Monday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch carried a whimsical piece about eight campaign phrases that may disappear from America’s lexicon for at least four more years. They are:
Joe the Plumber
Change
Country first
Redistribute
My Friends (McCain)/Ladies and Gentlemen (Biden)
Maverick
Yes We Can
Hockey mom
The writer omitted one phrase that I hope to never hear again in a campaign:
Measuring the drapes.
Update, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008: Apparently no shots were fired in Wednesday’s incident at Western Kentucky University. WKU defends erroneous reports about shooting.
I first heard about today’s shooting at Western Kentucky University via Twitter. Here’s how the story unfolded for me a few hours ago:
Scanning my Twitter feed, I noticed this post from @steverubel (of Micro Persuasion fame):
I clicked the friendfeed link in hopes of learning more details about the shooting (such as what college, how many hurt, etc.). But there wasn’t much available yet, only:
“REPORTS: MULTIPLE GUNMEN ON WESTERN KENTUCKY CAMPUS; STUDENTS IN “IMMEDIATE DANGER”; URGED TO TAKE SHELTER. DETAILS SOON.” (link)
This is the third or fourth time I’ve gotten breaking news from my Twitter stream. I see this as a growing trend.
So does Rubel. In a blog post today, he writes that the newsfeed is the future of news.
Newsfeeds elegantly combine peers and pros, algorithms and networks. They know no bounaries. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb agrees. This is why social networks will become the primary theater for PR in five years time.
“The newsfeed metaphor,” writes Rubel, “synergizes commentary, activity, relevance and timeliness and that’s why it’s the beginning of a new era in news.”
Among the 400-plus tweeters I keep an eye on, there are a handful of news organizations. Not one of them fed me the information about this shooting as quickly as Rubel did with his link to BreakingNewsOn’s friendfeed site. BreakingNewsOn, billed as “the breaking news wire,” also has a Twitter account that I am now following.
BreakingNewsOn also is based in the Netherlands, and it broke the news about an event that happened in Kentucky. Only on the Internet.
Andrew Careaga 