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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 15: "xbox live down" and No. 57: "cyxymu." Gamers are seeking out Google to find out why they couldn't get their Xbox Live fix yesterday. The social media blog Mashable reported that the site was down for an hour and lamented that "gaming was once again a solitary experience." It's likely the glitch was part of a larger Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that also affected the social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal. Russian patriots attempting to silence Cyxymu—a Georgian blogger who was critical of last year's war between Russia and Georgia—were behind the attack, according to the Guardian.
No. 32: "Alison Byrne Fields." John Hughes fan Alison Byrne Fields revealed on her blog yesterday that the recently deceased famous director was her pen pal for two years while she was in high school. He consoled her when her English teacher gave her bad grades, telling her to write to "please herself" and confessed that he wrote to her more than any living member of his family. In one letter, he admitted: "Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn't as painful as I portray it."
No. 81: "Chelsea Clinton." What's it gonna be, Chelsea, yes or no? On Thursday, when a Kenyan man offered 40 goats and 20 cows for the former first daughter's hand in marriage, Hillary didn't reply with a firm "no." "My daughter is her own person, very independent, so I will convey this very kind offer," she told Fareed Zakaria of CNN. This comes after the Clintons denied rumors in early May that Chelsea would marry boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky in the town of Chilmark, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard this summer. (Yes, the same town that the Obamas will retire to at the end of August.)
Photograph of Chelsea Clinton courtesy of Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.
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When word of Michael Jackson's death first spread, Google News went on the defensive. CNET is reporting that Google initially interpreted the tremendous spike in Jackson queries on Thursday as evidence of nefarious web sabotage and, in response, did the search-engine equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and singing "la-la-la" (or "ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa"): Many users who searched for Jackson news around 3 p.m. received an error message that read, "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
Slate's Jody Rosen is among those who have remarked that, with Jackson's death, the "monoculture," long on the wane, enjoyed one (final?) astounding spasm: For a few days, everyone was talking about, reading about, and listening to one man. The Google News story—along with stats demonstrating that Jackson drew in Yahoo's biggest single-day audience ever (16.4 million unique visitors, surpassing the previous record of 15.1 million set on election day, 2008) and dwarfed Iran and swine-flu posts on Twitter—raises a related question about what happens when the supposed agents of the monoculture's fragmentation—Google searches, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, MP3 blogs, etc.—all collude to resuscitate it. With the possible exception of Obama's win, Jackson's death is the most significant culturequake of the 2.0 era (which missed 9/11, Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the O.J. chase). And so it's not just that, for a spell, everyone was talking about the same thing again. Isn't it also the case that more people were talking about the same thing than was ever possible before?
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The 2009 U.S. Open was a massive shank—too much rain and too little Tiger Woods made golf's showcase event close to unwatchable. For the beloved Dan Jenkins, covering his 200th major tournament, the omnipresent storm clouds were less a deterrent than a welcome source of material. Over the last week, Jenkins filed more than 150 tweets from the Open, quipping about the weather ("If you want to get a swing tip today, try the aquarium"), Phil Mickelson's fashion sense ("Easy to root for Phil; still hard to root for those shirts"), and the tourney's anonymous champion ("I didn't have Lucas Glover in the pool, but good on you if you did. The unsung guy wins over the sung guys").
These 140-character dispatches earned Jenkins kudos from sports bloggers and the old-line media. (OK, that second link—in which "the ancient Twitterer" is described as "a sensation"—goes to a column written by his daughter Sally. But the point still stands.) Jenkins' tweets were the best thing about a bad U.S. Open, but it's worth thinking about whether Tweetdeck is the best venue for the world's greatest golf writer.
In terms of sheer output, @danjenkinsgd destroys Dan Jenkins the long-form writer. After this year's Masters, Jenkins filed a 1,300-word recap for Golf Digest. Add all of his tweets together, and Jenkins has dashed off 3,200 words on the Open. I'd also argue that Jenkins the Twitterer is funnier than his print-journalism alter ego. A slow and steady stream of one-liners plays better than carefully couched jokes—it's the difference between getting strafed by a BB gun and getting nailed by a cannonball. Timeliness is also key here: It makes more sense to joke about Phil Mickelson's attire when your readers can see what he's wearing.
