Tramp Stamp

Lindsay Lohan, once a Hollywood star, claims that E*Trade referred to her when they produced a commercial referencing “That milkaholic, Lindsay.”

It will take a lot more money than that to make the desperate Lindsay Lohan right. This looks like a sick attempt to work over a lost career with a high-profile “killed the spouse” kind of court appearance. We have seen similar attempts to bring back a name before, but perhaps none more pathetic.

Oh, but maybe she will just love what the Internet will say about her. Social media is great this way. Maybe some dude in Omaha will still send a Twitter update that says he “would do her.”

One thing you can pretty well bet is that it is not milk in this Lindsay’s lunchbox.

Enjoy the cute E*Trade video. While you watch the video, imagine who got the best side of this social media experiment … Lindsay Lohan or E*Trade. My guess is that E*Trade will gain a lot more value than Lindsay Lohan will.

For more information on the lawsuit, see the New York Post article: “Lindsay Lohan wants $100M over E-Trade ad”

The World Loves a Dubeshag

Social media vernacular is amazing in its reach, and often hilarious in its final accepted form. Crowd sourcing is certainly interesting, and when you apply it to linguistics you never know what you may get. There is usually a semi-logical genesis for the terms we use. For example, in the world of online gaming the term “pwn” appears to have sprung from teenagers busy juggling an energy drink, a bag of chips, and a game controller while “owning” their rival. Notice how close the “o” key is to the “p” key on a QWERTY keyboard. Thus the widely accepted word “pwn” (pronounced “pone”) was born.

Douchebag is So 2009

When social media looked for a word to describe great disdain for a person, they revived an old 1980′s favorite of mine, “douchebag”. I was beaten up so much for that word back in school that I still flinched a few times as I watched it regain popularity. How popular is the term “douchebag” today as it relates to social media and SEO? A look at a Twitter search for douchebag is shocking. Sure, there are a squillion douchebags out there, but I think we wore this word out for a couple more decades (or more).

Now this is safe for work, so don’t worry. I am going to unleash a new term as you scroll down, complete with illustrations. It may offend you a bit, but I am not your grandmother. It cannot be any worse than douchebag. Believe it or not, the word douchebag is kind of offensive to some people. In fact, it is kind of a fightin’ word. Heck, in social media, about any word beyond “at, is, but, the, that, and if” can be construed as offensive. You should have seen what happened one day on Twitter when I let fly with the word “hormonal”. Hormonal chicks everywhere and their douchebag sidekick playing the “trust me I’m gay” role went nuts. Nuts I tell ya!

Douchebag kicks it up a notch. It is so negative and mean that I thought we needed something nice. We needed a social media term of endearment of some sort to make up for our transgressions.

A Social Media Term of Endearment is Born!

Why does social media need yet another word? I consider the terms surrounding social media such as authenticity, crowdsourcing, transparency, collective intelligence, and douchebag. The list is long, and it is largely crafted by douchebags people who needed a word that would make them sound smarter. Then I get to looking around me at things that are so obvious but I don’t know what to call them. One in particular is the huge fad of not-so-amazingly-handsome fellas who collectively became one of the best known yet least discussed memes of social media. You know him. He is the guy with some extra pizza dough perched above his belt, a pair of moobs, or maybe had a little extra acne as a kid. Yet, against the odds and with help from social media, he has proved his rightfully earned authority as much as any of the Budweiser Real Men of Genius.

So, last night as I was lying in bed beside my supermodel-like wife and contemplating all of those less beautiful people whom I sincerely believe deserve a meme, it hit me. It was like a light bulb exploded over my head. “I’ve got it! Dubeshag … It is familiar, it is fun to say (dooooob – shaaag), and it does not have any other associated meaning. Dubeshag!“ I’ll bet Webster’s Dictionary didn’t see that one coming.

No, I don’t mean guys like Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com. I think most guys would be uncomfortable if their wife was stranded at a ski lodge with that dude … with champagne … and a hot tub … just “waiting” for the roads to clear as they nibble on strawberries. Arrgggghhh! No, not him at all. He is definitely not a dubeshag!

Ashton Kutcher? Well, maybe he could be a dubeshag, except that his wife alone makes him too good looking. Have you ever seen the movie Striptease?! Sorry Ashton … you are out by association.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not necessarily mean the “coyote ugly” guy or the one with a face for radio. I mean, they can be a dubeshag, too. What I mean is the guy you would be more likely to see on Saturday Night Live than as a prime time news anchor.

Winning One for “The Dubeshag”

You may ask, “But Mark, do you have some examples of The Dubeshag to share?” Oh yes, my friends, I do have dubeshag examples. Here are just a few photos of respected dubeshags. An all inclusive list would take forever, but I want to invite you to nominate a dubeshag in the blog comments.

Here are links for the famous-ish dubeshags pictured above, plus a a bonus of the shamefully unphotogenic Dee Tremendous. Enjoy!

• Chris Brogan
• Dee Tremendous
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Gerald Weber
• Guy Kawasaki
• JD Rucker
• Jason Urgo
• Patrick Parise
• Reg Saddler
• Rob McNealy
• Robert Scoble
• Thomas Clifford
• Tommy Walker

Nominate a Dubeshag

Go ahead, you know a dubeshag or two. Just think of a creative genius type whom you would trust with your little sister … snowed in at a ski resort.

Sadly, as much as I would love to one day become a dubeshag, my wife has precluded my induction. I feel your pain, Ashton Kutcher.

I think a lot of bullies can probably recall somebody they actually liked and respected, but when prompted by the crowd would still insult him and be mean. Social media has changed some of that tone of bullies, but then there are still the ones who want to bully me for writing this or who question my nefarious motives. I wrote it for fun and to entertain. If you think I was paid for it, you are wrong. If you think I wrote it to insult a dubeshag, you are wrong. If you think I wrote it for attention, I would have left it as a draft if I didn’t want people to read it. Sure, I want it to be read. Maybe you just blog for the entertainment of your cats, but I do it for public consumption.

It is laughable how some people never got beyond that sort of cynical thinking and ugly behavior that many of us left in high school. To them, I would have to say that the geeky kid you made fun of has a pretty big voice, and although you get a mention here, you may just be a douchebag bully. The dubeshag often has more friends than you.

There is buzz about iPad possibly bringing on a fire sale for Apple’s video. If it is true, it seems that Apple may be dropping television show pricing by half or more, down to 99 cents. This begs the question, “Since when did Apple ever consider price in their marketing?” Price, or compatibility for that matter. They have long suffered a smaller software offering, but when does the apple get too ripe for eating?

I doubt that dropping the price of iTunes will make up for the other shortcomings of Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Without supporting Adobe Flash while Adobe is making strides with the competition puts Apple and Adobe greatly at odds. Although Adobe had a three percent drop in share prices following Apple’s Steve Jobs’ announcement that iPad will not support Flash, it may be too early to tell how this will affect Apple.

According to comScore, the iPhone is up approximately one point two percent in market share, but that may change with Adobe Flash hitting the Android and Windows Mobile markets.

It is too bad that Apple and Adobe cannot play nice, because without Flash, Apple will have a steep path to climb convincing consumers that iPad will revolutionize Web surfing. It may do so, but it is a long fall from the Apple tree if support for alternative video does not increase as quickly as they hope. In the meantime, users will see a lot of gaping holes in their browsing experience.

The obvious alternative to the Adobe Flash player is HTML 5, which is surely in our future. However, considering that approximately 75 percent of all interactive Internet advertisements and 90 percent of video runs on Flash, it will take time. The challenge for Apple may be greater when more people have taken the opportunity to try YouTube’s HTML 5 beta. I am a fan of HTML 5, but after testing YouTube’s HTML 5 video player for about a week, I was very disappointed. Considering YouTube’s position in the video market, it seems apparent that if they cannot lead with a great offering, it could be a while before the rest of the Internet gets it right.

Some would say that the challenge is on Adobe, but while 98 percent of computers connected to the Internet have Adobe Flash player installed, it may be hard to convince content providers to replace such a massive portion of the Internet with the HTML 5 solution. It will take time. Perhaps more time than even Apple’s cult-like following will stand for.

Tell me what you think. Who wins this battle in the short and long term?

Don’t get me wrong. Email is still used, and if you ask anybody trying to sell you an email marketing campaign, it is the best thing ever and just getting better. If you believe that, I have a newspaper to sell you.

Let’s face it, if email was a movie character, it would look like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. Just like the spammers who messed it up for the rest of us. Fortunately for many of us, we are smarter. We figured out social media. We know Facebook, and Twitter, and RSS. We don’t need your stinkin’ email.

How did this happen? Consider the last time you trusted your cousin Cindy with your email address. Did you ever? I mean, a person can only sort through so many CC:’d political jokes and inspirational poems before their head explodes. I thought “Cc:” was for when you were sending something to a very small group of concerned parties, while “Bcc:” was for sending out to that horde of folks who may or may not have updated their virus protection.

On top of that, actually because of that, you have every con artist in Nigeria begging to wire the $50,000,000 USD that their dead uncle, the Czar of Cantspellworthistan, has tied up in some kind of mysterious probate. Why the heck did the Czar of Cantspellworthistan have US dollars, anyway?

What’s worse is that all of the sudden you have all of cousin Cindy’s pals emailing back and forth. You have seen this, right? The squillion people emailing their LOLs and goofy replies to the whole group of people. Then as soon as just one of those twits gets a virus KABOOM! Your inbox splits at the seams.

This description took a lot of health points away from email the way a shot in the chest does on Halo 3, but since it was still an easy option for reaching everybody from A to Z, it still had a pulse. The sniper rifle shot to the head that finally put email in a body bag came much later.

This is Cousin Cindy. She was so much sweeter back then!

Spam filtering got a little better, and in 2003 some brilliant people enacted The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. It was kind of a joke to most spammers, and in 2004 less than one percent of spam was in compliance with the law. Of course, when the people managing your email servers figured out that there was no way all of the email about Viagra was legitimate, you could actually catch back up with Cindy and her pals’ email, but you had to filter diligently.

On April first 2004, Google’s Gmail came along with some CPR and breathed life back to into email. April first is April Fools’ Day, which is fitting. Email was still looking pretty old and wrinkled, with one foot on a banana peel and the other hanging over a cliff.

In comes MySpace and Facebook like princes on white steeds. The things you had tried so hard to keep up with from Cindy started getting through. If you didn’t read the message, she could just post it to the wall and you could see it whenever you were good and ready.

OK, the wall thing can kind of stink, but that is another post, for another day. Damn you Farmville!

Something nice about the email from social networks is that people are not actually seeing your email and do not have access to harvest it like a 27 year old mullet head in a Camaro at the high school. Plus, I can choose to ignore cousin Cindy’s annoying friend Patty’s friend request.

Since so few people actually have the attention span of a toothpick these days, in comes Twitter to brighten our communications world. Twitter is great. Just tell me what you have to say, but don’t bug me with the story about grandma’s sick cat getting into the trash again with 4,000 words, OK? Think about it a moment first and find a way to cram it down to 140 characters. This works for about 90 percent of the email I used to get. Seriously, I love Twitter. I love it so much I wrote a book about it. I actually sold 14 copies (mostly to mom and her gracious friends). The point about every Twitter user being an expert about Twitter … yeah, another post, another day.

So we all love Twitter, right? Then we have Google trying to jump on board, first with Google Wave and most recently with Google Buzz. It is fine, but I guess I didn’t drink enough Gmail Kool Aid. I still think their efforts are better spent frustrating the less talented SEOs.

All in all, perhaps the greatest killer of email in the social media killing tool set is the RSS feed. It is still a bit confusing to some people like cousin Cindy, but if you just get to know RSS and become close with your reader, (I use Google Reader) you will love it. Before you know it, the “cousin Cindy’s” of the world may pick up on the fact that you can find some pretty darn cool inspirational poems and cute kitty cat pictures without her help. Delivered to your feed reader, even! No spam. Just the stuff you asked for.

Here, just try it for yourself and subscribe to Mobile Local Social so we never get lost in the email.

By the way, if you just cannot stand not knowing my email address, it is thebigcheese@veryimportantguy.com. Ever since I responded to that cheap Rolex offer Cindy sent me, I cannot seem to use it anyway.

Webcams have carved out a large market since their earliest use in 1991. It is hard to believe the impact something so small and cheap and plasticy can have on our privacy, our friendships, our news delivery, and yes (drumroll please) even our sexuality. You saw that coming, right?

We have come a long way since the first known webcam, which was focused on the coffee pot in the Trojan Room at University of Cambridge.

I remember the early days with my overpriced Cracker Jack toy-like camera. Trying to push that grainy picture through the comparatively tiny pipes we had for Internet access back then was like a poodle giving birth to a rhinoceros.

It was not very long before coffee pots and animals gave way to Internet video sensations like Jennifer Ringley of JenniCam, and technology webcaster Chris Pirillo.

Later, the boom of the webcam forged a huge spam market similar to that of the little blue pill. They were cheap and available everywhere. Not only that, we finally had more ways to use them.

As the technology improved, we started seeing more instant video from all over the place. It went mobile, and not just people going out to get video and putting it on YouTube twenty minutes later. The live video streaming sensation went mobile in a big way.

I am no Al Gore (self-proclaimed creator of the Internet), but I felt pretty darn excited on the day I decided to go mobile with a webcast. I was programming my home security IP cameras (so I could spy on my cat while away) and I had this crazy idea of a webcast from the car. “How amazing would that be?” I thought to myself. So I went about finding all of the right equipment to take my show on the road. I crammed a bunch of camera equipment, laptops, and cellular booster into a Corvette for a nine day live mobile webcast of the Cannonball One Lap of America. I packed as many wires as a guy could pack into that car. If not for a lot of careful tucking and routing, the car would have looked like a big bowl of black spaghetti. I brought a lot of equipment for the long 6,000 mile (9,500 km) trek from race track to race track, and a whole different setup for webcasting my racing events live at 175 miles per hour (280+ kph). I even threw in a live GPS feed and called myself Cop Magnet. I was feeling pretty high-tech … for way back in early ought-eight.

Today we can look back at all of the genius of nearly a decade since that coffee pot and what have we got now? Phones that can send a stream straight to the Internet. Not just phones, but incredible handheld wonders that grandma wouldn’t have seen coming in her wildest dreams. Better yet, they are not just sending streaming video to some obscure server, they are sending it to big communities like USTREAM, Qik, Kyte and others. Then they archive and upload episodes to YouTube, and Facebook, and send it out on Twitter, FriendFeed, Ping, and etcetera. The service I use even maps my GPS coordinates as I move along and allows viewers to chat with me right through my viewfinder. All of these cool features just by pushing the red button! So much for my rats nest of wires.

The most amazing thing to me now is that as the technology has grown so vast, many people seem to have become more shy. I think is scares a lot of people just how quickly they can make a fool of themselves in front of a global audience. This begs the question: “Isn’t that what we wanted?”

It is your turn. Feel free to leave your video reply, but if you are feeling particularly shy, just go ahead and type it out like they did in ought-nine. Here is my video from just before I pushed “publish”. I am sorry, but I didn’t get my hair all just right and I have not shaved, but you cannot call me a chicken!