find it a valuable mode of communication.

I still don’t get Twitter, but I’ve been around there for a few months now, to try and figure out what’s so great about it. Stuff like this Penny Arcade strip kind of scares me.

And it’s also quite curious that on the same day this news comes out, I’m seeing a few of my friends starting to follow me on Twitter. I guess that no one wants to be just like “normal people”…

(via Techcrunch)