Jenkins' just-in-time delivery wasn't always for the best. Twitter works better for color commentary than for play-by-play, even if the play-by-play man is a genius observer. Jenkins was an ideal companion during the Open's intractable rain delays, passing the time with jokes and historical footnotes. When the golf got more exciting, he didn't add much to the TV coverage or to lengthier, real-time Web writing. A sample tweet from Monday: "Glover fails to birdie the par-15 13th and remains tied with Phil at -4. Ricky Barnes two-putts for birdie and is alive at -2."
Twitter also doesn't do historical breadth. Jenkins made loads of allusions over the last week, everything from a rundown of all the U.S. Opens that ended on a Monday to a quote from Ben Crenshaw circa 1975. While this level of recall is incredible, Jenkins' musings came off as a string of factoids rather than a well-curated collection of supporting details. Luckily, this year's Open—which will be best-remembered for being forgettable—made this a moot point. The story of last year's tournament, in which a one-legged Tiger Woods refused to lose to underdog Rocco Mediate, was best told in a sweeping feature. This year's U.S. Open, played underwater and won by some guy named Lucas Glover, was nothing if not ephemeral. It was a Twitter tournament, and Dan Jenkins was the right man at the right time in the right medium.
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In a Slate article last week, I described the phenomenon of the orphan tweet: a post left behind by someone who signs up for Twitter, tweets once, and is never heard from again. With the help of Slate intern Jeremy Singer-Vine, I found several thousand such tweets. Our list was nowhere near exhaustive, however, so we invited readers to send along their own examples.
Ryan from Los Angeles wrote in to say that his favorite orphan tweet belongs to BretEastonEllis, whose lone missive reads "Nothing." As Ryan notes, this is not the real Bret Easton Ellis, though the novelist does have a Twitter account. EastonEllis, set up recently at the suggestion of The New Yorker's Dana Goodyear, is home to eight updates.
Stewart from Atlanta flagged a rather puckish orphan tweet, by the user 11am, which reads "getting ready for 11:01." Not that funny—until you consider that whenever someone tweets about planning to do something @11am, they inadvertently link to 11am's profile. This happens a lot.
On June 8, Matt from Orange, Calif., e-mailed to drop a dime on his buddy Kevin, who at the time had only this tweet to his name: "Watching Late night with Jimmy Fallon." (Fans of Fallon, an enthusiastic Twitterer, are surely responsible for untold orphan tweets.) Apparently tipped off about Matt's e-mail, Kevin posted a second tweet ("Sick of Twitter") on June 9, in what seems to have been an attempt to avoid being called out in this follow-up post. Nice try, Kevin.
By far the best excuse we heard for tweeting only once came from Zach, a corporal with the Marine Corps who's currently stationed in San Diego. Actually, Zach had two reasons for quitting, the first being his preference for Facebook over Twitter. The second: "My new membership happening in close proximity to my deployment to Iraq (and thus spotty Internet access)." Can't argue with that.
One of the strangest examples we cited in the original article was from user kttheet, whose lone, mysterious tweet read "Wearing a gigantic t-shirt (2XL)." To our delight, Katie from New York e-mailed to take credit for the post. Katie is on the editorial staff of O, The Oprah Magazine, though she joined up well before her boss helped make Twitter a household word. In fact, she may have been too early an adopter. "I guess I stopped because, at the time (I see that the post was from April '08), nobody even cared about Twitter," she writes.
As for the gigantic T-shirt, Katie reports that it was tossed into the audience at a live performance by the comedic duo Tim and Eric. "Being a superfan, I felt moved to wear it despite it being big enough to fit 2 of me," she writes. Skeptical readers, rest assured: In order to verify that Katie really was the wearer of the gigantic T-shirt, we asked her to post a second tweet. She graciously obliged. It reads: "My clothing is now appropriately sized."
Cick here to see a Google spreadsheet of the 2,848 orphan tweets Slate turned up. Found a great one of your own? Retweet it with the hashtag #orphantweet.
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