In response to Al Gore's twitter account/blog site

For this blog assignment, I decided to take a look at Al Gore's twitter account. I'm not exactly sure why, but after doing some poking around I feel like Al Gore's account in particular just strengthens several of my current opinions.

First, I would like to state that I've always thought Twitter to be an insanely pointless site that does nothing more than accelerate the process of “dumbing down' the global population. When Twitter first broke into an unexplainable popularity among social network fanatics, it's first recognizable flaw was that one could only post very short “tweets” which are comparable to Facebook's “status'. In response to someone's tweet, one could only respond with another tweet, which leaves followers with nothing more than a thread of short idiotic statements with which to read. Not only do we have regular everyday people posting shallow statements about where they are and what they are doing on the internet, but now we have celebrities and other “significant” people tweeting. In this particular case, I was surprised to find that even the former Vice President Al Gore was spending his valuable time with something as pointless as twitter.

Al Gore, as expected, spends his days tweeting about the same out-of-context crap that everyone else does, but every so often I was able to make out what one of his tweets actually meant. Of those that I could decrypt, most were about environmental awareness. If you spend enough time actually putting the pieces together, I'm sure you could find that to be a common theme throughout his entire Twitter profile. Though, what I find makes this website at all useful is its advertising capabilities. Gore, after every one of his tweets, includes a link to his blog where he can actually tell you what he's trying to talk about.

So after shedding the waste of time that is Twitter, I was able to read some of Gore's intellectual thoughts in whole pieces on his blog site. It's not a highly decorated site, but for a picture of Gore sitting as his desk. This picture, combined with a section that allows users to “join the conversation”gives Gore's audience the impression that they are speaking to him directly, which they may or may not be doing. Also, on this site, Gore's blog section is labeled “Journal” again trying to validate everything written as his own original work, which again, it may or may not be. Avoiding that point, one can still clearly see that this site makes a significantly better attempt at advertising what Gore wants readers to hear. There is a section to purchase books and DVDs as well as a section that routes visitors to Gore-supported sites, such as TheClimate Reality Project and on occasion he throws in a link for political purposes.

Twitter is good for advertising to other Twitter users. One simply posts a link as a tweet and hopes that people follow it to a real site. As close to useless as Twitter actually is, what really grinds my gears is the fact that people will drop the words “hash tag” to me in real life in a real life conversation. Get a life outside of the world wide web losers. I apologize if I've offended anyone, I'm slightly passtionate about this particular topic.