flashboy dot org

*Golf clap*

TweetVolume is shockingly jolly little doo-dah that lets you fight words and phrases against each other in the Twitter arena. Twitter, in case you’re late to that particular party, is the thing that is currently eating the internet – an absolutely essential addition to the web 2.0 pantheon of utterly non-essential things. It’s a combination of microblogging, instant messenger and Tourette’s syndrome, letting you blurt out whatever’s on your mind or record whatever you’re doing, and have it permalinked and Google-cached for all eternity. Hooray. You can see my Twitter down on the left sidebar, assuming that the Twitter servers haven’t swooned and taken to their bed with a severe case of brain fever. Which they usually have.

Anyway, TweetVolume is a very pretty little thing that searches every burble ever blathered on Twitter, and compares the scores of different phrases you type in. With a nice little graph. As such, with some judicious searching, you can build up a horrifyingly accurate picture of the Twittersphere*.

To begin with: Twitterers are tired. Overwhelmingly tired. “I am tired” has been said 6340 times, compared to only 2420 for “I am hungry” and 2650 for “I am bored”. Don’t get me wrong: Twitteristas are certainly very bored and very hungry. But above all else, they are tired.

I am tired.

(Meanwhile, the classic internet staple of “I am naked” only gets 514, while “I am the resurrection” gets 20. I am clothed and non-messianic, though.)

Elsewhere, we are happy to find that good triumphs over evil, love defeats hate, hope vanquishes despair, and Forest will totally beat Leeds next season. Wow! Twitter is a wonderful place.

So, these Twitterinos – they’re happy-go-lucky sorts, right? No. Bear in mind that they’re also tired, bored and hungry. “Oh God no” beats “Oh God yes” hands-down. They want you to stop, not carry on. They say variations on “aargh” quite a lot, and swear like good’uns.

What can we conclude from this? That the average early-to-middling adopter of pointless, hyper-addictive, badly-scaled web apps are extraordinarily tired, bored, hungry, good-hearted semi-naked people who want it fucking stop. Which we knew already. Apart from that, all we can be sure of is that a lot of them are annoyed with Twitter.

And that Forest will totally beat Leeds next season.

[See also here for more of this.]

*Just to show how incredibly fast Twitter’s grown, the term “Twittersphere”, which I just made up because it sounded silly, already has 11,000 hits on Google.

We can all stop and go home now after this.

(via qwghlm)

Ha! I was just jotting down some notes on a Blair resignation post I’m toying with, when I found myself browsing through some old, unpublished draft posts that I never finished off (there’s roughly as many of them as there are actual posts). Anyway, I found this old one from yonks ago, and I’m not quite sure why I didn’t publish it then. I think I was planning on adding a load of stuff about the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Imp Of The Perverse”, re-working it to try and explain the political self-destruct button of flailing leaders everywhere. Or something. Anyway, it’s moderately entertaining and stands quite well on its own, and it fits neatly with the theme of Blair’s leaving – especially all that misty-eyed bollocks about Britain being the greatest country EVAR. So – here’s four introductory paragraphs to an unfinished article, back from the halcyon days when we didn’t even know when Blair would announce the date of his announcement of the date when a date would be announced…

* * * * *

Posted on Monday 10 October 2005

It’s usually quite easy to tell when a leader has felt the cold hand of political death upon their shoulder. For one thing, normally sober political commentators turn overnight into fairground prognosticators, giddily insisting that the symbolic colour of the leader’s tie makes it clear he’s not going anywhere soon, or that very senior sources have told them to look for reassurance in his selective quoting of Beach Boys lyrics. But more notably, the leader will rapidly start unveiling vast, ill-thought out policy initiatives, predominantly designed to work in the field of abstract qualities – stuff like “national pride” or “public morals”. The moment a leader starts promising that “never again will Britain be known for her squeamishness”, you know someone, somewhere, is plotting to stab them in the back.

There’s several things that, fairly transparently, are going on in their mind when they turn to such policies: they want to simultaneously divert attention from their current troubles and to tighten their grip on power by setting a bold new agenda; but they’re also painfully aware that if they don’t start leaving a “legacy” behind, their chances of having a historical period or an ideology named after them are worryingly small. Hence, simplistic yet sweeping imperatives in the general direction of human nature. It’s like going for an ambitious long-range pot that still leaves the cue ball safe behind the green, only in this case you’re also hoping it distracts everybody from the fact that you were actually supposed to be playing ice hockey.

Of course, the best thing about such schemes is that they always go embarassingly, hideously, catastrophically wrong.

And yet, they keep on doing it. In the few weeks since Tony Blair unveiled his new, finger-wagging focus on “Respect”, the Labour party has beaten up an old-age pensioner, been jailed for sixteen months for committing arson while binge drinking, and managed to insult an entire fucking country. You’d think that maybe one of the legion policy advisers swarming around Number 10 could have pointed out that it was a thuddingly stupid idea – that all it does is to ensure that the behaviour of every person and institution connected with the party is now fair game for criticism, and that every action becomes viewed through the filter of your own rhetoric? It’s like none of them can remember Back To Basics (in which John Major called for a return to simple, modest British decency, and was promtly flattened by a stampede of rampant penises wrapped up in brown envelopes.)