Andre

Amazon is releasing the international version of it’s portable e-reader Kindle.

• I totally fail to understand the benefit of Amazon‘s Kindle: I’ve seen tablet netbooks for same price, they come in color and are a real PC.
• If I want a “book feeling”, I get a real book which I can touch, smell, keep on shelf (I love book shelves & revisit often), I can exchange.
• I love this algorithm theory about Amazon’s Kindle: RT @gregorylent: Must have made an algorithm to find sweet spot between cash and trash.

Tweets commenting the Chinese National Day parade, shown live on TV:

• Quiet outside, can stay home working until parade starts. Pearl runs CCTV9 Live all morning, too much info.. Better ATV at 9.45, seems less.
• CCTV 9 (cctv-9.com) shows live parade streaming but site barely loads from HK. With Great Firewall blocking much, shouldn’t speed be better?
• I really had hoped for the Great Firewall working once in *my* favor by focusing bandwidth on a stream I want to see coming from China. FAIL
• I almost forgot I have Now-TV where CCTV-9 is available as a free channel: now watching parade on big projector screen
• Love or hate them, but the Chinese know how to impress the masses by engaging the masses. From clean roads to clear skies, there’s no limit.
• They use the manpower of several times the Luxembourg population just to operate/secure the Beijing parade, not even including participants.
• The only signboard I saw was a huge Toshiba behind the tanks. That’s kind of ironic.
• Beijing’s blue sky is a testament to “if there is a will, there is a way”. It would be nice if they’d always want to keep things clean(er)..
• With those tanks rolling and planes coming in, Beijing’s blue sky will be gone by the time the parade is over.
• That 5sec video clip of marine boats was supposed to be what? Would have loved to see the boats as well. Overall, bad video cutting by CCTV.
• The standard Now-TV is crap: waving blue and red flags in full screen results in a pixeled image almost beyond recognition.
• 43000 participants just for the people’s part of the parade like dancers, floats… that gives you an idea of the size of this event. Costs?
• Now CCTV-9 lost the English audio feed and switched to Chinese. Sigh..
• The “One World” float was shown so briefly that by the time I realized it was about non-Chinese they switched to a long row of military ppl.
• The Hong Kong float must have been the most boring in the entire parade. Sigh.. Funny to see Donald having the biggest camera.
• A very nice parade but a crappy TV show, big FAIL. Let’s see if the show tonight is better (~6pm start).
• With over 100’000 participants in the parade (not including security and support), that is easily 280 times or more my (tiny) home village..
• The Beijing parade numbers keep climbing: now I read 8’000 soldiers and 180’000 participants. Still not including the security, support ppl.
• When a Western country runs a military parade (such as France), it’s called a festivity. When China runs one, it’s called propaganda. Hmm ..
• @Tortue End of the day it’s propaganda everywhere but also a festivity; it is a matter of point of view (if you’re a national or foreigner).

If tweets, those 140 character messages sent on the Twitter service, are in fact nothing more than status updates and we personify objects, events and actions, then anything measurable can tweet.

The question everyone answers with their tweets is “What are you doing?”
The answer to that should be another counter-question: “Do we care to read?”

Even a simple tree could tweet about what it sees all day, how it interacts with insects, animals and the wind, how it grows, sheds leaves.. A private tweet to me by my laundry machine might still be useful to me at least but does the world need to know? Isn’t it enough already when I tell it to all in my own tweet stream?

Fictional accounts like @DarthVader are fun to read, and so are real, human accounts like @_Syma_. Both can’t tweet on their own and thus rely on real people who write their stories. However, this is only so long fun as it stays within the account’s personality.

Using Twitter as a micro-blog, the daily life of a tree indeed could turn into a beautiful story when carefully written – with a professional level of children books or poetry in mind. Otherwise it would turn into a dead branch of the twitterverse. Why not let an atom whine about its breakup? continue reading…