Sunday, 28 June 2009    

In this year’s issue of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people, TV and screen darling Ashton Kutcher writes about what many consider to be the most important and interesting internet phenomenon in recent time: Twitter. Comparing them to the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Kutcher glorifies its founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone—the Twitter guys—claiming what they brought to the net in 2006 is “as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television, or the personal computer.” 

     Needless to say, Ashton Kutcher has one of the most followed profiles on Twitter, with nearly 2.5 million friends and fans daily following his thoughts as they’re expressed through his fingertips.  Every message is restricted to a limit of 140 characters, so the term “micro-blogging” is indeed appropriate.  Combining classical features of social networking with the immediacy of SMS, Twitter’s popularity has exploded. Everyone can receive and update his own status from anywhere. And it seems that everyone is doing just that. Exaggerated or not, one thing has definitely become clear: there must be something about Twitter.

     There is more to it than seemingly unimportant news sharing or celebrity hyping. It’s no secret that the Internet was a catalyst in Barack Obama’s popularity and a heavily used tool in his campaign.  Twitter’s role in the president’s rise to power is equally significant. And as major topics dominated the media—be it swine flu, Fashion Week, or the miracle of the Hudson River—Twitter has always covered them as fast as every online news ticker, if not two steps ahead. 

      The Twitter effect, with all the possibilities it provides, has never been as obvious and serious as during the oppositional protests following the Iranian presidential elections on June 12th.  Because all foreign journalists have been expelled from the country and the government has imposed heavy censorships on national media, the situation is (and has been) incredibly difficult to understand and estimate from the outside. Twitter informed the public in two important ways.  The opposition used the micro-blogging service to “spread the word,” as Marc Ambinder puts it in his article, “The Revolution Will be Twittered” on The Atlantic Online website. On the other hand, a lot of information accessible to the rest of the world appeared on Iranian Twitter accounts.  Is Ashton Kutcher correct in claiming that “the word revolution is spelled with 140 characters”? What is certain is that in the course of Politics 2.0, Twitter has proven to be an essential instrument, and will be even more so in the future. Its evolution from a fancy way to let people share some “short burst of information,” as Twitter guy Dorsey put it, to serving as opinion-leading medium is by all means exceptional. So it might be worth it to follow from time to time the news that’s been condensed to 140 characters, even if it’s what Ashton Kutcher literally had for lunch. Read more at

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Sunday, 21 June 2009

Nominated by President Barack Obama for the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor will be the first Hispanic American to take this seat. Here is some information about her judicial career: