British pop star Lily Allen may be planning to quit most of her online activities, including her MySpace blog, Twitter, and email, according to the New Musical Express (NME) magazine.
She may even have given away her laptop and BlackBerry after new boyfriend Sam Cooper expressed his anger about her “social networking obsession”, offering her an ultimatum — him or t’Internet. [Read more…]
It’s a bit rich for one-time-dog-outfit-wearing pop mogul Simon Cowell to give advice on portraying yourself to the media, but then again he is the manager of last year’s X Factor winner Alexandra Burke so he has the right to.
It seems that the 21-year-old singer is “addicted” to Twitter (according to a recent interview on UK national radio) and has let slip a few things that perhaps shouldn’t have been made public — things like (gasp) the new album isn’t finished yet.
Burke’s retort is that Simon doesn’t “really get it” (Twitter, that is) — rather like Hugh Laurie. [Read more…]
While many celebrities have flocked to Twitter, spurring the service to set up verified accounts, one musician who won’t be tweeting in the foreseeable future is Kid Rock.
The singer-songwriting rapper told Rolling Stone magazine that Twitter is “gay” and that “if one more person asks me if I have a Twitter, I’m going to tell them, ’Twitter this s**t, motherf**ker’. I don’t have anything to say, and what I have to say is not that relevant. Anything that is relevant, I’m going to bottle it up and then squeeze it onto a record somewhere”. [Read more…]
Duncan Riley has announced the addition of Paul Montgomery as the in-house sports writer on The Inquisitr. Montgomery is a journalist by trade, and with the addition the site now features a dedicated sports category.
Riley also announced a syndication deal with BANG Showbiz, which means that The Inquisitr can run up to ten stories from their celebrity content stock, as an addition to the regular celebrity coverage. Finally, Riley also announced a deal with GumGum for celebrity photography. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, especially the syndication deal.
As for traffic, Riley reports that pageviews are down in June, 2.7 million to 2.55. He calls it a comfortable level.
BlogAds.com CEO Henry Copeland participated on a panel at the OMMA Publishing, and had some Perez Hilton gossip to share. We’ll skip the “new friendlier site” launch rumors and skip to the part where Copeland says that Hilton has six-figure deals to tweet about products and/or services.
Under the agreements, Hilton this summer will post Tweets about the products or services involved for a week on his Twitter feed, which Copeland said has more than 1 million followers. “Perez is a great springboard for anyone who needs a springboard onto Twitter,” said Copeland, who claims that a link by the notorious blogger can send 10,000 to 20,000 new visitors to a site in an eye blink.
This will be linked to ad campaigns on PerezHilton.com, probably sold as a package. Media buyers love that. MediaPost has the full story.
Actor Hugh Laurie has admitted that he’s “bothered by the social cost of every tweet” on Twitter, and that although he has his own Twitter page he doesn’t really get the concept.
Going 22 characters over-limit, Laurie told a BBC radio programme, “If people were able to take these 140 characters and develop a poetic Western form… that would be a satisfying thing. But that’s not what I see when I read them”. [Read more…]
Prolific British celebrity twitterer Jonathan Ross is using Twitter to run his own informal book club.
The reasoning behind it won’t mean much to anyone outside Britain who isn’t a fan of Richard and Judy’s TV chat show, recently axed, but what’s more important is that it’s another interesting use of Twitter.
I’m not suggesting that no-one has thought of the idea before, but when you’re as popular and have as many followers as Ross, people take notice. [Read more…]
Twitter is fast becoming a place where you can let your fictional characters (and brands) come to life, with minimal effort should be noted. The latest to join in is Shamu, the killer whale of SeaWorld fame.
Bio I live at SeaWorld. I’m a large, athletic, black and white marine mammal. I’m not THE star of SeaWorld, I’m A star of SeaWorld
Follow @RealShamu if you like. Personally, I think the concept is more interesting than the tweets this time around.
In a story so short it could fit into a handful of tweets, notorious British tabloid The Sun reports that Beyonce Knowles is planning legal action against those who are pretending to be her on Twitter.
Apparently, her sister Solange said that she was being pestered by someone pretending to be the singer.
Whether this is a legitimate story is another matter. Though Twitter has been known to shut down accounts that either impersonate or are otherwise dubious, it’s possibly a better idea to ensure that your official Twitter account is well publicised so that the fakers can then be easily identified.
(Hat tip @kevindixie)
We live in an age of transparency. I’d say that “transparency” should have been the word of the year last year, and it’s popularity as a buzz word this year continues. It pops up in most news reports, demanding transparency from banks and financial institutions, politicians, governments, corporations, and individuals.
It also litters our social media interaction. We want our online social interchanges to be with real people who want to know us as real people. We want people leaving comments on our blogs to have names. We want folks on Twitter to have real names, not CD Handles and cute nicknames or keywords. So is it okay to be anonymous any more?
Over the years, there as been an ongoing debate about anonymous bloggers as more and more people take to the Information Highway to have their say. For some, anonymity is a matter of life or death. For others, it’s just wiser. But it isn’t for everyone.
Some use a pseudonym, similar to what writers and artists have been doing for many years, either for protection and security, or because their real name, Hildibob Slibbervitzenson, just isn’t “writerly” or “artistic.” Would women have swooned over Archie Leach? Sang the memorable songs of Barry Alan Pinkus, or sang along to Bohemian Rhapsody with Farrokh Bulsara? Or believed in the sung words of Robert Allen Zimmerman with such fervor? Would Moses have been so memorable if played by John Charles Carter? Would the sexy pottery scene in “Ghost” have been so memorable if performed by Demetria Gene Guynes? Replaces those real names with their pseudonyms of Cary Grant, Barry Manilow, Freddy Mercury, Bob Dylan, Charlton Heston, and Demi Moore and everything changes.
There are many people who blog under a pseudonym without condemnation, but there are still those who choose to publicly blog anonymously. They use CD Handle style names, making a visible statement about their need to be private and choosing to hide behind a masked name while not hiding their opinion.
And there continues to be a witch hunt on to out them when their opinion doesn’t agree with the government or politicians. [Read more…]
