We run a solid flowing gamut from customer service on Twitter (à la Nordstrom!) to what travel's lost post-9/11. We throw back to Vinny Warren, ruminate on the pros and cons of unexpected fame (is it ever unexpected?), and where The New York Times went horribly, horribly wrong with its payment wall.
I also rant heavy on the merits of Monocle, the little print publication that could - and could so, so good.
One of the most curious things Sandmonkey said during this week's AdVerve was that the Revolution in Egypt was posted as a Facebook event before it began.
In the same spirit, an apartment in the middle of Cairo has become a crashpad for young Egyptians taking a break from the protests (16 days and counting) to broadcast everything happening on the ground floor to Facebook. The Group on which they leave their daily testimonials is called Tahrir Square, and the "About Me" section says plenty in three small words: "The misunderstood movement..."
The page is cool because the perspectives are so diverse. It's also another example of what vocal social media users in Egypt have tried painstakingly to do: correct misunderstandings about what is happening, emphasise their unity and reiterate their why's.
This is an articulate revolution, composed of people who thought about their reasons, and the consequences of their failure, before committing themselves.
For more ongoing up-to-date information, balance whatever news you're reading with Al Jazeera English. It's updated daily and providing good coverage of day-to-day developments and the significance of small occurrences. I also highly recommend you follow @sandmonkey on Twitter: he's publishing and RTing information near-compulsively. What he's seeing and writing about have served as eyes for many who can't be in Egypt.
How often is it that the thing we've all been waiting for turns out to be exactly as imaginative as all the other things we already hate have?
Fairly often, I guess.
(In response to the secondary question still only half-formed in your mind: "pertussis" is whopping cough. You can still get that? Maybe they changed the name so people wouldn't automatically think about The Consumption.)
Biz Stone's Twitter talk this afternoon was met with a full auditorium, people clamoring for places to park cameras and laptops so they could livetweet questions in real time.
Kind of a neat format. Stone addressed questions as they appeared under hashtag #hkcannes, the results of which were projected onto a screen. Two problems with this method:
1) Wifi outside the press room isn't accessible for free, meaning those that livetweeted from inside the room were either paying for use or mobiling it up. Questions were never taken directly from audience members, raising their hands, for example.
2) Questions were still for the most part selected by a Hill & Knowlton rep. I'm pretty sure the Oracle of Delphi had a less formidable filtering system.
Stone talked a bit about Twitter's birth, which I'm sure will become the stuff of online legend, so I don't really need to go into it. (Hey look, here it is.) One point of interest: his partner, Jack Dorsey, conceived the idea out of a fascination with AIM status updates.
Then he told a bunch of heartrending stories about how the real-time updating system got journos out of jail in foreign countries, kept people abreast of earthquakes and wildfire locations, gave hipsters a way to convey to each other which SXSW sessions suck, etc.
The hivemind behaviour born out of these instances of Twitter adoption yields zen inspiration to Stone: he likens it to watching birds fly in formation, using instincts to drive activity that seems perfectly coordinated.
Talk was also peppered with proverbs, which appeared above us like pop philosophy at a new age seminar. My favourite is "creativity is a renewable resource" -- something that came to Stone when he was asked, once, to come up with a five-word speech.
Here are a couple of videos of the QA portion, focusing on how Twitter expects to demonstrate its long-term viability by developing a business model.
On that little "definitions" section in right-hand Twitter nav:
On monetizing Twitter:
Nothing you probably haven't already heard. Obviously there's a way to shoehorn sponsorship or premium service opportunities into a site where product/movie reviews and brand opinions are solicited and freely given as generously as on Twitter. For a meatier description on how Twitter can add an e-commerce angle to its value prop, however, check out what one of its investors recently had to say.
