Today is Remembrance Day, and in two hours the nation will hold a two minutes’ silence in honour of all of the servicemen and women who lost their lives serving their country. As part of the two minutes’ silence, The Royal British Legion has requested that users of the social networking website Twitter also remain silent for two minutes, starting at 11:00am this morning.

The Tweet was made on Twitter by @PoppySupport, the official Twitter account of The Royal British Legion.

The Tweet read:

2 minute silence on Twitter 11:00am GMT on 11 November #2minutesilence RT plz

The message is being copied by (more…)

Spelling may be very important with content, and certainly where Google is concerned, but it shouldn’t be considered the be all and end all where blogs and tweets are concerned.

The odd spelling mistake is fine. It’s accepted. What isn’t accepted is when you make a spelling mistake and you receive dozens, or hundreds, of comments and messages deriding you for the mistake.

Especially when you are dyslexic.

This happened to TV presenter Holly Willoughby this past week. She posted news on Twitter of what she would be doing that day, and made one or two spelling errors. This prompted scores of messages criticising her spelling, to which she responded by announcing that she was dyslexic.

The original Tweet from Holly stated:

Morning, today we’re talking, teenage peregnancies! ‘How to be famouse’ with Pete Waterman and Sara Payne is talking about victim support. x

The critical messages that Holly received prompted to her reveal that she suffers from dyslexia, publically on Twitter. Holly responded:

Thankyou for flagging up my spelling, I am (more…)

When politicians promise ‘swift action’ you can generally take it with a pinch of salt and ignore it, for little or no action will be taken, and certainly not ‘swiftly’. However, when that politician is Arnold Schwarzenegger and he’s promised his swift action by the medium of Twitter, it’s fair to assume that Arnie will keep his word.

The problem is, it’s his own wife, Maria Shriver, who’ll bear the brunt of Arnie’s swift action.

Schwarzenegger, yesterday

Schwarzenegger, as we all know, is the governor of California (as well as the biggest action star in the world) and in 2008 he brought in a law in California stating that it was illegal to use your cell, sorry mobile, phone while driving. The law only carries a $20 fine for breaking it on a first offence (which is about £12, how civilised – much more lenient that using your mobile while driving through Ellesmere Port) but if it’s Schwarzenegger’s law, it must be obeyed… only his wife has ignored this law, twice!

Maria Shriver has been photographed by a celebrity website chatting away on her phone while driving, and this angered the Governator.

Schwarzenegger responded (more…)

Twitter and opera; two institutions you probably never thought you’d hear in the same sentence, let alone in the same context. One is performed by teenagers, celebrities and generally anyone who wants to get their word out to the masses, from the privacy of their own homes or via their mobile phones, and the other is performed in lavish theatres to the doting elite.

They’re as far apart as chalk and cheese, Posh Spice and talent, Jack Tweed and ethics, yet for some reason Twitter has been turned into an opera, or at least the ‘Tweets’ of its users has. The Twitter opera debuted last night at London’s Royal Opera House no less, with just a few days of rehearsals.

The title of the Twitter opera is Twitterdammerung, which is apparently a pun title, but we haven’t the time to look up its meaning. The opera was a strange medley of unrelated ideas spawned from the tweets of 900 uses of Twitter, yet strangely, according to Igor Toronyi-Lalic, opera critic for the Telegraph, it sort of (more…)