Written by Ron Callari

In Twitter’s short 3-year lifespan, the rapid-growing microblogging platform has spawned over 6 million followers who not only blog in 140 characters or less, but have also penned and performed songs in its honor.

In addition to being a staple for rapid-fire communication amongst technophiles and a merchandising tool for tech-savvy companies, Twitter has inspired would-be songwriters to write music and pen lyrics about the obsession that has swept the nation. And while celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Jane Fonda have graced our presence in Twitter-ville, the real celebs are the those “unsung heroes” who are now singing their hearts out on YouTube. It’s high time to acknowledge and give props to their bravery and musicality.

“first-time-ever” Top Ten Twitter Songs of All Time.

So in true David Letterman‘s top-ten list style, this year’s 10th place award goes to Alana Taylor, a 20-yr old native of New York City, attending NYU who is a true troubadour-ess, lauding the praises of Twitter to the discredit of Facebook, because after all “140 characters are all you need to say.” While she knows there are now a lot of Twitter songs on YouTube, she claims that she was the first to write a tribute song to Twitter, posting her’s as early as March, 2008. Alana blogs for Mashable.com, PBS.org and her own at alanataylor.com.

In 9th Place…Ms. Krystyl Baldwin, who is quick to warn you that the only thing she will harm during her video performance is “your ears” due to an “out of tune guitar” and a voice that is somewhat “off key.” Versus singing for a living, her self-titled website, krystyl.net lists her current vocation as a fashion event producer. However, if you like what you hear, Krystyl has informed me that her “Twitter, Part 2″ video will be out in mid March. Stay tuned…



Keaton Branch, a 23-yr old Apple Store Manager, out of Houston, Texas is number 8 in our countdown. His whimsical refrain describes the Twitterverse as “somewhere between blog posts and emails” where someone still says, “hey man, what’s up? Keaton amusingly notes that although the top brass at Twitter HDQ haven’t gotten wind of his song, he is hopefully “waiting for a DM (Direct Message) from them one day!” @kbranch also has a music blog at AudioADD.net.

7th Place goes to Mary Hodder & Joshua Levy who work for TheUptake.org, a non-profit citizen journalism organization focused on video. Adapted from Lee Hays and Peter Seeger’s classic folk ballad “If I Had A Hammer,” Hodder’s and Levy’s parody not only extols the virtues of Twitter, but also promotes cell phone texting and Flickr photo pasting. Sing a long, if you like…

Allen Williamsis our 6th place winner.He is a 47 yr-old ( “going on 15″, according to Allen) writer, public speaker and self proclaimed “terrible guitar/piano player and song writer.” Williams teaches part-time at two universities in Nagoya, Japan. His Twitter tune has a catchy beat and his lyrics are quick to warn the twitterati about the hazards of just “following” anyone on Twitter. As he puts it, “Just heed these words carefully, or it just could be your loss, that silly @work follower, just might be your boss.”

The “Tweetbomb Song” by Camille Israel, a 21-yr old student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver comes in at Number 5. “Tweetbomb” according to the @tweetbomb bio forewarns all followers that following @tweetbomb can result in an onslaught of tweets. Inspired by this, Camille assures you that she will retweet you “by Tweetdeck or Twhirl” cuz as she sings: “she just might be your kind of girl”

Our 4th place winner goes to the lovely Justine Ezarik(also known asiJustine) and Zappos.TV. Billing herself as an Internet Superstar, Justine can be found on blogs.YouTube, and Ebay. When she’s not performing online, she works as a freelance graphic/web designer and video editor. Zappos, an online shoe and handbag company that will generate more than $1 billion in sales this year contracted Justine to perform their homage to Twitter, called “I Tweet Myself.” Warning: A toilet scene and one naked man are truly hilarious!




When Chris Pirillo, who touts himself as a “Shameless self-promoter” asked his friend Dave Ryderto write a Twitter song, what came out of it became my pick for the Number 3 Twitter Song. Dave has since written and produced another Twitter song, but that one just missed this year’s deadline. While several versions of this year’s song exist on YouTube, I chose this version based on the clever editing that incorporates the cartoon character, Felix the Cat.

In second place, I selected Ben Walker and his song entitled: “You’re No One if You’re Not on Twitter.” Since YouTube is a social network and social networks are based on visitor feedback, the visitation to Ben’s video has remarkably racked up tallies just shy of 300,000 views and over 450 user comments. When asked if his song has been performed by others, Ben noted: “Apart from crowds of drunken Twits singing along at various gigs and Twestivals, I don’t think anybody else has performed the song. Twestival Paris almost got somebody to sing it in French (the lyrics were translated by a couple of fans last year) but they backed out at the last minute.” Ben’s day job keeps him busy as a web developer at torchbox.com and his personal website featuring all of his music can be found at ihatemornings.com.




There are also a number of songs, that are not truly “Twitter” songs per se and were actually written prior to the existence of Twitter. Songs that contain the word “follow” in the title come to mind; e.g. “Follow Me ” by Pain, “Follow Me, Where I go” by John Denver, “Won’t you Follow Me” by Rory Gallagher and “Follow Me, Gangsta” by 50 Cent.

However, my all time favorite “Follow” song and the one worthy of being our Number One Twitter song this year has got to go to “Follow You, Follow Me.” This song has a definite big-band-rock sensibility that can get even the most complacent listener a little jiggy! So this year’s Top Number One Twitter Song of all time goes to Phil Collins & Genesis, and their rock anthem: “Follow You, Follow Me.” Sit back enjoy their live performance filmed at one of their concerts held in Dusseldorf.
Germany.




Perhaps a little bit of a cop-out regarding my Number One selection, but we all deserved to end this blog on a high note (pun intended)! However, if you don’t agree with any of my choices, please take our Poll and select your own Top Ten. Final Poll numbers will be tallied and posted by April 15, 2009, so your vote counts! (see TOP TEN POLL at the end of this article) Also feel free to follow any of these songwriters on Twitter and extend a hearty congratulations to them while you’re at it! Don’t forget to use the hashtag: #twittersongs in your tweets!

So there you have it… this year’s Top Ten Twitter Songs of All Time. If you don’t take our poll, I’d love to hear your comments and feedback. After viewing all of these great artists, what do you think? Which one tickled your fancy? Or perhaps you know of one I missed? Or maybe you are a songwriter and just finished writing one yourself? If so, comment here, as there is always next year! In the meantime, see you in Twitter-ville, and remember to keep it under 140 characters!

Who wrote & sang your favorite Twitter Song?
( polls)

Written by Jens Roland

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?

According to Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music, the decline in music revenues in the past 8 years can be fully attributed to illegal file sharing. If this were actually true, many of us might even respect his decision to go after pirates as fiercely as the music industry is doing right now. However, the past 8 years have seen a lot more changes in the landscape of home entertainment than Per Sundin would like to admit, and some of those changes have had a massive impact on music profitability – much more so than any amount of piracy.

Let us refresh our memories and take a look at what actually happened during and just before the past 8 years:

1. First, the explosive rise of computer and console gaming. This competitive ‘third element’ has appeared in the entertainment landscape, beaten both music and movies to the curb and taken a huge cut out of the music industry’s revenues. Consumers don’t have infinitely-deep pockets, and billions of ‘recreation dollars’ that used to go almost exclusively to music, are now going into gaming.

2. International trade agreements have allowed consumers to buy their music across borders, rather than accepting local prices on music based on the ‘relative wealth’ of nations, rather than the actual value of the product.

3. New forms of distributable media, most notably MP3s but also CDs, have become mainstream. These new media don’t degrade over time and rarely break at all, making music rebuys a thing of the past, and allowing the second-hand market for music to thrive and expand – both of which take a cut out of the music industry’s former revenues.

4. Radical technological innovation has taken place in the field of music creation, processing, mixing, and mastering. Recording hardware, CD burners, music software, and media encoders have evolved to the point where most artists can actually afford decent-quality equipment to do their own recording and producing. Furthermore, this has fostered literally thousands of smaller, specialized studios that are challenging the ‘Big 4? with lower prices, better terms for artists, genre-specific expertise, etc. Successful artists can now leave the big labels and start their own recording outfits on relatively modest budgets. Naturally, super stars like The Beatles or Frank Sinatra have always had this option, but the recent technological advances have lowered the bar drastically. This development is depriving the ‘Big 4? of many of their former cash cows, who now use the major labels for their advertising and distribution infrastructure alone.

