Audio By Carbonatix
How do you sum up your day in 140 characters on Twitter? At the 140 Character Conference in New York Tuesday and Wednesday, live, ten-minute speakers spread out from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Luckily, there were no mentions of what anyone was eating or how much someone loves Justin Bieber.
Everything Twitter was discussed. Tweeps live-tweeted and live-chatted. Action was live-streamed. It was intense. Who typed the most interesting quotes the fastest? Who paraphrased the current speaker in Tweetable length…, while including the #140conf hash tag? On the twitterverse, the conference became a top trending topic. Twitter was continuously “over capacity.”
It all began with a welcome from Miss America 2010 Caressa Cameron and conference creator Jeff Keni Pulver, before jumping into talks with NYU professors and CEOs. Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak, welled up viewers via new social media campaigns showing how a tweet is sort of like a Kodak moment. Aww.
But the speaker who really stood out during the two-day event was Chris Weingarten. A self-proclaimed “last rock critic standing,” the freelance writer for Rolling Stone, Spin, Revolver, and Village Voice, among others, was straight, to the point, and funny. He compared music to math and even claimed the advent of the Internet was killing his job. Most of his monologue dealt with bashing the Hype Machine. My favorite idea: “Good writing dies at the hands of search engine optimization.” He even compared listening to new music to “playing Mad Libs with Google trends.” The Internet has bands becoming “Internet hustlers.”
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His Twitter handle @1000TimesYes became a trending topic at one point. Tons of soccer moms and conservatives chatted beside the live stream concerning how “crude” his language was. Some even counted how much he cursed.
On the live stream, the number of viewers was displayed at the bottom of the screen. It increased from the hundreds to the thousands as he spoke. Weingarten created a meme blog (hipsterpuppies.tumblr.com) and now has a book deal in the works for it, maybe to offset all of his inner music rage with cute puppies.
