Way to go, Mika!

Full disclosure: Perhaps I'm biased, because I've made two appearances on MSNBC when Mika Brzezinski was anchoring (one about the MySpace pirate and one about the AutoAdmit lawsuit). But all I can say regarding this clip is: right on. There's a time and a place for video footage of Paris Hilton leaving jail, but it's not MSNBC morning news.

Additions to the Twitter lexicon

A bit of cultural irrelevance, for posterity's sake:

twittercept (v.): to twitter that someone is about to twitter something embarrassing about you before they have a chance to twitter it. (Ex: "Josh is going to twitter that I asked him, 'Shall we do porn, or something funnier?'") (c) C. McCarthy

twittercize (v.): to criticize the content of another person's twitter through a twitter of one's own. (Ex.: "@Josh: Stop posting under the influence.") (c) J.B. Sacks

twitwned (adj.): pwned via Twitter. (c) J. Lowensohn

The Economist on Stephen Colbert

From the Economist:

An odd thing about political satire in America is that it is directed nearly as much at the media as at politicians. Headlines in the Onion...would not be so funny if those in the New York Times were not so ponderous. Mr Colbert's show would make no sense if cable-news blowhards such as [Bill] O'Reilly did not exist. The post-modernity of it all was illustrated when Mr O'Reilly actually appeared on “The Colbert Report” and jokingly admitted that his aggressive on-screen persona was “all an act”. Mr Colbert replied: “If you're an act, then what am I?

I must say I love the use of "the post-modernity of it all."

Best representation of Twitter hype yet

Thanks to Rafe Needleman for passing this on to me.

BubbleBathNYC

Jennie blows bubbles, originally uploaded by caroline m..

Yesterday I was in attendance at BubbleBathNYC, a project organized by a School of Visual Arts student that basically consisted of...lots of people in Union Square blowing bubbles. I took a ton of photos. At the same time, I was participating in Shutdown Day, which encourages you to not use your computer for 24 hours. The two were unrelated, but it was definitely a very cool coincidence that a fun, quirky, let's-go-outside event was taking place on a day where we were encouraged to ditch our monitors for sunnier spaces.

I'll probably post more about my Shutdown Day experiences later.

Reason #1 why I need to lay off the pop culture

Please tell me I'm not the only one who immediately thought "and the only prescription is...more cowbell!" upon reading the headline of this WorldChanging post.

Pass the popcorn and Digg in

I've got to admit that I've never been much of a believer in Digg, for pretty much the same reason that most people who aren't believers in Digg profess to not be believers in Digg. You know: narrow audience that tends to digg things that aren't actually news ("Check out this Easter egg I found when I hacked this back-end Linux gobbledegook!"), potential for rigging, etc. I'm still skeptical of its potential, the same way that I'm skeptical of "anti-Digg" news aggregation models like Daylife.

(For the record, I think Daylife is great, and I had great conversations with Jeff Jarvis and the Daylife guys at the Founders Club mixer last month, but my opinion is that all those experiments in next-generation news delivery should be taken for what they are -- experiments. Some will percolate to the top. Some won't. Some will change their models drastically and then succeed. We'll see.)

But back to Digg. I'm not going to tell you that my outlook on Digg changed completely, because it didn't (it only changed a little bit). But today marked the first occasion that I watched a post of mine climb from RSS-reader obscurity to the upper echelon of Digg's current Top 10 in Technology (the only Digg category that actually matters). To keep it brief, I posted about a funny video that I saw on the Wired blog Cult of Mac, which in turn had ironically been plucked from Digg. Considering its original source, I had not expected it to get Dugg at all, but lo and behold, someone gave it a boost early on. Then there were three Diggs, and five Diggs, and it hovered around a dozen for a while. I'm assuming that then a moderately popular blog must have linked to it, because over the next few hours it steadily rose into the 20s, and then it was around 30 when I logged off at the office.

Cue dinnertime: a nice healthy salad with goat cheese and beets, since I was still kind of full from this afternoon's impromptu peanut M&M festival in my cube. I'd picked up a magazine at random and read something that made me want to look something up regarding a Crave post, so I fired up Firefox and started sifting through posts when -- Crikey! There are 300 Diggs on that silly post about the Novell 'I'm a Mac' ad parody! So I clicked on the post's Digg link, and there were already five more Diggs than there had been on the previous page view. So I ate a bite of salad, and then hit reload again. Three more Diggs! By the time I'd finished dinner, it had crawled up into the current top 10 in the technology category.

It's blogedelic!

I should note that as an (almost) one-year veteran of tech journalism, I'm not a total stranger to Digg, nor am I unfamiliar with the bizarro-world feeling of having ridiculously dumb posts wind up with 1000+ Diggs (hello, pirate toaster). But watching the process? That's both cool, as well as a reminder that I should probably get a life.

Then, to top it all off, I found this great article on Digg concerning crowdsourcing. So much for my belief that you never found anything good there.

Oh, and this afternoon I was stricken with the Thursday Afternoon Distractedness Syndrome and took this picture of myself with the Photo Booth feature on my MBPro. That was my day. Not nearly as exciting as sipping cocktails at a Second Life demonstration at the Hotel on Rivington (that was last night) or snapping photos of innonate looking like a lush and a half at the Web 2.0 Meetup (that was Tuesday), but hey, we all need our quiet evenings.