Old Sayings That Are Full Of Cr@P

How many times have you heard someone say "You can't judge a book by it's cover?" Sayings like this have a purpose. They are supposed to take a literal statement that everyone is familiar with, and allow you to apply it metaphorically to other more difficult to understand situations. Usually, this particular statement is used to clarify that you cannot judge other people simply by appearances. Judging other people is complicated business, so apparently by applying a simple thing like the process of judging a book by it's cover, it helps us make better sense out of the complicated process of judging other people.

Have you ever bought a book? Let's say you wanted to get something that's kind of Sci-Fi, futuristic, dealing with robots. You walk up to a shelf, see a book sitting there, and it has a nice photograph of a little girl sitting in a field of daisies. Is this your book? Absolutely not. Why? The cover. I guarantee you that publishers adhere to very strict principles about how best to reflect a book's content and to make that book appeal to a specific kind of reader. Why, then, are they spending a massive amount of time and money on doing this if it does not matter?

If you really can't judge a book by it's cover, why on earth did anyone think this would make a convincing metaphor for judging other people? I think it kind of sends the wrong message, ya know?

Here's another one. "Money can't buy you happiness." What are we to learn from this? That rich people are miserable from the weight of all that cash. I think what it should say is "money won't necessarily buy you happiness, but it's probably going to help avoid a lot of misery." If money didn't help to improve the human condition, why do charities want us to give it to them? Really. Think about that. OBVIOUSLY money is a good thing. Just as "guns don't kill people, people kill people," I think that "money doesn't corrupt people, greed for money corrupts people." Here's where that other old saying of "Everything in moderation" earns it's stripes...it's not an old saying that's full of cr@p. I hear a lot of lottery winners say they wish they had never won the big powerball...but I think they are just lacking money management skills. I think I would manage just nicely, thank you very much. Am I being greedy? No, just wishing to have the resources to live my life comfortably and to help others in need any time I want to. That would be ideal.

One more. "Never put off until tomorrow that which you can accomplish today." Well, I could go into a lot of detail here, but I'll come back tomorrow to finish this blog post then.

Death by Twitter

In a recent blog post, I was whining about how high profile Twitter accounts, such as USSoccer, were not tweeting to my heart's content. Specifically, I was complaining that they were not tweeting enough during the US / Spain soccer match; I was looking for a text on my phone for every goal, but they only supplied the score at the half and after the game.
Ok, so big deal, right? Well, it is now, because things have changed. For the worse. This is a classic case of "be careful what you wish for." Tonight, the US Men's National Team took on Haite in an important game. That game started somewhere around dinner time, yet I began getting texts on my phone from very early in the day. And they didn't stop. They kept coming, in some cases every 30 seconds or so. At one point, my family went to dinner. I was getting really annoyed with cell vibrating every 30 seconds, so I turned off my phone. After dinner, when I turned it back on, I had 42 text messages. All from USSoccer.
So what do you think? What images come to mind? For me, I just pictured some VP at the US Soccer Federation saying at a board meeting "I've decided to turn control of our Twitter account over to my neice, Stephanie. And we're giving her a blackberry." Here's a stream of some of the posts, and maybe you'll see why I am saying this.

• Before we get the #USMNT lineup...what do you want to see? Same lineup as before? New changes to get guys experience? What's ur starting 11?
• The U.S. Soccer Twitter tried to sneak away for a meal and was outed by one of our followers for not tweeting. OK! Now we're back...
• Speaking of press box food fare (and we've had a lot in our day), who can guess the stadium of the best pre-game spread we've encountered?
• Oh, snap. Here comes the FIFA Anthem. You can play along at home by loading it up here - http://bit.ly/HHJBx
• Out come the flags of the countries...

So all of that was before the game even started. Once it did, I counted over 70 more tweets,,,,in a 90 minute game. HOLY COW.
See what I mean? I really think the lazy tweeter from the Spain game must have gotten the sake, and Stephanie with the blackberrie was instructed to tweet until she was blue in the face...to match the blueberry. Needless to say, the first thing I did when I got home was to turn off the mobile alers from USSOCCER!
So this demonstrates my previous point quite gloriously...these high profile corporate accounts are going to need to do a little marketing research to find out what their Twitter followers are expecting out of the service. Maybe there were a few psycho soccer fans out there who enjoyed this diareal running of texts all day long, but I'd be willing to bet this did more to annoy more followers than not. So if you get that lucrative job of being a corporate Twitter Tweeter, please do a little research to figure out how much tweeting is a good balance. Hundreds of tweets in a 5 hour period seems like overkill to me.

Thoughts on Warm Worms and Twitter Squatters

Part of my job is to keep current with technology trends. The big site that everyone is buzzing about is Twitter, of course. Last year I set up an account for myself under the name of Herrdue and I use it occasionally. I actually think it's a bit over-hyped right now, but I see some value for certain types of users. The reason I mention this is couple of things have happened there that have left me scratching my head. In fact, I thought I'd share them here.

Global Warming...strike that...Global Worming

After using my own account on Twitter for a few weeks, it dawned on me that Twitter names might just follow the same fate as domain names. People are going to register all the best ones and hope they can sell them at a profit. So I thought to myself, hmmm...if I wanted to register another one just to sit on it, what would that be. Here's where I get to the worms part of this blog entry (see the title of this post).

You see, I had a funny little idea about Global Warming. Funny in that I wondered how many people in this big world of ours might just get that totally wrong and think that it's really Global Worming. Thus an idea was born to register that name on Twitter and see what happens.

Oddly, I have people coming out of the wood-work to follow me at this Global Worming address. They come and they go in droves. They don't even know who I am, nor do I think they have read my profile, because they just keep coming, simply because of the name...Global Worming. I'm still trying to piece this together in my head to figure out what is going on with this little social phenomenon. My current theory is that there must be a number of people out there who really do think that it's Global Worming, not Global Warming. If that's the case, perhaps I should start a business (worm farming), and sell my products around the world. Global Worming Inc. I'm looking into it. Maybe I need a Trademark lawyer.

Who's Tweeting Who?

The other thing that I have found hugely disappointing about Twitter is the use of Twitter as a means of getting alerts about events. When the US Men's National Soccer Team faced Spain in the semi-finals of the recent international tournament, I started following USSoccer on Twitter. I thought for sure that every time someone scored I'd get an update on my mobile device. Didn't happen. In fact, I have also begun following a few other corporate twitter accounts and would also expect to get timely info from these tweeters, but I don't.

For example, if you followed NASCAR on Twitter, wouldn't you expect to get timely notifications of someone involved in a crash on the course? Yes, but these corporate accounts are sometimes controlled by individuals who don't really get how to Tweet that well just yet, or are not manned by people affiliated with the organization. It could be some fan or enthusiast who's registered that name before the organization got around to it. A Twitter Squatter, so to speak.

This reminds me when I was very new to the web in the early 90's. I thought I could just type in www.johnmellencamp.com and it would take me to John Mellencamp's web site. Maybe it does today, but back then, there was some hack out there who had registered that name first and had some pretty skunky content on the site...perhaps he was just waiting for ol' John to come along and offer him a cool million to buy that domain name. Certainly that happened to Madonna, who had to take someone to court to get Madonna.com without being extorted for millions. I'm not sure if this still happens to this extent with web sites, but it appears to be alive and well in the Twitter world.

Maybe that's what I'm doing too...squatting on Global Worming, hoping some industrious worm farmer will want the name and pay me handsomely to surrender the name. I doubt I'd get anything soon, because http://www.globalworming.com/ is not currently for sale by another squatter. For the record, I'm willing to sell this Twitter name to anyone with a check that won't bounce. Just send me direct message on Twitter and I'll have my people tweet your people.

POSTSCRIPT: Since I authored this article a couple of weeks ago, I've noticed that USSOCCER on Twitter did present quite a bit of real-time commentary on their game with Honduras. So maybe I was a bit pre-mature on my critique. Maybe it's just hit or miss as to whether or not organizations will meet their followers tweetspectations.