5. The World Wide Web has become an omnipresent force in the world, allowing cheap, end-to-end distribution of digital music, increasingly cutting out the corporate music distributors, who deal in trucks and CD covers, rather than bytes and bandwidth. With iTunes leading the way (very successfully ‘competing with free’, I might add), billions of songs are now purchased digitally rather than physically, no longer necessitating the big labels’ distribution networks.

6. The total number of radio stations, music television networks and other ‘streaming’ sources of music has grown exponentially, giving music fans a huge selection of free (and legal) music options. Satellite radio, DAB, and internet radio broadcasts have made it trivial for consumers to simply tune into a channel broadcasting the exact sub-genre of music that they feel like listening to (they can even have a stream created for them dynamically, e.g. on Pandora), making the *purchase* of music entirely optional for the casual listener.

7. A massive selection of entertainment alternatives (home computing, console gaming, mobile devices, etc.) have appeared in the home, effectively marginalizing music as an activity. 15-20 years ago, youths would regularly visit each other just to listen to music together; today, that is virtually unthinkable without some form of activity involved, such as playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, or dancing at a concert.

8. And finally, the music industry itself has embraced the opportunities of digital media, at last letting consumers buy *single* tracks at a time rather than forcing entire albums full of ‘fillers’ on them. Looking at the RIAA’s own sales figures for the past 10 years, there is a *direct* correlation between the break-off in album sales and the introduction and increase in single track digital sales. Looking at the actual numbers, it is abundantly clear that the vast majority of consumers never wanted to buy full albums in the first place, but were merely forced to by the lack of affordable single-track media. Now that the digital revolution has arrived, countless millions of 16-track album sales are being turned into 1- or 2-track sales, *decimating* the former revenues on music. THIS is the real reason why the music industry is hurting.

In other words: The “it’s common sense” argument that the music industry is peddling in their attempt to tie the declining revenues to piracy, simply doesn’t hold. It is not as clear-cut as the industry believes; the true reason for the decline is something they are still unwilling to face, but will have to face sooner or later:

The fact is that the music industry’s revenues have been artificially inflated for decades because of limited consumer options. The last 15 years of innovation have lifted those limitations, effectively leaving the music industry with an obsolete, defective business model of monopolized production technology, forced album bundling, and almost nonexistent competition in the realm of home entertainment. What is happening now – the decline of music profits and the piracy witch hunt by the music industry – is merely the panicked struggle of a dying business model, a complacent industry’s refusal to accept its diminishing role in a digital world. The pirates are not the reason, and the decline is the not the disease. It is the cure.

This is a guest post by Jens Roland. Jens is a computer scientist by training, but a technology forecaster by trade. He has worked at international think tanks as a consultant and researcher in emerging technologies and has written more than 300 articles and a book on the subject.

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DATA: Net value of shipped music, in billion dollars

1991 7.83
1992 9.02
1993 10.0
1994 12.1
1995 12.3
1996 12.5
1997 12.2
1998 13.7
1999 14.6
2000 14.3
2001 13.7
2002 12.6
2003 11.9
2004 12.3
2005 12.3
2006 11.8
2007 10.4

(source: RIAA’s annual reports)

Written by John Biggs

Having used both Kindles 1 and 2, I thought it would helpful to list where the new Kindle excels and where it falters. The dead tree book will never die – I think it will even have more longevity and popularity than the boutique appreciation of vinyl records – but our generation will be the last to use “books” as our primary reading systems. Expect ebooks to hit colleges in perhaps five years and high schools and grade schools in about 7. That said, should you buy a Kindle now? Why and why not?

10 Reasons to buy a Kindle 2

1. It’s great if you travel. If you travel, the Kindle is a godsend. I’m the kind of guy who stocks up books for even short trips, fully expecting to finish War and Peace, Notes from Underground, and four Clive Cussler novels on a plane trip from Pittsburgh to Columbus. With the Kindle you have a full complement of books available at any time.

