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Most Blogs Now Abandoned
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.""
Twitter means meaningless chatter and a type of bird song.
Tweet is a (single) noise a bird makes.
By inferance, tweet is related to twitter as short unimportant remark is to meaningless chatter.
You know, people do still actually write new "classical" music. There are plenty of composers writing new symphonies, minuets and other works of that ilk. Just because you don't listen to it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
You actually hit it right on the head. The next thing is personal, targeted messaging to deliver ads. That "guy" will be your phone, and it's going to remind you of all the opportunities to spend money that are in close proximity to you. I'm sure some doughnut chain will lock down the use of Homer Simpson saying "Doughnuts, ahhwggrrrdroollll." And every fast food place will be bombarding you with their jingle. Then advertisers will find a way to justify sending blanket text messages in a given radius (perhaps buy paying telcos a flat rate and charging the receiving party nothing) saying it is freedom of speech and you could opt out if you wanted to...
A dumb phone may be a smart thing soon.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
According to Conan O'Brien, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will all merge in the ear 3000 and form "YouTwitFace", a super-social networking site.
Get me a meat pie floater!
The good thing about Twitter is that you choose who to listen to. So if there's a guy (virtually) tapping on your shoulder 20 hours a day saying nothing better than "Hey, hey, hey--pay attention to me", you just say "unfollow" and he goes away for good. (You could just not follow him in the first place also, but sometimes you follow someone and they wind up more annoying than useful.) That's what I like about Twitter - the ability to easily tune out the junk and tune in the good stuff. (Yes, there *are* folks on Twitter who post things worth reading.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.