NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web. A little before 9pm on Wednesday night and I’m standing on the ‘VIP’ balcony of San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom, holding a can of something called ‘MySpace Buzz’ and waiting for Weezer to take to the stage.
It’s a weird scene, all told, and not just because I thought Weezer was dead. The bulk of the weirdness stems from the make-up of the crowd: a dozen feet below me in the main auditorium there are maybe a couple of thousand writhing teenagers – Weezer fans to a (wo)man, cheering and shouting and jumping and sweating and doing all the things I remember doing a little over a decade ago. These are the invited fans; those lucky enough to have been chosen to attend this ‘secret show’, organised by MySpace. You know, for kids. Every so often one of the stage lights picks out a tiny puff of smoke in the crowd. By contrast, there are no kids up on the VIP balcony. And Weezer, to their credit, agreed with my sarcasm.
Worse still, we’re told that this is the future. Hmmmm. NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth. I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.
Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view. Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead. I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings. Better informed and more sensitive commentators than I have written about the massacre itself and what it means for the US army, and in particular for the thousands of Muslim soldiers currently fighting – and dying – for this country. How do you even begin to process the idea of an American soldier shouting the takbir, before mowing down his comrades in arms? And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Reports like (in no particular order)… [T]hey just brought a CART full of boxes w/transplant parts in them.
2009 State Of The Blogosphere: The Full BlogWorld Presentation. Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, fresh off a new funding and site relaunch, is showing some of the highlights from their annual State of the Blogosphere report today at BlogWorld in Las Vegas. We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below. Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland. 72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. 2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees.