Fight, fight, fight...

I have no real value to add around this particular gem that has been proferred by one of my favouritest columnists, as it speaks for itself. Paul Carr - he of acid tongue and deadly quick wit -has got himself in to a bit of a bundle with Orlowski over at The Register, all in the name of charity event 'Twestival'.

Over to Mr Carr: "Orlowski, in the highly likely event that you haven't heard of him, is what I would call a professional troll. A "journalist" whose oeuvre is to spout views so calculatingly dumb – global warming? scientific evidence, schmientific evidence – and to rely on wordplay so pathetic – Wikipedia users? "wiki fiddlers" more like! – that the editors of the Register regularly disable comments on his diatribes, lest a child accidentally crawl across a keyboard and beat him in an argument. He hates Wikipedia, he hates peer-to-peer filesharing ("freetards!"), he hates basically anything popular or successful or fashionable. Which all serves to explain why, above all else, he really, really hates Twitter.

In fact, Orlowski hates Twitter, and its users, so much that he decided to summon up all of his trollish powers to write an article hacking Twestival, and its charitable intentions, to death. Faced with a forest of positive statistics and coverage of the event, he sniffed around – like a pig nudging aside truffles in search of a turd – until finally he dug up a single negative fact. Donations to Twestival's online radio station, Twestival.fm, had failed to reach their $20K target, with pledges coming in at a little over $4K. Compared to the huge totals pledged through other channels, it was an irrelevant disappointment. An irrelevant disappointment on which Orlowski based his entire coverage of the event".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/17/twestival-charity-trolls

You can read the actual email back and forth on Paul's blog here: http://www.paulcarr.com/can-you-guess-what-my-columns-going-to-be-about-this-week/

Google FAIL makes Twitter Headlines

Clearly this blog is not Twitter. I say that because aside from the obvious reasons (look around) its taken me more than three days to write about the little drama that follows, whereas it took Twitter less than 20 minutes. Over the weekend those of you glued to Twitter would have almost certainly seen Google was having an issue or two. The search engine was returning searches and listing every page as potential malware with the warning ‘this site may harm your computer. The malfunction which Google later apologised for lasted no more than half an hour and in an era past might not have even been a story unless a journalist happened to be using the search engine during this time. Yet with such discussion around the issue taking place so quickly on Twitter it seemed to emphasise or underline the event and make it mainstream news... http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/31/google-blacklist-internet

We’ve already seen Twitter become the source for first information about news stories which will later blanket the traditional media (the plane crash photos first emerged via twitter for example) but we are beginning to see with increasing frequency, twitter conversation impacting the news stories that actually make it in to the mainstream media.

What do you think? Without the Twitter conversation would Google have taken less of a hammering?