Fortune Favors The Bold

markcoatney:

“On Tumblr, the blogging service, the president’s speech became fodder for quick animation loops, and there were doctored images of Mr. Obama riding a unicorn, with rainbows shooting out of his hands.”

Online, an Urge to Be a Part of the Bin Laden News - NYTimes.com

Nice bit from Jenna

Fear Of Missing Out again, eh? 

I’ll take the occasion to repeat my Fundamental Theory Of Times Lifestyle Reporters: they embrace and seek out the social bonding, validation and collective experiences that they missed out on while they were spending their time achieving things in high school. They’re naive in the way book worms would be naive and they obsess a bit too much over things that seem “cool”. It explains so many of the cases where they seem to get stories wrong.  

It’s pretty obvious that people were talking about the announcements of the evening. What’s not so clear, and probably highly disputable, is the relevance of the information services mentioned in this article to the OBL news or even the meta track of the OBL news. Did anyone online get a fundamentally different experience from someone who saw the news on a TV in a bar? ”People used Tumblr to post art and tell jokes inspired by current events”. You know what, that never happened before Tumblr. Huh. The way we live now! 

I agree that social media is now speeding up the pace of things (and thus creating a real urgency of time-opportunity for anyone who likes to dabble in current events). But we know that already. That horse died from its beating in 2007. We don’t need to be told about something breaking on Twitter every time something breaks on Twitter. One article per year on that thought is probably enough. 

You know what would have been interesting? If the CIA found Osama Bin Laden through unintentional location clues on his or someone else’s Facebook page. Something like that will happen someday! (probably already has) Didn’t happen yesterday, though. Yesterday was just a good old-fashioned CIA raid that made the network news, except instead of Reagan we got Smooth Barry to talk us through it.

By the way, tech CEOs LOOOOOOVE this stuff because it’s free marketing created and distributed by people who probably should be using their medium to talk about other things (but those reporters live in a world that ran out of interesting people and good clean fun a long time ago. It’s not like Jenna was going to go down to Bowlmor and get some public reactions there). It’s another sign that there is a big bubble ready to pop in all of their faces. You don’t see Steve Ballmer giving quotes about how people used Windows 7 every time they’re having a viral moment, do you? Some kinds of companies are willing to push their PR agenda harder than others. There are other online communities a lot bigger than [any of those companies], who have been around a lot longer, who have very good revenue streams (or revenue at all!), that don’t get name-drops in the lifestyle pages the way that [any of those companies] does. You should always question that state of affairs.

On that note, I want to give super super mad props to whoever is working PR for Path and Sysomos. The other companies mentioned are ridiculously low-hanging fruit for a garden-variety “people are doing things online!” article; the publicists for those companies, on the other hand, had to WORK IT to get in on this one. That’s some nice placement there. No, I’m not looking up who it is; I might find it’s the work of someone I know, and my eyes are too puffy from allergies to go into a deep roll at the moment.