So, what, it's like a TV Guide or something?

The big news in news that covers the news is that robber baron of the DeBordian Spectacle Rupert Murdoch has threatened to opt out of Google, walling off all News Corp  properties from the search engine’s webcrawlers and generally ensuring that nobody gets anything he makes for free. That’s cool. If Murdoch really thinks that the traffic driven to his various internet properties—which include WSJ.com, FoxNews.com and the purchased-in-a-manner-analogous-to-getting-wasted-and-going-home-with-a-fat-girl Myspace—isn’t worth the irritation of knowing that Google is indexing them for free, he’s welcome to hitch his wagon to Bing. As Weston Kosova of Newsweek sarcastically points out, people are totally going to search for “Sarah Palin teeth vagina” on Google, see what comes up, and then head on over to Bing to see if maybe News Corp has anything else. It’s a terrible idea if you intend to use the internet as a tool to disseminate your news reporting, but if you only see the internet as a way to advertise the other media outlets through which you disseminate your et cetera, it’s great. Murdoch’s problem with Google is that it doesn’t tell anyone about his products without also giving them a way to access them for free. His frustration captures the irony of the internet’s relationship to newspapers and television; it increases their circulation exponentially, while simultaneously making increased circulation almost valueless. It’s a real pickle, and it explains why, six months ago, every conventional news outlet in America couldn’t wait to tell us about Twitter.

If you’re like me, you find Twitter utterly baffling. It’s basically Facebook status updates without the rest of Facebook, but CNN, FoxNews and Time magazine greeted it as if it were the flying car-o-phone. Even the New York Times ran some barely disguised advertisements. Why the conventional media would be so thrilled with a technology ideally suited to 14 year-old girls was something of a mystery. Or at least it was, until fellow kazillionaire Mark Cuban responded to Murdoch’s threatened Google lockout. From the Times, I quote:

What has changed? Quite a bit, but lets start with this. TWITTER IS SURPASSING GOOGLE as a destination for finding information on breaking and recent news of all types. Whats more, TWITTER POSSES NO THREAT to any destination news site. 140 characters does not a story make. Find it on twitter, link to a story on say, FoxNews and everyone is happy.

And there you have it. Twitter offers the free advertising high of conventional search engines without the free content hangover. A tweet has just enough room for a link, so it guarantees that whatever content it’s pushing gets viewed at the original producer’s property. Its distribution network is friend-based, too, so it even comes with market segmentation built in. Twitter is only a redundant technology if you’re using it to find information; if you’re using it to sell information, it’s the internet’s solution to the internet. When Rupert Murdoch first read about Twitter, it must have been like watching Dracula kill Frankenstein.

Of course, for the rest of us, all non-Shit My Dad Says functions of Twitter remain totally useless. It’s a nationwide fad, though. Everybody loves it, and it’s changing the way we live. Fox News told me so.

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