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| Poor Leonardo Dicaprio Meme |
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Poor Leonardo Dicaprio -- Internet Memes
Poor Leonardo Dicaprio! If his movie roles are any reflection on his real life, things must be quite depressing for him. Instead of helping, we here at Future Twit have decided to mock his pain. Enjoy!
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Giblets: Toughening kids up, abuse, and bullying causes and responses
Image via WikipediaI had a friend write this blog entry a short while ago, and I thought that it was good enough that I wanted to comment on it a bit and maybe promote it on my own blog. The topic of his blog entry is about bullying and how some people have the mistaken impression that bullying toughens kids up for their adult lives.
Of course, this idea is absurd and appeals to some of the basest urges of the human race. Evolutionary biologists note that we are one chromosome and some odd strains of DNA away from being chimpanzees. When I read opinions like this, I think that relationship shows through a lot more than people would like to realize. So, you whole excuse for bullying is that the kid's life will suck later on and you want to help him or her by making that life suck now too?
I mean, really?
Seriously?
If someone's life is going to suck at all, I would think that people should do everything in their power to help prevent that life from sucking in any way possible. For example, if I saw a child starving in Africa, I would want to give that child food instead of starving him or her more just to help "toughen" the child up for the rest of life. Sure, maybe that child has a high probability of further suffering later on in life. But, I don't know how suffering now is going to help that.
My friend makes a lot of other points in his post, and you should check it out if you're interested. Also, if you're looking for a good read, check out any of the blogs on my sidebar. I am pretty careful about which ones I put there, and I have rejected several requests from people to add their blogs (mostly containing spam) to my blog list.
Also, if you have any comments or experiences on bullying, please leave you comment and favorite link below.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Rick Sanchez -- Where Does He Go from Here?
Update: Since I wrote the original article, Rick Sanchez gave an interview to The Daily Beast where he said about his future prospects, "I’m having some very promising conversations with some people in the business to create a platform for me that I could revel in it. I would cherish that. I can’t put a timetable on it because things like this go through the conceptualization stage first before they actually get to fruition, and right now we’re somewhere in between conceptualization and discussions."
What this means to me, reading between the lines, is that Rick probably has no real offers or prospects for any sort of job in the public arena at this stage. However, if he does get another job, I think that it'll be through one of the scenarios I've outlined below.
Rick Sanchez, an award winning reporter for CNN, recently was fired over controversial comments that he made about comedian Jon Stewart and Jews. Does this mean that Rick Sanchez is finished in the media industry, or does he still have a future on television? In this article, I will examine some options that might still be open to Sanchez in the future.
1. Fox News: I view this possibility as kind of a 50/50 toss up whether he gets hired here or not. On the one hand, he already came out and publicly made fun of the left's media darling Jon Stewart, which should give him an angle as an anti-liberal, anti-establishment type. On the other hand, he's Hispanic, which may or may not be a problem on Fox news. Fox already employs Geraldo Rivera as a frequent guest commentator on the Bill O'Reilly show, and this should mean that the Hispanic background of Sanchez wouldn't be a problem. However, Rivera doesn't identify with his Hispanic background as strongly as Sanchez does, and that strong identification with Hispanics might make Sanchez less appealing to conservatives that identify with the anti-immigration movement. Still, out of all the choices available, this move seems the most likely and favorable for Sanchez.
2. Spanish language news channel: This would seem, on the surface, a significant step back for Sanchez. because he would be moving from a national news channel to one with a far smaller audience. However, there is a silver lining to this. The viewership of Spanish language news channels is only going to increase as the Hispanic population of the United States continues to grow. Sanchez could use this growth and his name recognition from CNN to position himself as the preeminent anchor for Spanish language news, a position that might otherwise be open to an anchor like Inez Sainz. Even without the fame of CNN, this position could prove to be far more lucrative and lasting than a position at Fox, especially considering how untapped the Hispanic market still is in the United States. Also, Sanchez would likely enjoy much more freedom of expression on a Hispanic news channel because controversial comments are far less likely to be picked up by the major three English news networks.
3. MSNBC: I see this possibility as somewhat of a very distant third. Sanchez is far enough in the middle that he would, on the surface, make a possible addition to the MSNBC. However, there are two problems here. First, MSNBC is in love with Jon Stewart, and adding anyone as an anchor that had badmouthed him in anyway would likely tick off the stations core viewers. Second, Sanchez is Hispanic and doesn't fit at all into MSNBC's core demographic of yuppies and ultra-liberals. With those two strikes against him, I would be shocked to see him added to MSNBC.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Social Networks and Blog Promotion: Which Ones Work and Which Don't
Image by jerandsar via FlickrHere are the networks that work well to attract traffic, in the approximate order of how many followers they attract. Also, a small explanation of why the work (or not) is included to the side.
1. Twitter: In my opinion, Twitter is the "gold standard" when it comes to attracting traffic to your website. In general, I count on a minimum of about 1 viewer per 1,000 followers per day, assuming that I update regularly. If you have more engaged followers than I do, you'll probably have more hits from them too. In any case, Twitter is a godsend for blogging. I actually get about 33-50% of all my daily traffic from Twitter, and I only have about 20,000 followers.
2. Facebook: The Facebook account that I have associated with my blog is relatively newer, but I'm still seeing good results from the initial trials. With only about 200 friends, I'm seeing about 2 hits per day originating from Facebook -- results even better than Twitter per capita. Of course, if you have friends and family on your blog Facebook page (as opposed to strangers), I would expect that you would see higher traffic from this. However, Facebook is still below Twitter in my estimation because it's much harder to add new followers -- meaning that even a lower rate of click through from Twitter will win in the end through sheer volume.
3. Digg/Reddit: It depends on which "camp" you're in here (team werewolf vs. team vampire guy anyone?) but both services are marginally successful in driving traffic to a blog. Both have problems, however. In the case of Reddit, they like to block users who submit a lot of articles to Reddit from a blog, and they are difficult to deal with in general. Also, the interface sucks rocks. For Digg, they have a much cleaner interface and are much more lenient on submission, but they send a lot less traffic to a blog per article submitted. I guess which one (or preferably both) of these sites you use depends on your approach to blogging. More articles -- Digg is better. Fewer, higher quality articles -- use Reddit.
4. Myspace: In theory, this dying giant of a social network site should send lots of hits to my blog -- in theory. In practice, my 1,000 plus followers have generated very few hits for my blog -- probably because many of them no longer use the service.
5. Stumbleupon: I have blogger friends that swear by this, but I've never seen a large number of hits coming from that site. For each article I submit, I can usually expect a maximum of five hits to my blog from that site, I think that the problem here is that they receive such a high volume of article submissions that most of your articles are never "stumbled upon" by the site's bots.
In summary, all social networks are good to some extent to drive traffic to your blog, but some are better than others.
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