WTF?
This morning the body of the blogger known as NYCWD was found on my couch, dead.
I know… I know… the horror!!! 
He was stabbed repeatedly while apparently enjoying a cupcake from Dean & DeLuca as he watched The Biggest Loser. If the attacker hadn’t gotten him, surely Jillian Michaels would have eventually.
It is believed that his involvement as a BETA Tester in the new G-Mail Autopilot feature was a contributing factor to this attack.
Luckily however, a photo was taken of his assailant!!! Images from a recently purchased security camera show the following:
If you have any information regarding this unruly character who has taken from us a TRUE Blogging Icon, then please leave the information in the comments.
I’ll get around to looking at them after I’ve spent his life insurance money on catnip and playdough.
XOXOXO
Poppy
It seems the Twitter Buzz Train still has not left the station. Everyone’s still talking about it and using more than 140 characters in doing so. Sure I use it, there have been Twitter Contests, the FDA uses it, the tech revolutionist Jason Calacanis offered $500k to be a “recommended friend” for 3 years, and I have already determined that Twitter influence is really a whole lot of hype.
You know this economic crisis we’re in? Yeah, Twitter is like the sub-prime mortgage bubble and its gonna pop. It’s the new social bubble. Of course, you want to know why and I’m going to explain it to you the way I see it.
Prime Example: Ripley’s Believe It Or Not NYC
So last week I received a notice that Ripley’s Believe It Or Not‘s New York City venue was following me from their Twitter account. I took a glance at their profile, as I do everyone’s profile who follows me, and I decided to follow them back. I’m a fan of the television show and their Atlantic City museum, so I have no problem following their plugs (1,025 characters) about events in the area that I find myself in for about 50% of my day. I even retweeted one of their tweets to help them grow their subscriber base.
A week later I discovered that after I had followed them and retweeted one of their tweets, they in turn had unfollowed me. This was quite a rude action for them to take. The whole driving force behind “social media” is after all two way communication. So obviously they weren’t truly interested in communicating with me and therefore I was no longer interested in communicating with them or paying $26.95 per person to go see one of their shows.
If It’s Free It’s For Me
The great thing about Twitter is that it’s free. To create a personal account costs nothing. To find friends and like minded people costs nothing. To follow someone costs nothing. If it’s free, it’s for me.
The worst thing about Twitter is that it’s free. To create a business account costs nothing. To find current customers and future potential customers costs nothing. To follow someone costs nothing. To unfollow someone costs nothing… and they don’t even know you did it.
That’s one of the things that I’m not too crazy about on any of the social networks. They ask your permission to add a friend, but don’t tell you when someone defriends you or unfollows you. Now I realize there are reasons for this, including people who would become emotionally distraught when someone defriends them. However a corporation or business is NOT a person. Sure there are people BEHIND the business, but we’re not talking about them when it comes to corporations on Twitter like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. This is why I actually liked the whole Whopper Sacrifice promotion that Burger King did. It told the person that I was no longer their friend so they knew it. Of course, they also knew that two 1/4 patties of processed beef were valued more than they were… but hey, the truth can be brutal!
The Twitter River
The truth is that with everyone jumping into Twitter, the Twitter Stream is quickly becoming the Twitter Raging River. Human information consumption has not increased dramatically to keep pace with the growth rate of Twitter.
As I’ve already mentioned, let’s assume Twitter has 6 Million members. If every member sends one tweet out over a 24 hour period that is 6,000,000 tweets. Spread out evenly that equates to 81 tweets per second (6,000,000 divided by 86,400). Let’s say every tweet has an average of 125 characters instead of the maximum 140 characters. That equates to 1,025 characters per second, which is the number of characters from the start of this post to the end of the word plug a few paragraphs above. How long did it take you to read up to that point? More than a second? Exactly.
It is ALOT of text to not only read but to also comprehend. Sure some of us can digest more information than others, but unless you are using a third part application like TweetDeck that enables you the ability to filter Tweets down by either sender or keyword, the information being sent your way is not necessarily digestible.
Imitators Doing It Better
It’s one thing for someone to imitate you. It’s an entirely different thing when they imitate you in a better way. That’s exactly what Facebook did with their new homepage. The newly designed Newsfeed on Facebook delivers your friends status updates, pictures, and news items. Wanna know the best part of it? If you put your friends into “groups”, you are able to view the feeds filtered by the “groups” right in the service without a third part application.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not… but Facebook is going to be making changes to automate the feed, limit application news, and make other improvements. They are evolving past Twitter just as they evolved past MySpace. How has the actual experience of Twitter been improved upon lately by Twitter?
In Conclusion
In conclusion, if I were a social network I would be…
|
You Are Facebook |
 You are social, outgoing, and excited to connect to your friends. You are interested in your friends’ lives, and you enjoy adding your opinion to the mix. While you enjoy sharing online, you don’t want everyone to know your business. You value your privacy. Your life is an open book to those you know but not to strangers. |
Strong dividends in the long term. Yeah, that’s me.
What are you?
Dear Dragon Land Bakery located at 125 Walker Street, NY NY:
Allow me to explain something. Although I am not technically a tourist, I just got a new camera. Because of this… I have been taking alot of pictures. Some of them are arty. Some of them are candid. Some of them are an attempt at something new, like this reflection shot:
As you can see, I unfortunately also caught my own reflection. So I reposed Poppy, who was my willing model while her parents were inside your establishment to purchase pastries. This was the result of the repose:
As you can see, the photo has greatly improved. Poppy is visible while I am not. Two things happened in the photo that made me want to retake it. The first is my fault, in that I did not get the entire name of your fine establishment in the shot. The other is that this worker blocked a portion of the rack, but that is entirely understandable and acceptable because she is there to service your customers. So once I re-established the framing to include the sign and waited for your worker to move out of the frame on her own accord with no coaxing from myself, there was a banging on your window. Apparently the worker was trying to get my attention to issue obscene gestures and what can only be described as gang signs as indicated in this photo:
I mean, really? Are you seriously going to allow your workers to be disrespectful to people on the PUBLIC STREET. While you may be in Chinatown, this is the United States of America. I can understand if I was taking photographs from inside your establishment, that you may enforce a no photography policy which is your right. However, to allow your workers to be rude to people OUTSIDE your establishment is just fucking wrong. That worker needs to be concerned with the customers INSIDE the store and serving them properly, not what is going on outside. Also, considering that a good portion of the people in your bakery are tourists, perhaps you should be a little more open minded about photography. Even inside your establishment such as the Chinatown Starbucks who seemed to have no issue whatsoever:
Bottom line Dragon Land Bakery, while your pastries may indeed be succulent… the workers lack of respect to prospective customers and acceptance of the culture of the country you do business in that will sink you. Oh… and for the record… I’ll be back this weekend to take more pictures through your glass.
Because I can and there is nothing you can do to stop me.
Fucking commies.
XOXO
NYCWD
Everywhere I turn there is talk about all the people getting laid off from their jobs. There is talk about the economic downturn everywhere and the need for America to stay competitive and efficient.
The UAW gave concessions to Ford to keep the company opening. What they’re going to give back to GM is still in question… and whether or not it will be enough to save it even with tens of thousands of layoffs.
Two local hospitals closed at the beginning of this month, members of the HealthCare Local 1199. That’s 6,000 people without jobs or benefits, including EMTs and Paramedics who can’t even get hired in another union shop because… there’s a hiring freeze! Surprise!!!
The San Francisco Chronicle also got concessions from their union to hopefully stay in business.
Unions are not providing their members with job security. They have been giving concession after concession and when a shop closes they’ve been tossing their now non due paying members to the curb, which makes you wonder just where is the benefit?
Yet, Congress wants to make it easier to organize unions (which are businesses by the way) whether or not the majority of the employees want one or not. Do people who think that belonging to a union equals job security watching a different news station (CNN, NBC) or read different papers (NYT, Daily News) than I do?
I belonged to a union at one time. I paid them $25 a week for six months so the Union officers could go on vacation in the Bahamas while I worked in the snow, only to be let go come summer because I was a “provisional” employee. In my experience unions don’t provide job security. According to all the headlines about layoffs, unions don’t provide job security to other people either.
Really.
So if unions aren’t the answer (which I clearly don’t think they are although I’m sure others disagree), what is the best form of job security?
In my job I get alot of people with this mentality:
Which is why I need a tazer. Every single bullshit 911 caller needs to get tazed this way I can actually justify being there.
Seriously.
