Hopefully more to come today, since I’ve been away from my blog for a week and a half in Amsterdam, but first just a quick note on a new word that I found and love: Idiotarod. Not exactly sure how I would pronounce this, but clearly some cue should be taken from the original Iditarod—the world’s most famous sled-dog race. Instead, Idiotarod brings to mind the thousands of commuter vehicles, sit idly in their slowly moving lanes every weekday. [Thanks to Vica of La Vida Vica for coining such a great word!]

As I mentioned in my recent note on memes, the phenomena make good use of twitter. And with a new tool called Twist you can see mentions of words quantitatively, illustrating trends that are possibly occurring. The obvious one for today has been the mention of “Michael Jackson” or “MJ” which at the peak of the discussion of the news was actually trending at 26% of all messages on twitter.¹ It turns out that the King of Pop reigns supreme even after his demise. However, I spotted a sillier trend in investigating Twist as a tool. Being in possession of the mind I have and maybe because it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to see how the word “penis” fares on Twitter. It turns out that the word is fairly consistently used in roughly .03% of Twitter messages. But then I wondered, why the spike on June 24 at 11:30pm EST? For a brief time, the usage of the word penis spiked to practically double its normal mean at .07% of messages. Why the blip? I looked into some of the messages that were being posted and noticed that it was likely the fault of Jon Stewart. The Daily Show—a satirical show about current events²—airs at 11:00pm EST. During that particular Wednesday episode, discussing events surrounding SC governor Mark Sanford, said “…another conservative politician with a liberal penis.” Voilá! Instant memeburst.

While scientists have really yet to hit on a good model for the concept of the meme, it still serves as a great metaphor, the genes unit of culture, spreading through minds at sometimes rapid paces. It seems that all we’ve done with the web and the web and the Internet have given memes even greater opportunity to spread and spread further. In a showing of solidarity with protesters from Iran, twitterers are putting a transparent green overlay on their profile icons. Read more…

Well, I tried a new experiment with my favorite online tool, twitter. I thought it might be fun to compose them into digests and post them daily here. As far as experiments go, it was quite a successful one since it proved three things to me. One, it’s a stupid idea and made a mess of the blog. Two, one is largely due to the fact that I twitter way more than I blog right now. I’ve discovered a whole great gaggle of pithy writers on favrd.com who are nothing like the ego massaging masses of twitterers who write compelling cliffhangers like “I’ve got a headache” or “I’m going to bed.” Anyway, if you poke around on Favrd for long enough, you’ll find most of them. I enjoy competing for favorite stars. Someday someone will learn how to spam Favrd and that will be a sad day, but I don’t sense this trend coming to an end for at least another 6 months. It reminds me of the early days of the blogosphere, those rough-tough ragged days when you could stake a claim just about anywhere on the world wide web and set yourself up a nice little blog. People argued back then that blogs seemed trivial and useless—little more than diaries made public. Oh, how wrong you were naysayers. And twitter seems to be causing a similar hubabaloo. So, I think there’s good uses for twitter, aside from adding another awkward verb to the English:

I wish I lived in the heyday of ham radio. Because I would call it Hamming. Everyone would be like, “Huh?” And I’d be like, “Just wait.”

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

The second thing that I learned from this experiment was that what I like to write on Twitter has nothing to do with what I like to write on Banapana. Admittedly, I’ve been loosening up on the syntax here on Banapana—makes it easier to write more—but I’m still writing about particular subject matters, not stuff like this:

The evidence is mounting, and scientists agree, global idiocy is an increasing concern–possibly doubling by the year 2010

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

That there’s a legitimate place to put a thought like that on the Internet?—now that’s just fun! So, it looks like Twitter is just entertainment! Who knew that enforcing a 140 character limit would make email fun? So, at any rate, I am for the moment considering posting a twitter digest of my best from the week here, but no more daily updates. It makes a mess.

I am glad that someone is keeping track and that there are standards and all: