twitter updates

Hey if any of you are so inclined you can now follow me on twitter... clairemgrath89  and  you'll get know when I'm updating my blog and if I have any thoughts randomly pop into my head, I'll leave them of twitter too..sure to be as riveting as my blog but slight more succinct...

Don't all rush at once now ......

The Good Samaritan &Facebook

After yet another gruelling day in the library, studying the principles of digital media marketing  I decided that I deserved a break. So along with some other library weary friends I planned to head out to the bright lights of Cork city. What better way to unwind than with good company and good wine I thought to myself.

That evening after frequenting a few of the town’s local watering holes and purveying the local talent, I noted to my utter dismay that I was missing my wallet. Now, like many students the loss of a wallet would incur serious financial repercussions,in my case their was in fact no money, or well nothing more than what hillbilly’s would inevitably rob from later in the evening,  in it .Alas, to my distress I remembered that my passport driving licence student card, spare student card (from a previous loss and subsequent recovery) were all in my faithful red, heart quilted wallet.

To call this a faithful wallet would be an understatement, It has been stolen and returned to me by the Gardaí and the kind folk of the Classic no less than three times .It is a veritable homing pigeon among wallets, but unlike a cat I feared it would not have nine lives and this could be the day I would have to bid farewell to my quilted friend.

After a few phone calls, to the aforementioned watering holes, inquiring if any kindly souls had handed in my wallet, I left town. The bright lights of the city seem duller as I left with longing in my heart(no wallet) and in my stomach (no Hillbilly’s).

On my way home I meet what I thought was Good Samaritan, a fellow digital media marketer who shall remain nameless .A Kerry man with a penchant for the younger ladies, standing at  6”+ .Has the penny dropped yet? Well this young fellow assured me he would get me home safe and sound despite my financial difficulties, so we jumped in a taxi and headed for collage road .however, upon arrival at our destination it transpired my friend was having some financial difficulties too. So we had to bid farewell to the taxi driver with a stream of apologies which were met by a stream of… words not fit for my followers. I was beginning to think I should have stayed in the library.

The next morning as I walked down collage road I could find no joy in casting my judging eyes on those returning from their sordid walks of shame. In high heels, with loose morals, last night’s make up and ladders in their tights they may have been missing some of their dignity but I was missing every form of ID I owned and my beloved quilted wallet. After popping into the Honan chapel to get a mass said, for a late relative not my wallet, and saying a quick hail Mary to repent for the taxi incident I made my way to Boole basement to do a spot of printing .

It was here I met the real good Samaritan of my story and where we finally see what my story has to do with the digital world. Before doing any printing or in fact anything on my computer I took the obligatory sweep of Facebook. And there they were, my saviour, my good Samaritan…I had received a Facebook mail from a girl I had never seen before, a fellow UCC student who had found my wallet the previous night .She had used Facebook’s ability to find and stalk anyone for the purest of reasons to tell me that she had my wallet and unlike the people who stole my phone (that’s another story) she was going to drop it into the library for me on Monday .Halleluiah!

They say the devil makes work for ideal hands, but most of the people I know, who have nothing to do are on Facebook .Does this mean Mark Zuckerberg is helping fight the devil I’m not really sure,so what’s the moral of my story …..Don’t get in taxi’s with tall Kerry boys!

Irish Monks develop iPhone app

To follow on from my previous blog that everyone is developing iphone apps I bring you “iGod “! I kid you not, this is an app developed by the Limerick order of Benidictine Monks in Glenstal Abby. Who said Monks aren’t down with the kids  these days ?

 The initiative came about as a result of a chance encounter between Glenstal’s Bursar Fr Simon Sleeman and multimillionaire Dermot Desmond, who showed off his iPhone at a wedding and asked why the monks didn’t have an app.

 ‘Simon, where is the app for Glenstal?’ So I said to him that I would get one going. So when I came back home I set about trying to get one.” ” I got on to some people about making it happen and went back to Dermot who got me in touch with some other people to help develop it and it went from there,"

For any of you who are out of the habit of saying your prayers this could be the app for you,its free to download on the iphone and android platforms and offers features such as  “daily prayer, chant and latest news from the monks of Glenstal abbey”. 

Who’d be without it eh? As well as this the app offers  a selection of Gregorian chant and quotes from the Rule of St Benedict, always handy to have few to throw into your essays and of course keep your moral compass in check.

Today’s rule reads: “Just as there is an evil zeal of bitterness which sepaarates from God and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal which separates from vices and leads to God and to life everlasting.”

Although Fr Sleeman does not have an iphone yet ,he has had a look at the app and is very happy with and delighted that the app will bring the work of Glenstall Abby to the wider world .

People may consider this move into iphone app development to might be a unlikely move  for the community of Benedictine monks. But you’d be wrong there. In fact, by seeking out help with the app, Fr Sleeman was following a teaching in The Rule of Benedict: "Do everything with consultation and you will have no regrets when the deed is done."

Well if any of you download it let me know how you get on .

Now go in peace to love and text the lord.Amen.

APP My Life

I think it’s only apt (sorry had to be done) that in my general ramblings of all things digital I mention the modern day phenomenon that is smart phone apps ,their literally multiplying like swine flu on the school run. It seems we can’t get enough of them good, bad and utterly random. The apple app store receives approximately 1000 new apps a day from professional and amateur programmers every day not to mention all the other apps that are available free for download across the web. . The wealth and quality of some of these apps begs the question, do we really need friends any more? Anyone who has downloaded boggle  on their Iphone ,I imagine would have to think long and hard about the answer to that question.  This is just a short list of some of my favourite apps that I’ve herd of ..and as I said theirs new ones literally every day so let me know if you her of any more nifty ones .

1.       Alarm Clock app.

Sound pretty run of the mill we all have an alarm clock on our phones anyway ,so why would we want this one. Well with this one you select not just the tone to which you wish to woken up to but the method by which you turn off the alarm and most importantly THERE IS NO SNOOZE BUTTON ,yes it removes probably one of the single greatest and worst features of the modern day alarm. With this wakeup call you can chose to solve some basic maths problems of varying degrees of difficulty to brush away the cobwebs or set the geolocater so that the alarm wont stop until you have got up and started walking around for a certain period of time…Sheer genius never ” Snooze” away  a day again.

2.         Drunken Dialling Prevention

We’ve all been there, woken up selling of vodka and shame staring at our previously dillied lists. The morning after the night before can be traumatic time for so many of us when we realise that we have called someone inappropriate just because we wanted a chat or called some one not so inappropriate but left highly embarrassing voicemails (theses are the worst as the hard evidence can be replayed over and over again) well anyway this app prevents you from dialling if you are hands aren’t steady enough to hold the phone properly or if you keep making mistakes while dialling .

3.        Shazzam

So your just driving along paying no attention to the radio and then you here your new favourite song …But you don’t know who sings or the name of it which are pivotal points of information to have when telling your telling your friends about cool music before e it gets famous and your so over it by then. Well this is a problem no more this app lets you tag music from the radio pub, club, cooler people ipods and it will give you the name of the artist and the tract .

4.        Is  There a Docter on line?

This one was show cased at the launch of the iPhone 3GS earlier at Apple's WWDC, AirStrip showed off a mobile medical alert app whereby doctors could look at a patient's EKG in real-time over the iPhone. Fingers crossed the doctor's iPhone battery isn't dead when he gets the critical alert.

5.        Boggle, crosswords, Sudoku Apps

OK so this more than just more app but their all of a similar nature and highly addictive. These are all classic games that you can now download onto your ipod and paly whenever .They provide infinite amusement and provide a bit of a daily brain work out.

“The importance of freedom of speech is never more important than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer”

Because I’m full of good will for all mankind today and because I’ve been slightly negative about some of the digital phenomena that I have been blogging about, I decided I write about something I think is truly fantastic. Wikileaks it’s the not for profit media group founded by Julian Assange ,that’s causing a bit of stir in the press .Wikileaks officially launched in 2007 aims to bring material of ethical, political and historical nature to the attention of the world.

It hopes to expose corruption and improve democracy by bringing the unvarnished truth to the world media .It’s core beliefs centre around the idea that…. publishing improves transparency, and that transparency creates a better society for all people. Better scrutiny leads to reduced corruption and stronger democracies in all society’s institutions, including government, corporations and other organisations. It thinks that a healthy and inquisitive journalistic media plays a critical role in achieving these goals. I think George Washington summed it up very eloquently when he said.

“If freedom of speech is taken away then the dumb and the silent may be led,like sheep to the slaughter”George Washington

The organisation is completely reliant on donations and the work of it’s volunteers , whose tireless efforts keep the organisations work alive. It has triumphed in the face of many lawsuits brought by governments and corporations from across the globe who would hope to silence the organisation and its works. Wikileaks uses many highly sophisticated digital technologies to protect its sources such as high security anonymous drop box fortified by state of the art cryptographic information technologies. After they receive their information, Wikileakes  journalists analyse the material, verify it and write an article about it highlighting its significance to society. Alongside this, the original material is also published, so that the readers can exam the story in the context of the original source material. This also adds to the validity of their publishing.

WikiLeaks has no conection to the well-known encyclopaedia website Wikipedia .The information on Wikileaks is presented in a similar format to Wikipedia however the website is not a wiki and the content cannot be altered by the public.

Some of the stories it’s been involved in bring to the attention of the public include….

·         Changes in Guantanamo Bay SOP manual (2003-2004) - Guantanamo Bay’s main operations manuals.

·         Fallujah jail challenges US - Classified U.S. report into appalling prison conditions in Fallujah.

·         Media suppression order over Turks and Caicos Islands Commission of Inquiry corruption report, 20 Jul 2009 - Exposure of a press gagging order from the Turks and Caicos Islands, related to WikiLeaks exposure of the Commission of Inquiry corruption report.

·         The Monju nuclear reactor leak - Three suppressed videos from Japan’s fast breeder reactor Monju revealing the true extent of the 1995 sodium coolant disaster.

After a news item is published on Wikileaks the content is quickly circulated around the globe .Its reprinted , twitted about blogged about, spread by word of mouse around the web. I think this is an amazing example of how social/digital media can be used to do great good and how technology is helping to alleviate corruption and improve transparency. Gutenberg’s printing press transformed society ,it made the circulation of ideas and beliefs possible .It reduced the barrier of entry for the dissemination  of knowledge and news to the common man .As Washington said we are the blind being led to the slaughter without knowledge. I believe Wikileaks ,or rather the idea of the rapid transmission of ideas, beliefs, truth and news, is a symbol of the next societal transformation of how knowledge is shared around the world.

Internet Vloggers: Living their lives through the internet.

In today’s  media centred world it appears that ever y facet of society is being dominated by the internet. Age doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore- over Christmas, both my 80 year old grandfather and 9 year old cousin received laptops. While everybody is aware of the internet’s advantages in daily life, I’m beginning to see more and more evidence of people centring their entire existence around their computers.

The ‘youtube’ phenomenon really took off in the year 2006. This date sticks in my mind as I remember Beyonce saying that after taking an awful fall on stage that her biggest concern was the video surfacing on youtube! Over the past five years, its popularity has come to be used as an advertising  tool, an entertainment mechanism and most influencially, a way for artists to showcase their talent. Justin Bieber famously launched his career on the site.

