Shut A Gate on It

Dear Australian politicians,

I'm merely a humble observer of your craft; the way you sit in that green chamber and thrust arguments with iron will into the air almost brings a tear to my eye; but your political scandals kind of suck.

Mr. Rudd and Mr. Swan, surely you could embezzle a large sum of money or steal the crown Liberal Party jewel which they have stashed away underneath Joe Hockey's seat. But this crap about sending emails to some car dealer just doesn't make your government any more interesting than it already is(n't.) I think Malcolm is barking up the wrong tree when he demands a copy of the email for all to see - I doubt that either one of you could figure out the print function on Microsoft Outlook. Better call up your "tech support" guy quick smart a (It's the button marked "Delete" guys.)

Until you come up with a scandal that doesn't suck, I will force Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser out of retirement so we can re-enact the 1975 Constitutional Crisis. I mean, ACA would be forced to sort of pay attention to it. Imagine all the creepy music and grainy, black and white montages they could play in slow-motion? Don't deny them this golden opportunity to devolve Australian public affairs further into frivolous muckracking!

Yours,

Crushtor

Tom Valcanis, BA (Melb)

Finally. Thank. Fucking. God.

That means I won't get to keep my shiny "tav@unimelb.edu.au" email address, but you can take that mailbox...and reassign it.

In actual news: Got my ticket to LAX finally. Holla at all my American (seppo) peeps on the 13th of July!

I also got my hell of awesome Facebook vanity name. Guess what it is?

Crushtor: Brand Entrepreneur Marketing Guru Ichiban?

There's about fifty billion websites and twenty hundred trillion people on Twitter that "tweet" about internet marketing, branding, social media and whatever. Some of these arseholes expect you to pay for their "expertise" in generating leads, followers and whatever. Of course most of it appears to be spam, but a curious experiment I conducted today yielded some intriguing and disturbing results.

First off, it was supposed to be a parody of said "social media" marketers who think they can make exorbitant amounts of money from their tweeting. Who knows; bloggers with plenty of traffic probably can live off their advertising revenue once they hit a certain level of clout and credibility. Chris Onstad, creator of the hell of incisive and darkly funny Achewood comics says his advertising and merchandise sales allow him and his young family to live "comfortably" as a full-time comic writer.

Once I posted this:

After about two weeks on twitter, I think my two most hated words are currently "network" and "marketing."

I got 2 followers. After getting some tips from other friends:

@lindsayevans Oh yeah! Good call! Welcome to Crushtor: social media affiliate marketing entrepreneur and SEO guru for hire and pizza parties

What High Priestess @goatlady says about #hailsatan: "Before #hailsatan my brand marketing ROI was 2%. Now it's like 66.6%!"

I was up to about 17. Within 4 hours I got 73 new followers. At the start of the day I was on about 220, now I'm up to 310 as I write this. Completely ludicrous. Most websites scamming you out of your cash promise you that amount of rapid "growth" - I just threw up some buzzwords and got the same effect. Its hard to tell if its marketers looking for genuine signal amongst torrents of noise or if they're trying to validate their own scam; "Hey boys, looks like someone's bought into the program, better make it look nice!" so I can invariably sign up more chumps. Because seriously; these people are just repeating one another without even pointing to anything that actually exists.

Sure; advertising products or services with empty abstractions isn't anything we haven't seen before. But they have to refer back to something at the end of the day. If someone re-tweets "Top 5 tips for Brand Marketing on Social Media" and can't point to a real world, extensional definition they might as well be saying "Top 5 tips for blab blab on blab blab." (With apologies to Stuart Chase.)