If I haven’t already beaten this horse to death, let me continue. Increasing the number of Twitter followers can be overwhelming. It has been compared to drinking from a fire hose and I can personally testify that there’s nobody there to adjust the pressure! Once you go over the 100 following threshold, you’re bound to encounter so many tweets that you just want to give up. After the initial guilt over skipping posts passes, you tend to look for information from people you personally know.
I use Tweetdeck on my laptop which provides a grouping feature that allows me to see posts from particular users. However, this makes it easy to miss interesting items from common sources and forces reliance on your trusted friends to re-tweet stuff you might have missed. While I do have a trusted cadre of people that do this, I certainly don’t want this to be my safety net.
There is also the issue of people who tweet anything and everything that pops into their minds. Let’s call them tweeter-mouths. Some of these people have the BriteKite application installed that tweets their current location. It surprises me that I’m not finding out when they’re in the toilet! Then there are the folks who take oral hygiene habits to extreme and tweet after every meal with a recap of their menu. While I am sometimes interested in where people are or what they have eaten, I really only want to know if these things are interesting. A trip to the gas station or McDonalds meal might be something that inquiring minds want to know but I avoid that rag for a reason. Add to this the tweeting, re-tweeting, and more re-tweeting of AllTop.com lists and my head is just about ready to explode!
Is this just a symptom of not being able to cope with new technology due to a generational gap? Is it possible that younger people are able to filter out noise better than me? I may be in denial but I refuse to believe that this is true. As I’m fond of saying, “acquiescence is approval” and I do not approve. I will continue my search for new techniques and potential allies in the war on blather. Can I get an amen from the congregation?
So That's Life? 
I Don’t Need No Doctor
02/07/2009It’s been said that the Internet is the greatest source of mis-information known to mankind. Generally, I’ve taken this with a grain of salt. I certainly don’t believe everything I read on the Internet and I try to verify “facts” that look suspicious. When I get those “warning” emails from panicky friends about the latest killer computer virus or that urban legend warning of the dangers of kidney removal, I go straight to sites like symantec.com or snopes.com to see if they are indeed true. You should too.
I’m starting to think that the biggest problem facing us in the modern world is the mainstream media. I’ve used msnbc.com as my home page for many years now because it is fairly free of pop-ups and I can configure it to present local news fairly easily. Up until today, I was happy with this arrangement.
Then, I’m looking at the site this morning and the biggest headline is a “story” about the mother of octuplets and the interview she gave to Ann Curry of NBC. The second biggest was a mea culpa from Christian Bale regarding his tirade on the set of the latest Terminator movie. In the vernacular of online communication, WTF!?!?!?!?!?!
The U.S. is in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, massive layoffs are being announced every day, we have a new President battling to enact his promise of change, and global warming is on the verge of turning Nova Scotia into a beach resort. And the “biggest” story is about a woman who now has 15 children? Has the world gone mad?
I like getting my news via the internet where I can choose what to read and watch. I like human interest stories. I even like stupid entertainment gossip. But when these are the featured stories that grab the prime spots on a webpage, what does this say about the level of disdain that the media holds for the public? Do they think (and is it true?) that the public is so simpleminded that this meets the requirement of informing us?
Most people are pressed for time and can only read a few things a day. When this tripe is proffered as the “news”, what do they expect? When people only read non-news stories, how can they possibly be expected to know enough to make an intelligent choice on a ballot?
I don’t know about you but I’m switching my homepage today. I don’t know where I’ll end up but it certainly won’t be msnbc.com. I’ll keep you posted on what I find. In the mean time, let me know what you have as a homepage and what you think about this situation.
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