 Another area under the giant umbrella of youtube’s  uses, that I only came into contact with recently, is the ‘beauty community’ on youtube. ‘Beauty gurus’ upload makeup tutorials, advice etc and in some cases gain a huge following of subscribers (which I’m sure they make money from, but that’s another story). What I find interesting about this aspect of youtube however, is that oftentimes the ‘beauty gurus’ extend  their virtual following to personal channels on which they vlog about their daily lives. In the case of two sisters from the U.S.

http://www.youtube.com/user/otherjuicystar07

 as well as countless others, these personal channels have gained a massive following. This interests me from a sociological perspective. I have serious trouble getting my head around the idea that as many as hundreds of thousands of people (granted the majority may be pre-teen girls) would have the genuine interest in accessing the mundane unfoldings of a stranger’s daily life.

 Since discovering the concept of vlogging and the huge following it can command, I’ve come across many other like Juicystar07. Some vloggers even insist upon updating their subscribers on a daily basis. Yip, that means every day without fail, no matter how little material they have to draw from, they will document that day’s happenings. It really is beyond me how an ordinary Joe Soap could genuinely find his day to day routine worthy of such elaborate documentation. For most of these vloggers, their modes of expression are rarely limited to just youtube. These are the people whose endless witterings take over facebook, twitter (in my opinion a playground for the conceited) and the most voyeuristic of all social ‘networking’ sites- formspring. I wonder is it an extreme case of lonliness that drives people to living their lives almost exclusively through interactive pursuits. And yes I am aware of the irony of expressing this through my blog!!

Moses Gave Us The 10 Commandments –But what did he give Bloggers

Blogging has come a long way since the dawn of the 90’s, once considered the preserve of techno geeks .It has grown up and become a mainstream media outlet. But along the path to the mainstream have some bloggers lost their ethics along the way? In the early days , blogging mostly revolved around things people had a burning passion for  music, technology, sports and computer gaming. It was written for those with a similar passion and purely for the love their art. Those were the days when the notion of blogging and money were two entirely mutually exclusive ideas. But as the blogosphere continues to explode into the public consciousness – there are currently 126million blogs according to blogpulse– it was inevitable that the captains of commerce and industry would jump aboard the good ship Jollybloggers.

Major corporations such as Microsoft, Nokia and Dr Pepper have launched blogs. They were all on Facebook anyways so we presumed they would have a blog .Many of the Fortune 500’s top Executives  and CEO’s now blog ,and with an unabashed bias towards their own company and its endeavours. I don’t think there is anything wrong with backing your own team or a bit of blatant self-promotion. Ad-supported blogs such as Paid Content, Weblogs Inc. and Corante have formulated standards for separating commerce from editorial content. However, more and more personal blogs are becoming littered with advertisements and coated with hidden messages to consumer’s .It’s hidden agendas that I am averse to .Many special interest bloggers are now being approached by industry and courted for their favour like cheerleaders at Prom season. Without an editor’s  accusing eye what’s to spot bloggers shoving their new commercial agenda’s down are throats, or worse still offering us what we think is unbiased professional advice.

The current moral hot potato in the blogospheres is , what are the rules when commercial entities offer payments or freebies to get bloggers to write about them?

Several events have sparked a debate about whether an ethical threshold has been crossed: the decision by Marqui, a company in Vancouver, to pay bloggers to mention the company; Newsweek’s revelation that a group of 100 technologists in Silicon Valley accepts free products and services in return for word-of-mouth endorsements ; and the news that BzzAgent, a 3-year-old Boston company, has enlisted thousands of volunteers to generate buzz for clients’ products, sometimes in ethically questionable ways.

How far can marketers go in soliciting blog coverage of their products or services? Does the practice of paying bloggers to blog about a product amount to an advertorial?Does such an arrangement violate the compact of trust between reader and writer? Or is it naïve to think that its anything other than the next step in the blogosphere’s evolution from hobby to business opportunity? 

Stowe Boyd, president of Corante's Weblog network, has been particularly venomous in his criticism of such conduct, calling the bloggers who agreed to participate “paid shills” and warning that such programs threaten to “turn the blogosphere into a graffiti-laden slum where you won’t be able to tell if a blog posting is genuine or a paid message.”

