This week, we’re doing a countdown to last week’s most widely read post. So … let’s start with No. 5, shall we? Fun!
5. Zell Miller: Obama should be restrained with ‘Gorilla Glue’ (Hey Zell, I think there’s a booth with your name on it at a certain bar referenced in post No. 1.)
Rank of Atlanta rapper Soulja Boy Tell ’Em’s Twitter page on a list of “businesses” with the highest number of Twitter followers: 9
Rank of CNN: 1
Total number of Twitterers following Soulja Boy: 892,491
Total number of “tweets” the rapper — or his handlers — have posted on his Twitter site: 4,412
Estimated number of tweets worldwide that were related to the Iran protests, following the country’s June 12 election: 79,000
Estimated percentage of tweets that referenced Michael Jackson in the two hours following the king of pop’s death: 30
Total number of Twitter members worldwide: 37 million
Number of other major social-networking sites that have grown faster than Twitter over the past year: 0
Number of jobs that MySpace was forced to cut following stiff competition from Twitter and Facebook: 300
Sources: Twibs.com, twitter.com/souljaboytellem, WashingtonPost.com, ColumbusDispatch.com, Mashable.com, NYTimes.com
Mayoral front-runners: Borders (left), Norwood (middle) and Reed (right)
As reported by the AJC, Atlanta’s mayoral candidates have taken to social networking sites such as Twitter, utilizing the art of mass-updating to keep in constant touch with supporters and potential voters. And where there’s a seemingly innovative new political outreach tool, there’s almost always a predictable new catchphrase for it:
“This will be the Facebook election,” said Emory University associate professor Michael Leo Owens.
Four candidates — [Council President Lisa] Borders, Councilwoman Mary Norwood, state Sen. Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta) and [Glenn] Thomas, a former city employee — each have pages and videos on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Candidate Rod Mack, who works in logistics, has a MySpace page that plays the Sam Cooke classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
The campaigns do concede that, most often, it’s their staffs who are updating these accounts for them. Borders, for example, has three individuals from the firm Relate Media Group on staff to manage her social networking accounts.
Like everything else in politics, this is a competition — one that Reed and Borders would seem to have a head start on. Reed boasts more than 4,000 Facebook friends, while Borders has approximately 1,700. Each have more than 1,100 official supporters listed on their Facebook pages. On Twitter, Borders has more followers than any candidate: 749 as of last Sunday.
>> Oh, Lindsay, you’re one of the only reasons anyone should bother reading those hilarious gossip mags in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. You’re just so funny.
>> One cool thing about a recession is you get bargain prices on stocks and real estate. That is, if you were too poor to afford them before and thereby haven’t lost every dime already…
>> As the world’s most “globalized economies” (read: wealthiest) are hard hit by the world-wide recession, both rich and poor foreign workers head home.
>> Brit-Brit brings her comeback to Atlanta today. Maybe she’ll be warmed-up from her NOLA show and rip it like the Britney of yore. Or maybe she’ll be a stumbling drugged-out mess. Either way, entertainment at its finest!
>> In the war between Facebook and Myspace, the latter wins the battle of Koobface. Your secrets (and passwords) are safer on Myspace.
>> Most informative story on the web today. So full of information, in fact, that if I said any more about it, I’d be violating copyright law by giving away too much….
>> And because the MSM is so good at getting to the real story American needs to know — a discussion on Obama’s graying hair.
The New York Times has found Kristen, the alleged prostitute with whom New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer allegedly had alleged sex with (allegedly) on Feb. 13 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C., the alleged nation’s capital. Naturally, Kristen is not her real name:
Born Ashley Youmans but now known as Ashley Alexandra Dupre, she spoke softly and with good humor as she added with significant understatement: “This has been a very difficult time. It is complicated.â€
The Times even found her MySpace profile, which includes at least one soon-to-be-widely-reproduced bikini photo:
And one soon-to-be-widely-psychoanalyzed blog post dated August 30, 2007:
The past few months have been a roller coaster with so called friends, lovers, and family…but its something you have to deal with and confront in order to move on…
I stepped away from each situation that happened and asked myself…
1) What is this person doing to make my life better? (financial, intel, drive, networking etc.)
If, by any chance, Ms. Youmans deletes or blocks access to her profile, feel free to console yourself with my MySpace profile.
I can’t offer you bikini photos*, but I have been to the Mayflower Hotel. I went to a bat mitzvah there when I was 13.
And if that doesn’t make you want to Add Me, my senior prom was in the hotel where former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was videotaped smoking crack.
(*I prefer the comfort and coverage of a unitard)
Ripping a page from the Fred Thompson Book of Hype, Osama bin Laden has reportedly announced to someone that he plans to announce something.
Says CNN:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is about to appear in a new video, according to a banner ad posted by al Qaeda’s media production company, As Sahab.
Banner ad?
Production company?
Even international terrorism has gone showbiz.
He needs to update his MySpace page, though.
Earlier this month, we posted content from the MySpace profile of Lamar Gavin. Gavin is the 26-year-old Atlanta police officer charged with videotaping himself raping his neighbor.
Among other things, we noted that Gavin called himself “The ‘ATL’ Bad Boy” and claims to be a big fan of “Law & Order SVU,” a police drama about sex crimes.
Two days after Gavin was released from jail on $50,000 bond, the following comment defending him appeared under our post.
I’m quite sure he didn’t record himself raping this woman. It sounds like a “cry wolf†story to me.
The comment was signed “Chuck.”
Who is “Chuck”?
We don’t know for sure.
We do know, however, that the e-mail address “Chuck” used on our blog is the same address Lamar Gavin uses in his MySpace profile.
Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker announced today that MySpace has agreed to hand over information the social networking site obtained while trying to rid its massive membership of registered sex offenders.
But while MySpace officials have claimed its efforts to purge the pervs has been successful, there’s evidence to suggest otherwise.
Baker, president of the National Association of Attorneys General, along with a half-dozen other attorneys general had urged MySpace in a letter last week to share the info so law enforcement could check to see whether sex offenders had violated their parole by contacting minors online.
In a press release, Baker proclaimed:
Today’s decision by MySpace clears the way for law enforcement, both here in Georgia and around the nation, to target internet predators who use the appeal of social networking sites to search for potential victims.
The release points out that MySpace had hired an outside data firm to compare a list of MySpace members with lists of sex-offender registries maintained by different states, and it goes on to claim that “MySpace has deleted these users from its site.”
Yet Wired magazine has been keeping MySpace on its toes with an admittedly “unscientific” 2006 probe of its own — and an equally interesting follow-up posted on the magazine’s blog last week — that suggests not all sex offenders are being deleted.
