Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Digital Meandering


Twitterverse, Interweb, Digital Forest, InYourFaceBook . . . Most of the Luddites of my generation consider me an early adopter. And yet other than a page for the Matusow book, I have not as yet ventured into the time sink called FaceBook. Until today that is. I have sent out my first batch of friend invitations and will see where this goes. I figured since I am physically wandering from friend to friend on this current journey of mine, I might as well embark on a similar path in cyberspace. Also an olde acquaintance and internet critic showed me several long lost friends she had reconnected with via her short FB experiment, so I am now officially in your webface.


Twitter is a different attraction all together. The World Series of Poker was twitter infected this year with great success. For the non-poker infected among you, first I will acknowledge that my "no poker" content promise will take awhile to completely mature. So if you haven't surfed on yet, information from hundreds of poker tables is difficult and tedious to view and report on. But with a sizeable number of players twittering their own reports, the tournament coverage was much more accurate and up to date, at least for those players who were continually twittering. 

More interesting for me was the rumor control exercised by WSOP Commissioner Jeffery Pollack. The Commish (or Knish) put out over 700 twits during the Series and although most were PR and updates. He was able to comment on rumors in nearly real time. There is some surreal but inherent paranoia that leaks into a room of several thousand poker players and stomping out the first flames of ridiculous rumors gave this year's Series a more calm and less psychotic atmosphere. 

Osama and Obama should get twitter accounts--world peace 140 characters at a time.

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