                                                                                                                                                      

It’s generally accepted that bloggers and traditional journalists aren’t singing from the same hymn sheet. They do not have to play by the same rules, as there is no one to call them up on their conduct. Journalists are held to an ethics code, editors reprise and far more stringent legal responsibilities, for which the papers they write for are also bond to. Should bloggers be able to continue as a law onto themselves?

 Bloggers have also become known for leaving their journalistic sensibilities at the door when it comes to, headline grabbing as major stories are breaking .This is notoriously the one area where bloggers hold the upper hand over traditional journalists ,their ability to get a story out first .When news is breaking ,we now all flood to the internet to watch as the story unfolds .But when bloggers throw caution to the wind, in regard to fact checking are they are partaking in irresponsible journalism .In the recent case of T.V personality ,Jerry Ryan’s untimely passing there was much consternation over various reporters lack of regard for official confirmation before posting the news on their blogs. And also their lack of regard for the Mr Ryan’s Family in reporting on the story. Mr Ryan’s death was tragic event and had the initial speculation been false ,if the story was posted it would have caused a great deal of distress to the family. 

Bloggers who resort to such shotgun journalism may risk losing their credibility and become merely merchants of fear and fantasy . Anyone broadcasting to the public needs to be accountable to, a certain level of social responsibility, for the information they relay to the world. Behaving in controlled and responsible matter in regards to matters of a sensitive nature and those of a commercial nature should result positively in the long run for bloggers. Yes there may be small short terms gains by being the first to post a news item, but the long term reputation damage of being associated with inappropriate an inaccurate journalism far outweighs those benefits.

What’s socially acceptable on Social networks -Facebook court orders ?

When I was younger my parents impressed upon me the importance of saying please and thank you ,not dipping my bread in my soup in public ,calling grown up’s by their sir name until I was told other wise and the vital importance of not always vocalizing my internal thoughts.”Miss Barry –Murphy, Miss Barry-Murphy why is your belly so big, are you having a baby   ?” “No Claire, go back to your colouring of the baby Jesus”.

learning these simple rules helps oil the wheels that make social discourse run that bit more smoothly. With the emergence of social networks and digital reality I wonder how we will go out about explaining social (network )etiquette to our children. Or will there be a difference ,as the lines between our digital and real lives merge further. In a world where there will be double meanings to phrases like “Don’t poke them” and “have you been playing Tag “and friending and facebooking are considered real verbs.

A recent story about a lawyers attempts to provide forclosue notice to  Australian couple trying to avid court appearances shows just how blurred the lines between our Facebook lives and our real lives are fast becoming.

Lawyers in a Canberra law firm Meyer Vandenberg persuaded a judge in the Australian Capital Territory's Supreme Court to allow them to serve legal documents over the internet via Facebook. This was after a series of failed attempts to serve the papers in person to the couple. The couple had continually ignored emails from the law firm regarding the matter and had failed to attend a court appearance on Oct 3. For all intensive purposes the couple had vanished.

Mr McCormack was quoted as saying there was no other way to find the two.
"They weren't available at their residence. They no longer worked at the place given in some documents as the last place of their employment,"
he said.
After it became increasingly apparent that couple did not want to be found, Lawyer, Mark McCormack came up with a modern approach to tackle the situation. Which those in the firm nicknamed the “Facebook Plan”

“It's somewhat novel, however we do see it as a valid method of bringing the matter to the attention of the defendant," McCormack said.

Carmel Rita Corbo and Gordon Poyser had failed to keep up repayments on a $150,000 (£44,000) loan they had borrowed from MKM Capital, a mortgage provider.

Mc Cormack looked to the social networking giant for inspiration for his new plan. As a facebooker himself he said...

"It's one of those occasions where you feel most at home with what you know and I myself have a Facebook account."

The former home of Carmel Rita Corbo and Gordon Poyser

It appears to be the first time that Facebook has been used by lawyer in this way according to Facebook spokes person  Barry Schnitt. He praised the ruling saying...

"We're pleased to see the Australian court validate Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication,"

In their accounts given to the courts ,to persuade them that Facebook was a valid means of communication they noted that the , Facebook profiles showed the defendants' dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another.

"This information was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants.”

In a legal first the court decided Facebook was a legally viable way to communicate foreclosure notices. However, in granting permission to use the social networking site, the judge stipulated that the papers be sent via a private email so that other people visiting the page could not read their contents.

This represents a massive shift in the validity of social networking as a means of communication, with court documents being communicated via this method. This may see a shift in the way people create and use sites like Facebook as people who certainly never envisioned Facebook being used in this way.

Sydney University of Technology law professor Michael Fraser said the court intrusion into a social Web site was inevitable he also commented that ..

"It does change the rules of the game because people thought of these as social sites; now they can be used to serve official court documents and it may change the way people establish a presence on the social networks and the way they use them,"

So be warned the rules of engagement are changing the repo man wants to "poke" you and  the bill collector is writing on your wall.

The Death Of The Novel

The Death Of The Novel

Next time you hop on a train in china you may find yourself sitting next to someone who seems far to engrossed in their last text message. If you thought no text or tweet could so completely devour someone’s attention from one end of the red line to the other. You’d be right .The latest craze to hit the shores of those , constantly one step ahead of the game ,techno savvy Chinese is the “mobile phone novel”.

Most of us have already embraced concepts such as getting our daily fix of the news online. Broadsheets were always such nuisance anyway and the idea of corresponding via letter seems positively Stone Age these days. But I had always rather hoped that some things would stay sacred and were safe from a technology makeover .The birthday card ,good quality paper the hand written in loving scrawl is a no contest with the likes of Facebook wall posts no matter how many you get. They pale in comparison with the thrill of 53cent stamp and a sealed envelope full of possibility ,maybe twenty euro from your favourite uncle .I would hold the novel in the same reserve, lovingly printed in paper or hard copy with that new book smell, which I can’t describe but we all know .

However many Chinese, don’t share my sacrosanct view of literature and are ditching their books in their millions for mobile phone novels. Mobile phone novels are creating their very own genre, like chick lit(light hearted yet steamy romances penned for poolside reading)before them mobile phone novels define themselves. The novels are pacy and paunchy ...

“ The literature needs an intense outline, a shallow writing style and a lively atmosphere. I think the length is not the real trouble,” says Shen Haobo, president of Beijing Motie.

“ it should not make people feel tired to read, each episode should not surpass four lines, and each episode has to contain a funny sentence or joke to inspire the readers not to give up, not to stop reading. This means love stories, historical stories and horror stories, as well as novelty books are the main categories of mobile phone books now,” said Xia.

Professor Zhang Yiwu, a literature professor at Peking University and one of China’s most respected commentators. Has said, that he thinks that this new breed of novel may be the death of the midsized novel as we know it. Although many would argue that Twilight saga had already sucked the life out of quality literature some time ago.

Written Chinese is a character-based language, so each word is a concise pictogram, rather than a lengthy English word made up of several letters which takes up a lot more space. For this reason the Chinese language lends it’s self very well to mobile phone novels in. It enables witters to covey a great deal in a very small amount of space.

The mobile phone novel is originally of Japanese descent, but it is Chinese authors and readers have truly embraced the concept. Like St. Patrick ’s Day in New York. It’s able to avoids the censorship that interferes with content in traditional formats. Tens of thousands of novelist have their “books “downloaded onto their readers Smartphone’s for free every day.

 One of the leading providers of mobile phone books, Shanda, gets hundreds of millions of hits on its websites every day. Readers can and have been doing, in their thousands, texting messages to the authors to complain about plot development or characters. One can only imagine the texts JK .Rowling would have had to respond to after Dumbledore’s untimely death.

