ONE WOMAN. WITH CELEB POWER. OUT TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

I came across this new auction that is the brainchild of Eva Longoria (Gabrielle of Desperate Housewives). Link is here: Twitchange. All proceeds go to the efforts in rebuilding Haiti in aHomeinHaiti.org.

Now, instead of bidding for autographs or memorabilia from celebrities, people would be bidding for three things:

1. To have a celebrity follow you on Twitter

2. To be mentioned by a celebrity in a tweet

3. For a celebrity to retweet you

The celebrities who were enlisted and are currently on board include Eva Longoria  (duh), Nicole Richie, Paula Abdul, the Jonas brothers (a lot of fangirl money coming in), Demi Moore, Perez Hilton (is he considered a celebrity?), Gordon Ramsay (haha! I wonder what he tweets about), Cher, Alicia Keys (New Yooooooork!), Ne-Yo, Sophia Bush, and more.

So who will bid? Fans who admire a certain celebrity, businesses who want to be mentioned to a huge audience (this is worldwide exposure we’re talking about here), and people who just want their money to be benefitted by the children in Haiti, especially the ones with severe autism and cerebral palsy.

Shows how the times are changing and the rising power and influence social media brings to the table.

Personally, I think this idea is FUNKAY. Imagine telling people “Yeah, Oprah follows me. We talk on twitter all the time”.

Okay I don’t seriously think that that will really happen. But it would still be funky to say that, no?

Makes me wonder, does Oprah tweet? As in the real Oprah?

Bidding begins on 15th Sept and ends on 25 Sept. It’s worldwide, so I bet there’ll be REAL competition.

Tweet Tweet Twit (Library of Congress)

Very recently, the Library of Congress announced that it has plans to archive the entire Twitter archive dating back from it’s beginning in 2006. Original article here. And I worry very much about it, because I wonder, what exactly are they planning to do with it, for now and in the future? Who exactly is holding the copyrights and intellectual property rights for the entire database?

Because Library of Congress is seen as merely an archival database, people believe that their conscience is clear. Library of Congress announced that they planned to archive tweets so that they could sift through the information for anthropological reasons: to study the human behaviour in the 21st century. Years later, the people of the future will be able to view and understand how life was like in the 21st century, in a much much better way than we can understand how life was like in the 20th century, the 19th century, and so on.

I’m not saying that the Library of Congress is evil, or out to get us in any way. Perhaps that wasn’t their intentions, perhaps their intentions are good. They want to be able to have access to invaluable data that would contribute to society, in terms of knowledge, in terms of understanding and in terms of betterment of society. But the idea that somewhere out there, a huge database of tweets remains, perfectly archived, means that they may fall into the hands of people with lesser-than-good intentions.

Like, people of corporate companies, perhaps?

Corporate websites like Google and Twitter are info or data-based, they thrive on data. Without information, Google would not exist as a search engine to help people filter through the content that others have put up on the Internet. If there were no people to contribute to content, Twitter would not exist as a microblogging service devoted to allowing people all over the world to read messages known as Tweets.

What happens if these corporate websites are looking for money? The true role of all companies are to generate money and cashflow, they’re all interested in the bottom line. How do they generate cashflow? By seeking advertisers. How do they get more advertisers? By offering the advertisers an idea of what they think people will buy. How will they know what people want? By getting more data.

In 2003, Google acquired Blogger.com, popular blog-hosting service, and later Picasa later in 2004. Why? Why are they interested in acquiring Blogger and Picasa in the first place? Because they recognize it as a means to make money through advertisements?

Partly yes, but more so because they want to gain the rights of content from millions of people all over the world. The more content they have, the more information they have to sell to advertisers. Do you earn? No. Do they earn? Why yes, they do.

Wait, why? you may ask.

Well, who owns the copyrights? They do, remember?

This gives new meaning to

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Because all your content are belong-ing to them.

So in the same way that Google quietly takes control, I fear the future of what might happen to the billions of tweets stocked in the archived databases of the Library of Congress. Apparently, there are “50 million tweets per day and the total number of tweets already number well into the billions.” That’s a lot of info.

I think if one extremely wealthy corporate person were to buy over Facebook and Twitter, he’d be unstoppable. Imagine the amount of content he’d have intellectual property rights over! Imagine the amount of data he can generate for marketing and advertising purposes. Imagine the amount of data he controls. Unstoppable!

Perhaps Rupert Murdoch might like to acquire your tweets. Then he’ll have a better idea of what the people of this century are talking about, and what they like. What they eat and drink, where they go, what they like to do, and the celebrities they like to worship. And he will go back to News Corporation and pitch advertisement spots to companies accordingly, to buy advertisement space. After all, then he’ll know exactly what you eat and drink, where you go, what you like and which celebrities you worship. And he’ll be able to pitch to companies accordingly, to get them to buy advertisement space from him to reach the people he has read about. And in this way, he’ll get rich. Very rich. Thanks to you. All because of something you mentioned in passing, years ago.