yooRyoo.com

Marketers marketing to other marketers

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”
-    Lloyd Dobbler in “Say Anything”

Twitter has become Ads masked as tweets. Everyone is advertising how “bleeding edge” they are, trumpeting their services along with the antics of their cat, so as to appear “real” and not as the advertising/branding/marketing machine they really are.  But, at the same time they subscribe to Google alerts, Alltop and other news pushers, just so they can tweet about just-in-time news events so as to appear “relevant” and “in the know.”

Automation
Automation has entered Twitter, with twit-bots  from Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop,  et al. It leverages the machines instant monitoring of certain subjects, and tweets for you on the subjects you want to focus on.  The stream of tweets enters the twitter-sphere with the advantages of real-time twitter-stream, providing endless grist for the online mill.

Why use automation? Because it works. Just ask Google. They stomped Yahoo because Yahoo was a human-driven directory, and Terminator movies and Saberhagen’s Berserker books notwithstanding, in a war between smart machines and human catalogers, the machine wins.

You will be assimilated
Whiners will say: but that’s not human! That’s not the point of Twitter! Twitter is about the free exchange of ideas, and my cat, and Ashton Kutcher!

Wrong! You fail. Twitter is more about news scoops, advertising, marketing and one-on-one pay-per-minute webscams.  It’s about recruiting an army of twaves, and spamming everyone with your marginal ideas.

Discourse takes time and thought and more than 140 characters. Twitter is the virtual watercooler, the raison d’être of the World of Warcraft jetset, the 30 second attention span theatre of our decaying braintrust.  What Brave New World are we entering when everyone tries to outdo everyone else on outing the death of Michael Jackson, and as a result take down the internet?  Okay, okay, so TMZ scooped his death, now shut the f up.

But Twitter is about relationships – not!
How do you have a relationship with over a million followers? Twitter is a broadcast medium, kinda like a text talk radio.  Subscribers subscribe so you can tell them what to think. Dialogues happen, just like in talk radio, but by your choice.

Twitter seems more like high school cliques, with people grouping themselves by interests: the Jocks with the other jocks and cheerleaders, Freaks outside in the smoking area, and the Thespians divining a route through. They market to themselves, trying to build each other up, gain followers to send pronouncements to, with the final result being self-defeating.  The reality is: no one cares. We live in a selfish world with selfish interests. Everyone is talking to hear themselves talk. The end game is that Twitter will eat itself. It will be abandoned the instant it either A) charges money, or B) The next big marketing platform comes along.

The lemmings, they are a-leaping!
Join the twaves, get caught up in the mindless tweeting and re-tweeting, hoping it gets you somewhere, even when “somewhere” is at the bottom of a cliff. The death spiral welcomes you – at the speed of 140 characters a minute.

Friends and followers of yooRyoo may wonder what happened to the satirical, Web 2.0 postings? As you may have read from previous posts, yooRyoo is desperately seeking writers that have a unique perspective on social media to help us expand our content.

Satire is not dead, but is somewhat stalled in this economy. What with Steve Jobs not presenting at MacWorld, we all have to focus on our health and economic stability. Will the internet kill TV? Will Microsoft actually embrace cloud computing? Whatever happened to Palindrones?

If you are a writer, comedian or just a snarky observer of Web 2.0 tecnologies, and want to earn pennies per click…the internet (and moreover, yooRyoo) is for you. Submit your ideas and stories to us, and we’ll gladly present them to our loyal audience…

Think you have a unique satirical view of Web 2.0 and want to present it to thousands – nay, millions of interested parties? Like to make fun of the latest technologies and have your content appreciated worldwide? Want to post a comedic YouTube video and actually have people view it, and not make snarky comments about your material?

Then don’t post anything on the web.

However, if you are a fan of yooRyoo and think you have the intestinal fortitude to spew publish for our site (that is, you can form complete sentences and walk at the same time and are somewhat humorous), then we want you!

Simply fill out our Submissions form, and, if you bribe us pass the audition, we’ll steal grab up your content, package it up with nasty people doing nasty things pretty pictures and animated GIFs, and spew publish it, giving you partial full credit (because, lord knows, we wouldn’t want to be directly associated with that masterpiece dreck).

yooRyoo exclusive report: The Phoenix Project.

On the heels of the much-ballyhooed Palin-drone robotic expose, yooRyoo’s investigative reporters have uncovered another secret government machinated program – special code-name: The Phoenix Project. And much like Project Blue-Book, this tale is filled with decoys and red herrings designed to confuse the average citizen.

“The government is resurrecting extinct animals, first through robot lookalikes they license to private companies, and then eventually through indistinguishable DNA lookalikes,” says an unnamed government agent who was not authorized to reveal his military ranking. After revealing top secret photographs of laboratories filled with unspeakable, Frankensteinien images, our investigators pressured him to reveal more.

“The most recent example is the once thought to be extinct pygmy tarsier,” the unnamed source went on, “This extinct animal was first brought back to life by the government in 1965 – even before the tarsier was  declared extinct. Then, later it was ‘brought to life’ again, via the popular Hasbro electronic Furby robotic toy.”

