ME: It’s easy. You just have to channel your inner J. R. Ewing.
STUDENT: Who?
ME: J. R. Ewing, from Dallas. Played by the late, great Larry Hagman.
STUDENT: Dallas?
ME: Uhh—anyway, let’s talk about your paper.
Most kids use it every day from the time they can sit up on their own. It’s commonly available, and found in nearly every American home. Continue reading
Leave it to these two to sum up the entire Internet in 17 seconds. And don’t forget that only Statler and Waldorf could heckle Milton Berle into a stammering mess.
The 2012 NBA Finals begin tonight. There will be much trash talking. No championship series would be complete without it.
However, to paraphrase an old saying, it ain’t trash talk if you follow through. Witness:
I won’t get started about my disappointment in my Boston Celtics. Or in the fact that we have a weather-themed NBA Finals this year. [deep sigh]
Edited to add: My disappointment is minor compared to that of Seattle basketball fans. Their former Supersonics are now the Oklahoma City Thunder, and playing in the NBA Finals. My condolences, y’all.
So we’ve got Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Who’s missing?
Oh, right.
Behold the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Stupidity. Or maybe his name is Marketing Coup. I’m not sure. Continue reading
This classic Sesame Street sketch aired in late 1974, when small children automatically would have known what the funny-looking black plastic object was. (Would today’s preschoolers know? Hmm.)
In case you haven’t seen this recurring skit, Continue reading
Okay, so I’ve got this Tagxedo problem, and it occurred to me the other day to see what the word mapping site would do with the Weather Channel’s Twitter feed. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know that I’m a longtime Weather Fan who can’t stand TWC’s pointless weather tweets. Think about it: If your company’s name is The Weather Channel, wouldn’t you think that your tweets would talk mainly about weather?
Anyway, just for grins, I thought I’d turn TWC’s Twitter feed into a couple Tagxedo word clouds. The results would look better than my own pitiful blog word clouds. Right?
It’s an amoeba! Just what I always wanted!
Okay, so that one didn’t look so hot (no weather pun intended). Why not try out a weather-related shape for another Tagxedo attempt? I chose a cloud-with-lightning-bolt silhouette. Couldn’t get much worse than the biology lab specimen above.
This is slightly better, even though I didn’t adjust the word count or any other threshholds. From a distance, it’s obviously a cloud with lightning jumping down below it. Up close, it looks kind of silly.
Tagxedo creates word clouds (word maps) according to the number and frequency of words in a text. Twitter, of course, limits messages to 140 characters or fewer, and since it’s used mainly for self-promotion, hashtags and Twitter “handles” will appear most frequently.
Keeping this in mind, I’m glad that some of the largest words in here are weather, hurricane, and tornado. Isn’t it weird that so few other weather-related words appear in large type, though? You know—words like rain, thunderstorm, front, clouds, and so on? Sure, we’re having a drought here in the Deep South, but other parts of the country are seeing rain. Twitter is all about self-promotion, though, so it makes sense that the non-weather words are larger than weather words. (Ugh! I hated typing that.)
Next, I chose a U.S. map silhouette.
Yep, about the same, except in a larger shape. The run-on nature of hashtags and Twitter usernames turns phrases into one word. Thus, Weather Channel becomes #weatherchannel.
Twitter can be helpful. I’ve found dozens of great articles through others’ Tweets. I’ve discovered worthy causes and made new professional connections through Twitter. My 140-or-less attempts have even brought new readers to my blog. However, like any social media platform, Twitter can also be completely useless. Remember the most important guideline about living in Social Mediaville: Whatever you’re doing had better help everybody in this town. When I look at these word clouds from the Weather Channel’s Twitter feed, I’m not sure it’s helping TWC or its viewers.
I first saw this ad during the Super Bowl in 1999 or 2000 (I think). Over a decade later, it still makes me belly-laugh.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you herd cats and create a memorable ad.