Chad Smith

I got to do some cool shit this year. I visited two countries I’d long longed to, England and France; went to Texas; saw the Gators win their third football championship; saw them beat Louisiana State in Death Valley; went to a Premier League match; was interviewed on MSNBC; had a few stories featured on Bizarre Florida; had the pleasure of visiting Disneyland Paris; and so on.

But I don’t think I will remember 2009 fondly. After all, it was the year that left us with these enduring images: a seemingly occupied balloon floating over the Colorado desert; the mug shot of the governor of South Carolina, who was thought to be missing in the Appalachian Mountains but was really off bopping some South American broad unbeknownst to his staff (not to mention his family); Tiger Woods’ smashed-up SUV; a Texas military base in chaos; thousands mourning Michael Jackson’s hardly untimely death; protesters around my age dying on the streets of Tehran.

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Recently, whoever keeps track of such things declared “Web 2.0″ the millionth word in the English language. The newspaper I work for — traditionally stubborn toward the Web, the norm in the industry — last week set up Facebook and Twitter accounts. The Time cover story last week was about tweeting, and several of the podcasters I listen to regularly — Bill Simmons, Adam Carolla, etc. — in recent weeks have gone from talking shit about the tweeting phenomenon/claiming ignorance about it to using it to promote upcoming shows and criticize Dwight Howard.

Sigh. I guess I might as well get on board too.

I think there’s a legitimate news application for Twitter, and I guess there’s a legitimate social application as well. It seems to work for The New York Times, as it does for Miley Cyrus. (By the way, if asked to bet I would have guessed Miley has more followers than The Times. Not so. NYT leads by about 200,000. I suppose that’s encouraging.)

I’m excited about the possibilities of implementing it at the paper, but we should all quit if mainstream, legitimate news ever begins to look like this:

we getting hustled? all candid’s pre-selected by clerics and hold position a-jad regime? takes bite out of “populist revolt”? #iranelection
about 10 hours ago from web
ChrisCuomo [ABC anchor]

Right.

So begins Round 2 of my Great Twitter Experiment. I had an account for about a week senior year, but I quickly realized I neither had the time to “micro blog” nor was I interesting enough to do it consistently. But if the aforementioned starlet can figure out something worthwhile to, uh, tweet, I better be able to come up with something too.

(Sry for goin over 140 chrctrs.)