Twittersheep – who’s stalking whom?
I tried Twittersheep, which gathers information from the bios of one’s followers and extracts a cloud of keywords. The biggest key words were Christian, Church, Orthodoxy and Love.
That’s OK.
The key words I dread seeing are Marketing and Entrepreneurship.
When I see them written large in tag clouds, my interest flags. When I see them as tags in blogs in MyBlogLog, I know I’m going to find it boring. But most of the entrepreneurs and marketing geeks have stopped blogging and gone Twittering. And they are the people who like following (or is it stalking) other people and collecting more followers than anyone else.
When my son graduated from Pretoria Technikon (now called the Tshwane University of Technology, or something like that) he was a bit reluctant that we should go to the graduation ceremony. Afterwards it was obvious why — he found it too cringeworthy and embarrassing.
The vice-chancellor (or his stand-in) made a speech in which he proudly announced that the Pretoria Technikon was the first tertiary educational institution in the world to include the word “entrepreneurship” in its mission statement, and at the end the lights dimmed, and there were spotlights on the new graduates as they all recited the Entrepreneurs Creed in unison. It was the essence of kitsch.
But as the global recession deepens, and the great god Entrepreneurship turns out to have feet of clay, I wonder if they will still be reciting it now.
Notes from underground 