Re: How's everything going?

1. On the 16th, Wolff posts a piece entitled "What if Twitter is for girls" in which he cites some unnamed "person from the high media stratosphere" as offering "the following hypothesis: The Twitter demographic skews notably female." Then he goes on to "analyze" this non-data by way of a number of observations he seems to have pulled out of the air, eventually concluding with the following: "Anyway, my friends point is a large one: If Twitter is really for women, if we can define this medium so conventionally, then this is a media business modelfinally." This makes no sense. How would that make it a business model? You might assume that I am taking this out of context and that the reasoning behind this may be found somewhere else in the column. Nope. Also, keep in mind Wolff's quickness to grant Twitter the elusive "You've found a business model!" badge; we will come back to this.

3. In the same column, Wolff writes, "Perhaps, no surprise, women's tweets seem much more likely to be personal rather than professional, upbeat rather than serious, confessional instead of political." Later: "And, indeed, men seem to try to turn Twitter into PowerPointa set of professional notes." Elswhere: "The men who do well on Twitter, in fact, sounderlike women. Theyre self-consciously menschy." I've never been able to figure out what menschy means, but if we're going by gender stereotypes, take a look at what's up on Wolff's own Twitter feed, in which two of the last four tweets as of 7 EST Sunday are as follows:

These strike me as sounding "personal rather than professional," to put it nicely. Which is not to say that the manly Wolff does not "try to turn Twitter into PowerPoint - a set of professional notes." Here are his most recent forays into his professional realm of news:

I just can't get enough of this Pope story.

There's an awesomeness to the Church and the Pope's predicament. It starts to feels like the end of European history. Yikes.

One has to wonder how he would have felt during the Reformation or even the time of John Wyclef if he thinks some already-dying scandal with minor implications for the pope marks "the end of European history" or even a tingling of such. Is the Catholic Church really going to go into decline over the minor possibility that a particular pope did not take some action that he should? Is he unaware of World War II, or that pope who had the corpse of the previous pope dug up, clothed, and put on trial? This man has zero news instincts and he's supposed to be some icon of the news industry, at least according to Newser press releases.

4. Noting that Wolff has deemed the alleged yet clearly non-existent dominance of females on Twitter to be something akin to a "business model," it is all the more wacky that he continues to attack Rupert Murdoch and Sulzberger's attempts to monetize online content as some sort of crazy, crazy scheme that will definitely fail, as he did once again less that a week ago. Would the NYT be more viable if they figured out that a lot of women read the paper? Would that constitute a "business model"?

5. I mean, what the fucking fuck, man?

6. Remember that Wolff is writing all of this on a blog - blogging being a medium that he predicted would fail, as The Observer itself noted a few years back. This is the guy who was flown to London last week to go share his expertise on all things internety.

So, hook could be Wolff's inexplicable speaking gig at this London conference, could move from there into his tenuous grasp of internet media and his incompetent spokesmanship on behalf of Newser, and then go into his lack of any value whatsoever as a political analyst (he writes for the same Vanity Fair Politics and Power blog that I do, so I've seen him try his hand at political analysis - he never bothers with policy, being of the sort who presumably considers concern with such things to be provincial.

Let me know if you want me to go ahead and go after Wolff. It'll take, like, a day.