The rights to film one popular mobile phone novel, Ghost Blows Out the Light, has been sold for millions. Recent research indicates that almost half of Chinese adults read books, in different forms, and about 25 per cent of readers – some 220 million people – read electronic media. Of these, almost 120 million people use their mobile phone to read, and almost 25 million only use their smart phones to read books.

Well I can’t say I’m entirly against the mobile novel .I having spent many an hour wandering around my house looking for my mid chapter, misplaced copy of Ulysses/The goblet of Fire and accusing every member of my family of grand theft during the search process,so it will be nice to know I can just call my phone to find it.

The Y list celebrity

Ah the Y list or YouTube celeb, they come and go from our lives as quickly as new year’s resolutions enter and leave our physic .Susan Boyle ,Bo Bhurnam ,The Rubber Bandits,Crystal Swing and just a few days ago we were introduced to the Golden toned crooner “Ted Williams”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rPFvLUWkzs
           

 He was “discovered” homeless and begging , in return for a blast of his golden toned radio voice, which transpired to be impossibly smooth and laced with refined charm.Hardened viral addicts were taken aback by the this small  mans big voice” Radio is theatre of the mind” explained Ted as he once again shocked viewers with his eloquent speech .

Presumably now approximately 4-5 days since Ted’s “discovery “(some believe he’s been planted by big wig excue’) He will be inundated with job offers, book deals, interviews and basically bucket loads of cash. Catapulted to stardom without hid nor hair of a Simon Cowell shaped PR effigy. That’s the power of “The People “ these days .The people ,being the ever growing ,constantly multiplying restless beast that is the “The Social Network” with an insatiable appetite for the pure of heart ,extraordinarily bizarre ,genuine folk with a dam good story up their proverbial sleeve.

 They are the Internet massif.Your twitter hounds, your YouTube junkies, myspace addicts,Moses like profits blogging from the web above and you’re every day common or garden facebookers like you and me. To make a story; Neil Prendivels baggage handling saga, a song; the rubber bandits “Horse outside”, a moment; Obama’s inauguration, go viral it’s got to grab the attention of all of the above.

 Ted like all those great viral men who have gone before him managed even if only fleetingly to capture our imagination. He is the epitome of the underdog, for whom everybody routes. The problem for all viral wonders is how turn their 15 minutes of fame into a down payment on a home. Because today’s news, is tomorrows fish and chip shop paper. We the democratic republic of the world wide web applaud Ted’s Frank Sinatra/Will Goodbody gifts and demand that it is rewarded. Our love is not however everlasting and our attention will swing away again, sooner rather than later, its good deed done.

Overnight stardome can now be attained without a squad of professionals on the payroll.This is an exciting new democratic version of fame; it is both refreshing and unnerving. Those with and without talent have seen their stars rise with tremendous velocity but fall again just as quickly. It’s terrific that those with genuine talent are given an opportunity to capitalise on it, and before industry professionals are given the chance to beat them into a state of veggitive, generic comatose. It’s also troubling as real people are fragile, ill-equipped to handle the pressures of; waking up one morning and having a hundred thousand strangers know your name. Doing something out of the ordinary always garnered attention, good or bad. But no one has to deal with the weight of global criticism good and bad.JessiSlatter,Crystal Swing and Miss South Carolina 2007 were all under the age of 18 when they felt the backlash of the world come down around there shoulders.

So do we want to live in this new celebrity democracy ,where the masses rule .The ancient Romans said democracy is just rule by the mob were they right? .With the power to pluck passers by from relative obscurity and thrust them into the lime light and they feed them to the lions when they are finished with them . Does free choice, to watch anything YouTube mean we get to see the best quality viewing. Or is it nice that occasionally the powers that be at the BCC deem that we should allow David attenbourragugh take us on a journey of discovery to the rainforest's and that the news is shown every day.