We learned the conspiracy ran so deep that even the toy manufacturer did not know the true origins of the device, the result of a top secret biological-pharmaceutical-robotic-creating government agency working on The Phoenix Project.

And much like a real “Jurassic Park” The Phoenix Program was originally designed to bring back extinct animals by splicing their DNA with hydraulic hinges. These first forays looked less like robotic animals, and more like a Roomba.

Efforts to make these initial creatures as realistic and lifelike as the real pygmy tarsier failed, so they hired a patsy “inventor” to take the concept to Hasbro, and allowed the toy company the ability to make millions of dollars on those annoying toys called Furbys. And then the government set out to try to really resurrect the pygmy tarsier.

Through inserting the DNA harvested from the carcass of a real pygmy tarsier into the ovum of a chimpanzee, scientists have created what is essentially a lookalike for the extinct pygmy tarsier.

“This is not an imitation of the once extinct pygmy tarsier; it is the pygmy tarsier,” added the government agent. “And yes, it does taste like chicken.”

Our source revealed that while the government was focused on creating tasty tarsiers, the Phoenix Project has also been dabbling in other robotic efforts, including the robotic Dolphin

- which is a replicant of the once thought to be extinct Chinese River Dolphin:

While these results are freakish and unthinkable, our investigators are left with one overarching question: “can the real Jurassic Park be far behind?”

Senator Ted Stevens is the latest fallout from the discovery of Palin-drones in our nation’s government. Last week, Sen. Stevens – from Alaska – was convicted on corruption charges stemming from over $250,000 in home renovations (along with a massage chair, dog…).

Yet, begging incredulity, at this writing, Sen. Stevens might be possibly re-elected in Alaska, making him the only sitting Senator to be a convicted felon. How could that be? The answer is simple -  Senator Ted Stevens is (yes, you guessed it!) a Palin-Drone (remember Palin-drones?)!!!

That’s where Emmit comes in…Emmit is a Blade Runner (made famous by the movie of the same name). His old job was to retire Replicants; now he retires Palin-Drones. Having been appointed a US District Court Judge, Emmit was assigned to the Senator’s case:

Bryant: I need ya, Ems. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old blade runner, I need your magic.

Emmit: [narrating] They don’t advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-blade runner. Ex-killer. Now, I’m just a judge taking down “Palin-drones”…

Emmit could stand the reversals on political viewpoints, even reversals in voting, but what he couldn’t stand by to watch was a rogue Palin-Drone, seemingly in it just for the graft: Senator Ted Stevens. What follows is testimony from last week’s closing deliberations in the Sen. Stevens trial:

U.S. District Judge Emmit Sullivan: [Emmet explains to Ted why he can't extend his Senate term] The facts of life… to make an alteration in the specifics of an organic legal system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it’s been established.
Ted Stevens:Why not?
U.S. District Judge Emmit Sullivan: Because by the second day of deliberation, any Palin-Drones that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Ted Stevens:What about EMS recombination?
Emmit: We’ve already tried it – abuse of power, voter tampering, looking the other way while an American city drowns as an alkalating agent and potent mutagen; it created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before it even left the table.
Stevens: Then a repressor protein; that would block the operating Palin-Drones.
Emmit: Wouldn’t obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation, and you’ve got a virus again… but this, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Stevens: But not to last.
Emmit: The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Ted. Look at you, you’re a US Senator; you’re quite a prize.
Stevens: I’ve done… questionable things.
Emmit: Also extraordinary things; revel in your time.
Stevens: Nothing the God of biomechanics wouldn’t put you in heaven for.

As of this writing, Senator Ted Stevens has still eluded being “retired” by Emmit – or as Emmit put it “He went rogue on us…just like that hot chick that ran for VP – and I don’t mean Darryl Hannah.” The Palin-drone Stevens remains on the loose, dangerous, and defiant.

When attempted to reach for comment, Sarah Palin was busy on the phone: presumably talking to the heads of foreign countries… (Audio here)

A sincere plea from yooRyoo today: it’s an important election day. Please – whatever you do – get out there and vote. Even if you have to wait in line a few hours…please vote!!! It’s worth it!

The “ghost is in the machine”…so if you are voting on a machine, make sure that ghost is representing you. Make your vote count!!!

Make sure to carefully watch your ballot for accuracy. Here is an actual flimed testimony of how the machines can easily be “non-calibrated” and cast the wrong vote:

Here’s Homer’s take on it:

In this particular heated election year, a rise of online political polling has spread like a virus on the internet. At any given count, there are hundreds…yea, thousands…of online political polls dedicated to parsing numbers and voters, left and right, depending on how the wind blows.

Along with the rise of these polls, came the rise of political polling techniques – opinion polling, early voting polling, phone call polling, online popularity polls. Every major news organization – and even Fox News – has created their own polling techniques, not to mention fancy electronic boards to display their information in their news casts.

To that end, ostensibly, Picken & McCracken, leading researchers and statisticians (famous for their recent study that 67% of all web statistics are made up on the spot) have applied a Noble-prize winning technique and weighed in on the latest political polls.

Using state-of-the-art techniques, Picken & McCracken have employed, phones, cell-phones, email, Facebook, Twitter, IM and a host of other online techniques, and reached out to virtually every American in a short period of time. They compiled their results and just published their latest election poll numbers:

• 97% of all Americans have never participated in any election poll
• Of those 97% of people, 73.4% of them responded to Picken and McCracken’s poll and their first statement was “Oh crap… now I participated in a poll. Can I switch sides?”
• 13% of all American can’t make simple decisions like: skim milk or cream in my coffee, Subway or Quiznos for lunch, should I take Sally to dance class or Billy to practice? Inevitably, these same 13% are found right in front of you in the checkout lane at the supermarket
• States like Ohio are virtually split 50/50 with every decision they have to make (Picken brought up the 2005 Ohio Baskin Robbins “Chocolate or Vanilla” vote, in which “Chocolate” won by 3 votes)
• While Politicians focus on certain states to statistically win Electoral Votes like Ohio, Florida, and this year, Pennsylvania and Colorado, voters in those non “swing states” have a more enjoyable TV viewing experience, not having to ignore campaign commercials

Upon its release today, this study is expected to change the political polling landscape today. When asked for it’s impact, most major news outlets dismissed the study by stating: “You can’t believe those polls, anyway…now, back to our latest poll results…”

Meanwhile, the US Voters are nonplussed.

Poor Rick Astley never gets a break in this Web 2.0 world. After suddenly re-appearing on the pop scene last year due to a surge of “rick-rolling” on YouTube, Mr. Astley was rediscovered by millions of new listeners throughout the world. The demand for his techno-pop-synth sounds soared, so much so that he announced his plan to tour Japan and the Far East, digging up his 80′s pseudo-music catalog for newer, younger audiences.

Just when the money began rolling back to Rick Astley’s pockets, a newer internet craze surfaced on the web, a craze designed to humiliate this singer of such hits as “Never Gonna Give You Up” and “Together Forever”….Roll Ricking.

Roll Ricking is a malicious prank targeting Rick Astley directly – just as he takes to the stage and the opening strains of his Number 1 hits flow from the computer banks (doubling as his band), large screens drop from the ceilings, and different videos begin showing inane video clips such as:

• LOLcats montages
• videos of people inadvertently taking a hit to their crotch
• naked webcam girls that want to get freaky with you – FREE!
• clothed webcam girls that want to mildly suggest things to do with you – FREE!
• other people singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” in Karaoke

These video events are subsequently filmed and uploaded back to YouTube.

Rick Astley caught on tape at a latest concert

Already humiliated at four concerts in Japan and Hong Kong, Rick Astley has been quoted as stating: “This is enough – there’s only so much this One (maybe Two) Hit Wonder of the 80′s can take – I’m quitting touring for good.” After blowing his nose, he added: “Besides, I just got offered a hosting job at VH-1 for their new reality/trivia/nostalgia program: “Growing up with Denise Richards in the I Love the 80′s Rock of Love game show.”

YouTube viewers, when reached for comment, left more than 4,000 smarmy responses on voicemail – maybe two or three of them relevant and/or funny.

Happy Sunday, yooRyoo followers. As you know, every Sunday we like to bring you a feature called “Is It Real?” – where we present a web 2.0 company or technology, give you a brief overview of the product, and then ask you to decide if it’s real or not. We reveal the answer to you on Friday, so you have a whole week to vote!

Here’s the catch: you can’t use the web in any way to determine if the company is real or not. You just have to guess, based on what’s presented of you. So, without any more ado, here is this Sunday’s “Is It Real?“…

As you know Facebook allows members to gather together under formal “groups” – thus, proclaiming your likeness with other denizens of this social network. To that end, Facebook users have created a group called “I Tend to Fart in Public” with the following description:

This is a group for sharing horror stories about farting in a socially unacceptable setting. it’s happened to all of us and we could all use a safe place to talk about it.

There are currently 23 members of this group, but once the word gets out, they expect an explosive rise in new members…

Is "I Tend to Fart in Public" a real Facebook group?

• Maybe - because when I fart in public, I let out silent ones...so no one knows it's me (67%, 2 Votes)
• Yes - since I tend to fart in public all the time, this must be a real group (33%, 1 Votes)
• No - I can't imagine ever farting in public...I always do it in the privacy of my office, home or car. (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 3

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Happy Friday, everyone. So glad the weekend is almost here! This Friday Fishwrap celebrated the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Bejing, as well as reveals to you the results of last Sunday’s “Is It Real?” Let’s get started…

Last Sunday in our “Is It Real?” feature, we presented to you a Twitter application that allows you to be an online poseur, automatically research the followers of your “Twitter hero” and recommending to you which ones you should be stalking…er, following. Then we asked if this application – Twannabe – is indeed real.

• 50% of you thought it was real
• 50% thought it was fake

In reality, Twannabe is a REAL APPLICATION. Don’t believe me, check it out yourself: www.twannabe.com

Congratulations to those that guessed correctly. So, without further ado, here is today’s Olympic-themed Friday-Fishwrap video: Funny Olympic Videos…