Thursday, August 20, 2009
Get acquainted with Mashable
Social media aim to unite all of us Gen Y-ers in digital communion, but, so far, it seems to have split us into three separate camps: 1. Those of us who have no idea what a tweet is; 2. Those of us who tweet in our sleep (or at least dream of a mobile client that would make that a possibility); and 3. Those of us who don’t really know why we should care.
But fear not, all three of these camps can find a happy home at mashable.com, a powerful and user-friendly guide to being a 21st-century twentysomething.
Mashable, lead by 23-year-old Scottish wunderkind Pete Cashmore, is a one-stop resource for social media news and how-tos for navigating the crazy virtual world of tweets, vlogs and Nings.
Mashable is an incredibly useful tool for learning how to engage in the social media revolution and how to make your online presence work for you. In addition to frequently updated news — covering everything from new iPhone applications to new Radiohead digital releases — Mashable’s hefty how-to lists educate on everything from how to use Facebook to get a job to five ways to get the most out of your music collection.
Mashable is at once a moving history of the social media revolution and a tool for how to use it to your advantage. No matter what camp you fall into (I’m somewhere between 1 and 2), there’s handy, easily digestible information on Mashable to improve and simplify your online life.
Experiment with ‘Google-plotzing’
As much as we love and advocate technology (follow JayplayMagazine on Twitter!), we know sometimes it can get a little creepy. Every once in awhile we need a little revolt against the Digital Man.
Enter, Google-plotzing, one man’s quirky attempt to make Gmail ads more useful by being a little snarky with the technology.
Esquire writer Tom Chiarella detailed what he called Google-plotzing in a funny and small-revolution-inspiring essay in the magazine’s June issue. Bored with the ads Google had been generating based on keywords in his e-mails, Chiarella began to place random words at the end of his correspondence to try to mess with the ad-generator.
“I enjoyed the idea of Google-bots working to make sense of the presence of mangoes in a letter about a tax return. It felt both seditious and productive, my personal cloud of privacy,” Chiarella writes in the article. He fueled his one-man revolt with words such as “steel wire,” “despair” and “Rhoade Island” in his digital post-scripts.
So, we say give it a try, too, and give your lazy Google-bots a good kick in the pants.
Feel free to send some of your rebellious e-mails our way at jayplay09@gmail.com. Just make sure there’s something snarky in the P.S.
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