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Roundup: Things Most Normal People Don’t Care About

Here’s a summary of social media happenings from the week that most normal people couldn’t give two hoots about:

* Twitter switched its URL-shortening service from TinyURL to Bit.ly: Perhaps coincidentally (then again, perhaps not), Bit.ly is now the #1 URL-shortening service on the Internet. At least, for the period of time before URL shorteners destroy it. Hey, at least you’ll get link clicktracking up to that point. (Incidentally, looking back at my daisy chain of URL shortners from March: Zi.ma — the very last link — seems to be no more, thus breaking the chain. Oh well.)

* More Twitter news: They added more information to their follower notification e-mails (which are now HTML e-mails, instead of plain text), which follows on the heels of search sidebar enhancements the previous week.

* Blah blah Kindle DX $489 blah blah. Will it save newspapers? (See below.)

* Steve Gillmore stirs the pot and declares RSS dead, with Twitter in its place. Hey, it garnered 443 comments — that’s a pretty good troll-job. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo gives his browser tab-alternative to RSS readers, which is pretty kludgy. And I say this even though I do something similar, as my much-abused browser can attest to. Though I use multiple browser tabs opened via bookmark folders and Session Manager as a supplement to my RSS reader, not a replacement.

* The NYT asked, “Does anyone still use MySpace?” Answer: Not really, no (From my own personal survey. Sample size: One.) The blog followup suggests that MySpace is still good for music discovery. Should MySpace just cede the social status and friending bits to Facebook and Twitter? (I’ve said more than a few times that the friend collecting / follower numbers game has quite obviously moved to Twitter.) What Would Rupert Murdoch Do?

* Valleywag (which sucks a lot more ever since they downsized) calls the Webby Awards (which sucks a lot more since… always) the “best scam going.”

* Newspapers are still toast. (Too many articles to list.) The shaking of their ever-tinier fists at Google is always amusing, though. Interesting to see a few newspaper folks try to take on the answer to the obvious question: Why not just block Google from your news site, using robots.txt? Of course, no one wants to go first. It’s like a game theory exercise writ large.

If readers are truly getting everything they need from the first three lines of the article (in the Google summary), maybe it’s time to rethink the inverted pyramid.

* WeirdUniverse, an umbrella weird news site (that had been the new home of Chuck Shepard’s News of the Weird), in the face of untenable time demands, switched over from a triumverate of posters (that would be three people), to a collaborative group contributor effort — in effect, crowdsourcing the site content. The new contributors were culled from active members of the commenting and contributing community. It seems to be working, but time will tell if they can maintain a distinctive style, or if we’ll just see all the same weird news links that populate the other usual suspect social linksharing sites.

* In the wake of recent publicity (mostly bad), Craigslist is taking heat from state AGs over erotic services. In fact, South Carolina has issued an ultimatum: pull it, or else. Will we see state-specific categories from now on, or will escorts and masseuses simply go back to hiding amongst the personal ads (so I hear)? Stay tuned.

Now, while regular folk may not care about the actual events, they do have a stake in the outcomes (particularly with the Craigslist issues), so the headline is at least partially a lie. Nothing new there, of course.

Anything interesting I left out? Leave a comment below.

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