Andre

My Michael Jackson Memorial service coverage by using Twitter, sorted by oldest (first in order) tweet on top:

• Why does all the TV coverage from the US always looks so shitty in quality? Blurry and worse.. YouTube looks better than a US live coverage.
• ATV was mentioning Twitter & Internet in general, some impressive numbers.. Would have been good opportunity to introduce their own account.
• I believe the last and only time the world stood still, glued to the TV waiting for something to happen was when man set foot onto the moon.
• I guess the next similar event might be something like Madonna, moon again or Mars. Expert guesses suggest the world stands still right now.
• It is actually an excellent test to see how the media and the Internet in particular holds up to the challenge as mankind becomes connected.
• I wonder what % of the MJ Memorial followers' mass is actually the part which follows the event because of its mass, thus enlarging it more.
• In the age of combined TV and Internet coverage, I think the last Pope did not do too bad in the ratings when it comes to death ceremonies..
• As usual when tragedy struck, people are more famous afterwards. With many unpublished tracks, reworks, MJ'll be richer than ever, in death.
• RT @TechCurious: ... wow look at all the hot spots from the MJ streaming worldwide on this Akamai map! http://tinyurl.com/ytwysn
• RT @olgs: RT @william_ma: We are WITNESSING history! This could be the event we go back and say geographic limited broadcasting TV is DEAD!
• I am really looking forward for "the day after the Michael Jackson Memorial" statistics, reports and analytics of the event and its traffic.
• A couple of funny but also good harsh lines so far. I expect any moment now the Pope on stage declaring MJ a saint for bringing world peace.
• I was close with my "saint" tweet: that US Congress lady declared him a national hero with that bill, even if very unlikely it doesn't pass.
• TVB Pearl was the only station to go with the live coverage through to the end. Glad I kept switching between ATV and all TVBs all evening..
• Funny & interesting to read how US President Obama got shoved aside by the current global Michael Jackson "mania": http://tinyurl.com/mb4kbt
• Zooming live over Los Angeles in one of the news helicopters. They got a great camera onboard, feels like I stand on the street by myself :)
• Reading MJ's Memorial created a lot but not as much as expected online traffic. I doubt the result counted by 1 agency. What about restream?

If tweets, those 140 character messages sent on the Twitter service, are in fact nothing more than status updates and we personify objects, events and actions, then anything measurable can tweet.

The question everyone answers with their tweets is "What are you doing?"
The answer to that should be another counter-question: "Do we care to read?"

Even a simple tree could tweet about what it sees all day, how it interacts with insects, animals and the wind, how it grows, sheds leaves.. A private tweet to me by my laundry machine might still be useful to me at least but does the world need to know? Isn't it enough already when I tell it to all in my own tweet stream?

Fictional accounts like @DarthVader are fun to read, and so are real, human accounts like @_Syma_. Both can't tweet on their own and thus rely on real people who write their stories. However, this is only so long fun as it stays within the account's personality.

Using Twitter as a micro-blog, the daily life of a tree indeed could turn into a beautiful story when carefully written - with a professional level of children books or poetry in mind. Otherwise it would turn into a dead branch of the twitterverse. Why not let an atom whine about its breakup?

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Friends gave their children (11 & 3) a pc, loaded with daddy's download tools, no (child) protection other than some hacked anti-virus and firewall but they expect the older kid to use the pc for studies. Furthermore, they expect the school to teach about how to use a computer - not only to turn it on but also to stay safe. Of course they also complain that the kids spend too much time playing online games - the 3year old can't read yet but navigates around the web like an adult.

No matter if the schools offer appropriate computer teaching or not, the problem is the combination of parents' lack of knowledge and/or interest about the relation of their kids with computers as well as the well too frequent lax attitude towards illegal copies. Asking for a 200HKD complete computer protection is already too much.

My experience of most parents' lesson to their kids: "get cheap pc, don't pay for software, download illegally, no need to protect, discover by yourself". (More)

A thought about "followers" on Twitter versus "friends" on about most other social (network) services.

There is something seriously wrong with the usage of "friend" when people clean up their social lists by removing 100s of "unknown friends". If those you follow on Twitter become real friends, it's because you have learned something about them or have communicated with them first.

You "follow" people/services because you are interested in their updates. I personally don't believe in the blind following out of courtesy. What I like about Twitter is that it is about "followers" and not like other sites where the whole world is your - often unknown - "friend".

"Thx for follow" tweets can be annoying but when they are links to "thx for follow" pages with video and plenty of ads, it becomes terrible.

You can follow me on Twitter - and just maybe we might become friends.

Some people still don't understand that there is no such thing as "public privacy". Opening online banking accounts on a public terminal such as in coffee shops is NOT a good idea, despite the acces code generator (Security Device) required for logging in and executing transactions.