jbrotherlove

SXSW Panel Picker has ended and I am really hoping my panel idea is selected. Thanks all who voted! There’s no shortage of fodder for the panel, that’s for sure.

By now, the entire world knows how Kanye West made a jackass out of himself at the 2009 VMA Awards (hey, if the President can call him a jackass, who am I to argue). Predictably, Kanye’s rant set off a swarm of anti-Kanye responses — including, a slew of racially charged tweets such as this one from amber_berry:

I wonder if Amber Adamson (who knows if this is really her name) really wants this to be her first impression on a job interview? At church? At PTA? Hell, at the pumpkin pie shop?

As the real-time web gets faster, I hope we are realizing that anything can be cached on the web — forever. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be ourselves online. But we certainly need to be aware that anything we say or do (even offline) can be “picked up”, rebroadcast and remixed. So if you’re not prepared to defend it, you should think twice about what you’re doing.

This is not news, per se. But Twitter has been particularly susceptible. The ability to instantly fire off anything on your mind has generated some interesting content, to say the least. I suggest you think before you tweet. Even “protected” accounts are only as private as those you follow.

But wait. There’s more at Harry Allen’s Media Assassin.

It seems Twitter is officially not for geeks anymore. This has been the case for some time. But Twitter early adopters got smacked in the face with it during Monday night’s BET Awards show. I started to comment on Black Web 2.0’s post BET Awards Dominate Twitter, Causes Racist Backlash when I realized I was getting long-winded.

While the criticism of Twitter trending topics is not new, it was interesting to see the reaction to the BET dominated list last night. Some comments bordered on being racist while others went ahead and crossed it. In short, nothing new under the sun in terms of race relations.

See also this tweet by my man @dykc:

Some of the non-racial backlash to trending topics stems from self-appointed, social network gatekeepers attempting to dictate how others should use Twitter. I’ve seen this type of conversation pop up on FriendFeed as well (I’ll write about my issues experience with that service at another time).

Still, I’m amazed so many user seem genuinely ignorant of the intrinsic function of trending topics. It’s what the majority of people are “talking” about on Twitter. That’s it. Sometimes those topics happen not to be news, political issues, startups, or your latest app.

I’m not interested in most of the trending topics either. I also don’t base my use of Twitter on that list. Ideally, topics of interest to you should be something driven by your followees/followers.

Directly related, is the concept of “noise” on Twitter which has more to do with how a user configures their account than actual messages being broadcast. If you only want to know about news-related items, science, technology, etc., you should only follow Twitter accounts dedicated to those topics.

If you follow regular, well-rounded people on Twitter, you’ll see those tweets interspersed with comments about celebrity deaths, award shows, sports, and any number of daily memes.

If you’re bent out of shape over trending topics or noise on Twitter, clean up your follower list or use a Twitter client that allows you to group or filter, such as Tweedeck or FriendFeed. It’s not rocket science.