Re: How's everything going?

VERY good. Let me know what they say!

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 7:36 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Actually, never mind Douthat, got something else for now. Michael Wolff is
in London for the Changing Media Summit, where he was one of a handful of
speakers along with the likes of Jimbo Wales (Wikipedia). Meanwhile, he's
been writing a series of blog posts and tweets that, together with certain
aspects of his career as well as past statements, would seem to illustrate
why this fellow shouldn't be speaking at any conferences billed as being a
"a blueprint for creative and commercial success in the digital world."
Here's a brief what's-wrong-with-this-picture for you:
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.
2. Wolff's high-media stratospheric friend is wrong. As of last year,
American Twitter users were divided 53 - 47 male to female in a country in
which females make up a slight majority. There is no "skewing" here,
particularly not of the "notable" sort. This took me all of two minutes to
find out, and no one sends me to fucking London to go tell everyone about
how the internet works.
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:
But first lunch at the Wolseley with A.A. Gill...then to Heathrow
A British lunch (new British) in Lambeth at Anchor & Hope...fennel gratin
and roast wood pigeon
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.
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com>
wrote:


Alrighty then!

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 6:45 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
wrote:

Pretty well, just pitched an attack on Michael Wolff to New York
Observer,
recruited 12 non-bloggers for Project PM, about to defend myself and all
other fair-complexioned people from charges of racism, couple other
things.

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Karen Lancaster
<lancaster.karen@gmail.com>
wrote: