Jamey Tucker’s BlogSquat

Most people think Twitter has already hit the bigtime. Local and national news organizations are using it to gather information and connect with viewers. Celebrities are tweeting. Jimmy Fallon pulls a guy out of the audience and he has nearly a million followers.

It’s huge! Gi-normous.

But you haven’t seen anything yet.

Teenagers haven’t embraced twitter. They’re still texting. Oh, they facebook, but if my 19 year old daughter is any indication, facebook sort of jumped the shark when parents got accounts.

And now there’s twitter which their parents have gotten to first. I haven’t talked to any teenagers who’ve joined Twitter. I don’t hear them talking about tweets. But they’re about to.

This morning I reserved the Twitter user names for my wife and kids. My daughter said “yeah…okay. thanks” as she walked past me to the television carrying “The Disney Channel”. Then I showed her how it works and found the first person to follow…..

Miley Cyrus.

That’s when she screamed loud enough to make the neighborhood dogs barked. My daughter became the 32,948th follower of  Miley (and yes I checked it out before to make sure it’s really her).

She got a twitter account over the weekend at the urging of her sister Brandi.

So now my daughter is all over Twitter along with about a 1/100th of Miley’s fans.

And yes I’m following now too, my daughter and Miley just to make sure there’s nothing dad doesn’t know about that he should.

changing the blog look. May start posting here more too.

We’ve been having some fun around the house. Delaney came home from school saying her Irish teacher believes a leprechaun has been playing some tricks when they were out of the classroom.

Now that may be. But what happened next in our house should be remembered for a while.

First, the leprechaun’s started playing little tricks. Then Friday night while we were all out, the leprechauns left gold coins scattered throughout the house. Several in Delaney’s room. She was scared, but she laughed.

The next morning when I got up, Delaney was asleep in Trey’s bed. When she was in the shower, the leprechauns lined up all of the shoes in her room. Then when she came back from playing outside Saturday, her shoes had been stacked in a pyramid on her bed.

Sunday afternoon when she opened her bedroom door, shoes fell from the top of the door.

So Delaney and I searched the internet for history on leprechauns but what caught our attention the most was this honest to goodness news story from Mobile, Alabama’s NBC affiliate. Many of you have seen it already. But for those who haven’t:

My first look at Alabama newspapers this morning over at www.al.com.
The first story I see is that Alabama head coach Nick Saban has hired the former University of Virginia offensive coordinator. The brief story explains how it all happened but the web address is more interesting. As a message board visitor pointed out, the url is, well I’ll cut and paste so you can read it for yourself:
http://blog.al.com/rapsheet/2009/03/nick_saban_hires_former_virgin.html

Don’t notice it yet? He’s hired a former virgin.

And just below that headline is this one:
“Thief steals the family jewels”.

I’m not making this up. The creative, probably weekend producer came up with that headline for a one sentence report from the Huntsville police blotter.

http://blog.al.com/breaking/2009/03/post_21.html

Scary times. Unemployment numbers came out Thursday and one of  the industries highlighted was broadcasting. 5.5% unemployment.

And the places where many broadcasters would normally go once they left the business aren’t doing much better. Publishing- 7.8% unemployment. Professional and business services  10.4% unemployment.

Yesterday the Columbia School of Broadcasting shuttered all of it’s campuses. One student was interviewed on television last night, crying. “I just got an apartment here…like 5 minutes ago. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have a plan B”

Emmy winning reporter Mark Joyella left the news business this week from WPLG in Miami. According to a post on his blog, his agent tells him

there isn’t any work, and there is a phenomenal amount of talent sitting on the sidelines ready to jump at anything that opens up.

more later

I wonder how many of us will be getting our news from a local newspaper. How many local tv stations will be producing nightly newscasts in five years? Will most of us even use a desktop computer? Or is it possible that we’ll think a laptop computer is too bulky?

Surely not. We won’t be all that different from today will we?

Maybe.

But how far away does the year 2014 sound to you? That’s five years. The same distance from today that 2004 is.

And look how far technology has come since then. Few people had blogs. Only a few students at Harvard had heard about Facebook which was being developed by another student. Social Media wasn’t even a word or phrase. Twitter was impossible to fathom.  Cellphones mostly did calls. Few people even used texting.

Mark Cuban asked on his blog the other day whether our phones will replace laptops in the future. Nah, I thought. As much as I love my iPhone’s ability to scan the internet, check e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, take on-the-spot photos and keep my calendar in order, I still need my desktop or laptop.

But what if your iPhone/Blackberry/Gphone could connect to a monitor where you could have the screen space to do all you need to do? What if you came home, connected (wireless of course) to a monitor and keyboard? Or maybe your LCD flatscreen tv? And if you had a 3G or 4G network would you even pay for cable broadband or DSL?

Creative types who edit video, or do heavy processor graphics work would want their desktops of course. But for everyone else? Why would we need it?

This all popped in my head tonight because of a story I read about how the Japanese hate the iPhone. Not just because it’s a western produced device, but because the monthly subscriptions cost too much. Also the cameras resolution is too low, there’s no videocamera, and there’s no TV tuner either. In Japan, iPhone providers are giving them away for free to anyone who’ll pay the $60 per month for a plan.

And then I saw this: “A large portion of Japanese citizens live with only a cellphone as their computing device, not a personal computer”

Generally, the Japanese are far far ahead of Americans when it comes to technology, and already to them, an iPhone looks like a cellular phone with a long chord used by yuppies in the early 90s.

How much will things change in the next five years?

In 2004 I don’t imagine many of us could envision the things we’re already taking for granted today. So I cannot even begin to imagine how different things are going to be in 2014.