The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square

Twenty years ago this Friday, one of the most famous images (or rather four images of the same event) ever taken was caught on film in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. A man, who became known as "Tank Man" stood in front of a row of tanks. Even to this day, virtually nothing is known about the man, even down to what his name is.

The New York Times tracked down the four photographers whose pictures have been shown over and over and TV and in magazines to get their recollections of the event.

As Arthur Tsang Hin Wah, the man who took the photo for Reuters, said, "I am glad that it still has impact after 20 years. Four different versions but one same focus."

Dave Eggers speaks the myth of print's importance

Best selling author and all-around smart guy Dave Eggers (if you haven't read What is the What you have to -- now).

At a recent speech at the Author's Guild in Manhattan, Eggers said:

The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying.

Of course, the writer of a Splice Today article says that Eggers "has his head up his ass with regards to the decline of print media."

Bing has a ways to go before slaying Google

The chart below is the amount of blog posts that compare the new Microsoft search engine Bing to Google.

There are a couple of caveats, however -- Google has been around for seemingly forever now, at least in internet time. It is by far the largest search engine in the world, and anything that Google does creates buzz in the technology blogosphere. Also, any post that references Bing will invariably also mention Google (as I did in this post).

People are also trying to figure out what Google Wave will be, what it means for the internet and whether it is just another example of Google slowly becoming Skynet.

Also, ultimately, the only number that will matter is whether or not people use Bing. All I can say is that it is at least better than that epic trainwreck that was Cuil.

Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere

This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords.

bing vs. google

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Can social media networks stand in for real life friendships?

Paula Rice of Island City, Kentucky said that the social media network Eons gave her "a reason to keep on going” according to the New York Times.

Rice is 73, retired and was lonely.

“One of the greatest challenges or losses that we face as older adults, frankly, is not about our health, but it’s actually about our social network deteriorating on us, because our friends get sick, our spouse passes away, friends pass away, or we move,” said Joseph F. Coughlin, director of the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An interesting read.

I don't think that Obama will be getting an invitation to the Clinton's Christmas Party

Sure, President Barack Obama made Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State. But the infamous rift between Obama and the last Democratic President, Hillary's husband Bill Clinton, is still there.

And this, according to Taegan Goddard, probably won't help that ice thaw.

Speaking of Clinton, Obama said, "We had to figure out how to deal with a former president who was just lying, engaging in bald-faced lies."

And:

When Obama was asked by the author if Clinton got in his head, he replied: "Yes, but I got into his."

It's all in Renegade: The Making of a President by Richard Wolffe. The book was released today.

Twitter a one-way mode of communication?

Is Twitter a one-way mode of communication?

That's what a study from Harvard Business Publishing hypothesizes.

The study of 300,000 Twitter accounts found that that top ten percent most-prolific Twitter accounts accounted for 90 percent of all the Twitter posts. Which is amazing.

However, the study also show, "A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one."

This suggests, to me, that they didn't just do a poll of active accounts. There must have been a significant amount of accounts where people start an account, think, "I don't see what the fuss is about" and quit. Or they decide to shed the name and start a new account with a new name (even though it is incredibly easy to switch names in the "settings" menu).

The study writes:

To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I'm not so sure if a study of those "top ten percent" of Twitter accounts wouldn't prove otherwise.

It would be interesting to see how many of the tweets sent out where "@ replies," or replying to the original author.

Using Twitter in the classroom

One teacher at the University of Texas at Dallas has been utilizing Twitter in his teaching, according to an article in Read Write Web.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.

People are using Twitter for a number of different applications, many that the founders of Twitter surely never anticipated.

Functional Ambivalent says goodbye

A blog that I read on an occasional basis (I'd drop in about once a week) was Functional Ambivalent. I say was not because I've stopped reading it, but rather because Funcational Ambivalent will no longer be a blog.

Fighting climate change really ISN'T like cheating on your spouse

The Atlantic tells us why the website CheatNeutral.com is operating from a flawed premise.

That premise is, as explained by Robert Frank in the NY Times:

A British Web site called Cheat Neutral (www.cheatneutral.com) parodies the concept [of carbon offsets]-- by offering a service under which someone who wants to cheat on his partner can pay someone else who will refrain from committing an act of infidelity. The site's founders say they wanted to use humor to demonstrate why the market for carbon offsets is a moral travesty.

But the Atlantic explains:

ne reason is that I don't necessarily think of the cost associated with consuming fossil fuels as moral. It's a market failure. The issue is that there is a social cost -- an externality -- that isn't internalized by the consumer. Ordinary consumers acting in ordinary, rational ways create the problem.

In other words, expect James Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh to be parroting this line of thought from

Why I don't care that Lebron James didn't go to the postgame news conference

OK, Lebron James decided not to go to the post-game news conference after the Cleveland Cavaliers' game six loss to the Orlando Magic. The loss meant that the Cavs were eliminated from the playoffs.

And now every sports talk radio host and commenter on sports websites are saying that James not going to the post-game news conference showed disrespect to the game, to the Magic to, blah blah blah.

I have to call BS on that one.

The Cleveland Cavaliers pay James to play basketball. And he does that very well. They don't pay him to talk to the media -- sure they'd like him to, but they'd live without it if he didn't. Nike and his sponsors pay James to promote their product (those Kobe/Lebron Crank Yankers ripoff commercials suck, though), not to go to post-game press conferences.

I think it's just a slow sports news day -- no one cares about the hockey playoffs (Detroit is up 2-0 in the Stanley Cup Finals over the Pittsburgh Penguins). No one cares that Andy Roddick lost again in the French Open (after being openly taunted by his French opponent to the delight of the crowd). No one cares about baseball in June (the Evil Empire New York Yankees are once again in first place in the AL East).

So the sports pundits and talking heads have to argue about SOMETHING. And they decide to argue about this. Give me a break.