Archive for January 2009
Why does the Internet hate Billy Joel?
Why would anyone need to defend Billy Joel?
Billy Joel is like a rainbow or a sunset or a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.
Billy Joel doesn’t need your pity. Billy Joel just is.
Until I got an Internet connection, I didn’t think it was possible to hate Billy Joel. It’s like hating puppies or french fries or Christmas trees. But if you put the right words in Google, you can find people who hate those things, too.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time defending Billy Joel this week, arguing on various message boards, trying to explain the difference between the way normal people consume music versus the way critics consume music.
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Change comes to the White House and to Whitehouse.gov
Barack Obama has 4,117,238 friends on Facebook.
That number only makes up 6 percent of the total number of people who voted for him in 2008, but it’s a very important 6 percent.
Barack Obama has exactly 144,000 followers on Twitter, a number so precise, it either represents an artificial system limit or constitutes proof of biblical prophecy.
Obama is the most popular person on Twitter, a fact that says more about his demographic appeal, and more about the future of this country, than any poll number I can think of.
Facebook has gone mainstream, but Twitter is the digital frontier. Twitter users are movers, shakers and alpha-consumers. These folks are the future of the Internet and the future of the country, and if Obama doesn’t speak their language, someone on his staff certainly does.
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Life lessons from the author of 'Stuff White People Like'
The Internet can’t change your life.
It can’t take an idea you had on a coffee break, lift you from obscurity and make all your dreams come true in six months.
Except when it does.
That’s what happened to Christian Lander, the creator of Stuff White People Like. Lander, an aspiring comedy writer from Toronto, was discussing “The Wire” with a friend from work when the conversation took a turn that changed his life.
He started with an obscure WordPress blog read by 25 friends, then his site got noticed by Comedy Central, creating a media avalanche that turned it into a overnight viral phenomenon.
Christian talked about his success in an utterly charming YouTube video recorded at the Google compound.
Michael B. Duff 