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Some of the news feeds I subscribe to today are all abuzz with the news that both Microsoft and Google are now going to include Twitter and some other social media outlets in their search. This is good news?

Isn’t that kind of like Headline News announcing that they’re going to include the random jabberings of any teenager off the street? Wait… do they do that now?

Don’t get me wrong. I think Twitter is neat and I tweet regularly about stuff that is going on in my life, but that’s just the thing. Whatever I am posting is guaranteed to be Jim-centric to the detriment of whatever other nouns make it into my update.

If I tweet about fanny packs, it’s because I am putting one on and letting people know that I look like a dork right now. If you’re searching for fanny pack information, you probably don’t care if I am wearing one or how it affects my carefully sculpted image.

This is also why clicking on “Trending topics” on the right hand bar of Twitter’s interface is mostly a mistake. The law of averages dictates that at least some of those should contain real insight, but I have yet to see any. It feels to me as though I’ve stumbled into a conversation among teenagers at a mall food court.

Looking at the current trending topic on Balloon Boy, it consists of a bunch of copies of the same tweet making a joke about the trending topic on the rumor that Kanye passed away. One can only wonder why Google and Bing haven’t allowed us to search this gold mine sooner, or as I am calling them from now on when speaking of them collectively, “Bingle”.

It has a nice ring to it, I feel, even though I suspect Bing won’t really be with us for long.

Motorola is turning up the buzz on the Droid phone, which aims to dislodge the iPhone from its perch of coolness. I wish them luck with their “Droid Does” campaign.

From the photos of the thing that I’ve seen, it looks like they forgot to emphasize the number one design touch of the 2000s. It is the very thing that makes Apple products look so cool: rounded corners.

Come on guys.. we all know that in the 90s the technology design touch was a rectangle with one angled corner, but nowadays if you don’t have rounded corners you might as well be in the stone age.

Granted, they did round the corners, but I think they could be a lot MORE round. After all, there is no such thing as too cool, as historic cool pioneers such as Vanilla Ice have certainly proved.

What I would really like to see is mobile phones adopting a model more like the one we enjoy with computers and internet service. That being that any computer works with any internet service. It seems to me that this is an inevitable shift, but I wish it would hurry up and get here.

I like the mobile phone innovation we’ve seen lately, thanks in no small part to RIM and Apple, but I still can’t shake the feeling I have had the entire time I have owned a cellphone, and that is that they are purposely crippled. I think mobile phone manufacturers leave out obvious features so that they can add them later and call it innovation.

I have no hard evidence to support this, it just seems like the innovation in mobile phones has come at a horribly slow pace because mobile phones enjoy a somewhat closed market, being tied to a carrier. Sure, you can unlock them, but that’s something only nerds do.

I want to see phones compete against phones and carriers compete against carriers, not people choosing AT&T because they have an exclusive deal with Apple. I think that is dumb.

I have heard some rumors that Google is going to release such a phone, and I really hope they do. I think they are the chosen ones, sent to conquer any evil with a magic wand and a weird scar!

That’s right, Google is the Harry Potter of the internet.

Man, it’s such a strange feeling to watch something like this. It’s so right on, I want to scream “Hiyah!” and kick something.

Not only are the ideas being talked about in this video directly in line with things I have been feeling for a long time, the shirt worn by the guy asking the question to begin with is also directly in line with my wardrobe. There simply is no replacement for striking content, and a weird shirt wraps things up nicely.

Speaking of weird shirts, I used to play music for a living. Back in that dark time, Myspace was the big thing. I even heard a talent buyer tell me once he judged a band solely on their number of myspace friends. If they had a lot, he would book them. If they didn’t, he wouldn’t. Maybe there was something to that. I’m not sure, honestly.

Personally when I see an event on Facebook sometimes I will mark that I plan to attend just because I like the event or the idea of the event. When it comes to actually committing my time and presence, however, that’s another story.

I think that social networking is neat, and it can be a cool way to let a group of people know what’s up with you, but thinking that it necessarily will translate outside the internet is perhaps a mistake. I have similar thoughts about online dating, as it happens.

Speaking for myself, I post on some internet forums like bikeforums.net regularly. People who also post on forums sometimes meet each other in real life. I don’t want to do that. Can you imagine the damage to my reputation if I were discovered to be an internet nerd? The shame!

Have you ever been at a party where someone mentioned something they saw on the internet and tried to get everyone to laugh about it with them? I may be alone here, but I think it often feels weird to talk in real life about something that happened on the internet. There’s a line there. It’s the line of internet nerd-dom, and once you’ve crossed it you can never return.

We all think stuff on the internet is cool, and I think we can all agree that cat videos on YouTube are hilarious, but no one likes to be outed. Internet humor and internet relationships are great… on the internet. They don’t necessarily translate.

So, should you start a blog or twitter account or facebook page for business? Yes! It’ll be fun, you’ll get to connect with new people in new ways, and you’ll get to talk all about your point of view on your own terms, all of which are great for your business. It’s not a quick fix, and I caution anyone to be wary of people charging you to tell you how to catapult your business using any method including social media.

For that sort of growth, you’ll need to incorporate some seriously loud shirts into your wardrobe. They are perpetually the right call.

I subscribe to several blogs via RSS to try to stay updated on the crazy stuff that’s going on around the world. I think people are in a mood to innovate lately, but sometimes they can go astray.

Take the WikiReader, for instance. Now, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that everyone already has this functionality in their pockets. They’re called cell phones, and they access the actual internet where Wikipedia lives.

The WikiReader, as I understand it, updates itself quarterly, and not for free either.

I guess if you intend to look up this or that on Wikipedia and you’re nowhere near any sort of technology for long periods of time it could make sense, but I don’t think it’s going to be a runaway hit. It seems to me that in that case you could take a book or print a few things out.

Seems to me like a mark missed, but I have been wrong before!

As reported here in Southern Voice, photographer Caroline Smith went down to the Krog Tunnel last week during the Atlanta flood and snapped a photo of a man and a woman in a canoe.

As you can see in the photo itself, it’s a striking image. It has great subject matter, some striking lighting conditions, and it embodies the weirdness of a flooded city. Add to that a little dash of the human propensity for making the best of a bad situation, and you’ve got yourself an incredible photo.

In the Southern Voice article, Ms. Smith talks about uploading the image to Flickr and talking about it on twitter with the #atlflood hashtag. She didn’t make any posters. She didn’t send a newsletter. She didn’t promote the image. It just took off on its own.

What I take away from this is that great content will take off given half a chance. It might not even need half a chance.

Having been a professional musician in a former life, I can tell you that there are a lot of bands and songwriters out there promoting themselves with all the gusto they can manage. They are carpet bombing every available outlet. They relentlessly text message everyone in their phones about every gig they play. And yet, they don’t take off.

I was guilty of this behavior myself. Why doesn’t it work? No good content! Those artists should spend that effort on one good song rather than trying to push twelve okay ones.

Contrast this with my friend Sonia Leigh, who has never gone looking for a gig in her life. She’s only ever played gigs other people asked her to play. When I heard that I told her I was going to play in her band. I did, for over a year.

Her songs are so good that people are dying to get her to come play her music at their venue.. she doesn’t have to sell herself because she has good content. Of course, the best combination is good marketing and good content, but good content and no marketing is a lot better than any kind of marketing and no good content.

So if things aren’t taking off, marketing might not be your problem. You might need to refine your product until it helps market itself!