2. You can put anything you want on it. You can easily email DOC, TXT, and PDF files to your own Kindle email address for conversion to the Kindle – but that costs 10 cents.

3. It looks great. The Kindle 2 is an amazing improvement over the Kindle 1. If every manufacturer took cues on build quality and product life cycles from Amazon, we’d all be better off.

4. It feels great. This new version has excellent button placement and is thin enough to cut cheese. It’s eminently portable.

5. Almost any book at any time. Except for a few esoteric reference books I’ve found just about everything I need on the Kindle store. As more and more publishers go ebook – and I think an iPhone Kindle reader will truly blow the last bottlenecks out – this excuse will become ineffective.

6. It works in inclement conditions. I was in Mexico with the wife and kids and I wanted to test the Kindle out near the pool. Three books later and I felt like the laziest high-tech maven in the world. The ladies next to me brought twenty softcover novels with them and all of them got wet and messy. The Kindle worked like a dream.

7. The bookmarking and highlighting systems are vastly improved. The original Kindle had two methods for note-taking: you could select text and add a note or you could add a book mark. The new system refines those considerably and adds visual feedback whenever you take a note.

8. The dictionary is now in-line. When you move to a word, its definition appears at the bottom of the page. If you wanted a definition before, you had to pop out to a separate page.

9. You can almost see and understand the illustrations in 16 greyscale shades. Note the “almost.” However, it’s better than 4 shades, which was abysmal.

10. It is the future. Sorry, it is. Amazon nailed the ebook and they’re going to own the space for the next few years. Maybe they’ll pull a Netflix and sell the software to OEMs, which is fine by me. But ebooks are what we’ll be reading while we rocket to Mars in 2050. Or we’ll have our robotic concubines read them to us.

10 reasons not to buy a Kindle 2

1. It’s bad for research. I’m working on a book right now and I wanted to use the Kindle for all of my research. Sadly, this is almost impossible. The book is a physical object – you can move through it, skimming for notes and important points – and there is something in our education that gives us a sense of space inside a book. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but you know how you can pick up a book and show someone what you’re looking for in a few page turns? You know it was halfway through, maybe a third of the way down the page, and it was near another set of words. The Kindle is not conducive to that kind of mental map-making… yet.

2. It’s horrible for reference. Don’t buy a Kindle of you just read programming manuals. Programming manuals offer something different. While it seems counterintuitive that a document you can search programatically wouldn’t be good as reference material, you’re better off looking up function calls on a website and using the physical book as a guide to building your programs. This is a corallary of point 1, above, so this could change.

3. The Kindle is flimsy. You’ll go through your day thinking you will break your Kindle. You don’t fit that much screen on a thin device that is meant to be thrown into a bag without a care and not risk cracking it. There will come a day when you open your bag and see that your Kindle is dead, even in its case. It’s not your fault. Say it with me: it’s not your fault.

4. It’s not ready for students. Add points 1, 2, and 3 together and you come to the conclusion that this is not ready for students. This may be a good device for English classes requiring lots of long novel reading, but as an education tool it isn’t quite there.

5. The net connection doesn’t work internationally. For some reason last year I was convinced the Kindle had Wi-Fi built-in. I was trying to get on the Internet in Warsaw, Poland and I kept looking for that Wi-Fi button. Then I remembered – no Wi-Fi. And I cried. How I cried, my friends. Then I downloaded the Kindle book onto my desktop and dragged it over via the USB cable. So that’s, in essence, your international solution.

6. No SD slot. While the Kindle can easily hold 1,500 books, what if you’re the kind of person who likes to keep everything in its right place? Maybe you want to make a book playlist? Maybe you have 1,501 books? I don’t know. Sadly, the Kindle doesn’t allow for memory expansion. Not a big deal, but to some it’s a bad thing.

7. Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can’t explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can’t. It’s like explaining heaven to bears.

8. It contains a battery. Remember, Reader, the Kindle is mortal. It will die on you when you don’t have your charger.

9. It’s bottom heavy. The internal battery makes the device want to plop face down on your chest. I read it last night when I was sleepy and it kept getting ready to fall on me.

10. There’s just something about a dead tree book, isn’t there? It’s nice to pop into the airport news stand and pick up a novel. It just is. I’m sorry.