Everything he needed to know about social media he learned from being @the_swine_flu

I've met Baratunde a couple of times, and he is hilarious. He made fun of my other blog's name from the stage at the Big Tent in Denver during the Democratic National Convention (though, admittedly, New Mexico FBIHOP is a pretty damned weird name).

He happens to be one of those people who "get" Twitter -- he uses his Twitter account in one of the best ways of anyone who I follow. Ditto with his Facebook account (and probably a hundred other social media networks that I don't know about).

He also one of the few people I know that sends out more tweets than I do, which is pretty impressive.

But here is a video of him showing, using his experience as @the_swine_flu, how to use Twitter correctly and to get attention effectively. Using humor, of course.

Zach Galifianakis is the new comedy god

OK, the title is a little bit facetious. But Zach Galifianakis is a really funny guy. Or he's extremely unfunny. It all depends on the person who is watching his act.

I watched Galifianakis' Comedy Central special (video) with my old roommates and a girl when they were over at the house. This is a Comedy Central special where Galiafianakis jumps around in a leotard, has a chorus of his ex-girlfriends sing a song and... well, it's pretty weird.

My roommates didn't get it (for the record, they thought that Dane Cook was hilarious). The girl? She said that Katt Williams is funny and asked if we had any of that.

Yeah.

Anyway, the New York Times magazine ran a feature on Galifianakis (my second favorite Greek comedian behind Demetri Martin).

Here's a portion:

The beard lends him a subtly beatnik air, a link to the first generation of stand-up iconoclasts, like Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce; at the same time,it gives him a professorial quality — dare I call it a gravitas? — that makes his more meatheaded material jarringly effective. Galifianakis himself put it more succinctly: “I look like a homeless guy now. People seem to appreciate that.”

One of the people who appreciated it was Kanye West, who saw Galifianakis perform at a Hollywood club called Largo in 2007. “I was doing a bit about how much I hate celebrity egos, and that seemed to resonate with him, for some reason,” said Galifianakis, with a barely perceptible grin. “He asked me to do a video for him, and I said yes, with one condition: I just go off by myself and shoot it, and he doesn’t get to look at it until it’s done.” To everyone’s surprise, West agreed. The resulting video, in which Galifianakis and the indie-folk icon Will Oldham drive a tractor around a cornfield while lip-synching West’s hit single “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” has been viewed nearly half a million times. “I wasn’t sure what Kanye would think of it, to be honest,” Galifianakis said. “But his response was perfect, considering how we’d first met. He said it was the best video he’d ever made.”