The Guardian Shifts To Twitter After 188 Years of Ink 211
teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting:
"A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."
Re:Interesting... (Score:1, Informative)
You realise of course that this is an April Fool. The author of the article, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology [guardian.co.uk], is Rio Palof - an anagram of "April Fool"...
Re:Nice try... (Score:2, Informative)
I might have bought it if the story had been about The Sun, or The Dail Wail, though.
Yeah, but those papers aren't actually clever.
Re:"Waffle & Bluster"?! (Score:3, Informative)
I guess we think more highly of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. in the states.
In the UK, we think so highly of Dr. King that it is clearly absurd and comic to suggest that his speeches are full of waffle and bluster.
It's almost as if the writer of the article doesn't expect to be taken seriously.
Re:Not April Fools. The End of the World. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Waffle & Bluster"?! (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about you, but I was completely fooled by the "OMG Hitler invades Poland" headline.
Must be that dry British humour I keep hearing about.