9. The media savvy people who work at Mars-owned Skittles, instead of building their own website, redirected Skittles.com to a Twitter search results page. They had not prepared for pranksters to flood the page with unflattering remarks about the brand such as: “Skittles got stuck in my mouth while I was driving, forced me to slam into orphanage, killing hundreds. I’ll never eat them again.”

Pretty rubbish lineup but this one is a knockout. Love the reply.

No mention of the Telegraph’s recent twitterfail I notice.

Major Lazer is a Jamaican commando who lost his arm in the secret Zombie War of 1984. The US military rescued him and repurposed experimental lazers as prosthetic limbs. Since then Major Lazer has been a hired renegade soldier for a rogue government operating in secrecy underneath the watch of M5 and the CIA.

Check out Zumbi after the jump. Completely insane zombie ragga.

Before I heard about moot — the mysterious 21-year-old creator of the influential Web message board 4chan.org, who just happened to win TIME.com’s online poll to determine the world’s most influential people — I used to think some young kid had stumbled across my video and thought it would be funny to send it to his mates, and it just kind of caught on. I suppose at first I was a little embarrassed by it. I always liken it to when people look through their photo albums or home videos from 20 years ago and think, Gosh, did I really wear that? The difference is, thankfully on the one hand and perhaps a bit scarily on the other, mine are out there for the public to see whenever they want. I find some Rickrolls really funny. Have you seen the one with President Barack Obama? Someone has cut up his speeches and put them together so that he sings “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It’s totally amazing. I find it bonkers, by the way!

I never caught on to the Rickrolling meme – maybe I just move in the wrong circles, but I can honestly say I’ve never been Rickrolled. Except when I knowingly Rickroll myself to see what the fuss was about.

What makes the whole thing really bizarre is that Rick himself was briefly thrust into the limelight again. I wonder if he’s been able to make a few bob off the whole thing.

I just wish that moot had used “Together Forever”, way better tune IMO.

Strangely, though, the most interesting new component here might just be some of the wallpaper the company is including with this release: colorful, artsy, psychedelic… pretty much like nothing you’ve ever seen from Microsoft in its flagship software. Combined with the slightly more polished UI, you get the distinct impression that Redmond’s gotten a jolt of new blood — if not in staff, then certainly in mindset.

Brilliant! I can’t decide what I like best, the volcano spewing rainbow magma or the mouse and the rabbit undertaking a transaction involving a carrots and a bushbaby.

The boss of Ryanair has claimed only people living in ’slums’ will be affected by swine flu.

Michael O’Leary’s comments came as a four-year-old boy from a small Mexican village was identified as the earliest confirmed victim of the illness.

Edgar Hernandez – who has since recovered – fell sick on April 2 – nearly two weeks before anybody even knew the virus existed.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary says cough sweets should beat swine flu

Mr O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, was characteristically outspoken on the swine flu panic gripping the world.

‘It is a tragedy only for people living. . . in slums in Asia or Mexico,’ he said. ‘But will the honeymoon couple from Edinburgh die? No. A couple of Strepsils will do the job.’

Mr O’Leary said he had ‘been dealing with swine for many years’ in the form of various airport authorities.

He then declared it would be better if England’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, ‘just crawled back under the rock he’s been living under for the last ten years and left us all alone’.

Ryanair, which does not operate any flights to Mexico, could not be contacted for comment.

Are some people overreacting about swine flu? Yes. Is this an appropriate response? Ummmno.

Anyway, I don’t mean to suggest there’s any grand lesson here about reporting on the Internet. Yes, the news broke on Twitter, but the first solid reporting emerged from a newspaper — just four minutes after Trachtman’s tweet. And yet, you can’t dismiss the significance of that Jersey City message board, where calling 911 was itself a form of reporting. Plus, Slepian, the Advocate reporter, told me that they first learned one of the planes was Air Force One from readers who called into the newsroom.

I like the term “news ecosystem,” and it’s certainly an apt way to describe the various threads of reporting that occurred today. Trachtman was a citizen journalist, sure, but so was LaForge when he asked, “See anything?” And so was Trachtman’s friend when she scanned her favorite news sources and broadcast, over the phone, that there was no reason to worry.

I think the grand lesson from this story is that Twitter is the fastest way to get hold of uncorroborated and inaccurate hysteria, and that you have to wait for longer-form information sources to post before you get anything really useful. What’s interesting here is that the non-Twitter sources started pulling together the details just minutes after Twitter did.

COST OF REBUILDING BANKS

US banks: $275bn

Eurozone banks: $725bn

UK banks: $250bn

Other European banks: $225bn

Source: IMF, based on 6% capital/assets ratio

Oh wow… the Brits made a bit of a hash of that one, didn’t we.

Ultimately Twitter subsists on the fallacious premise of much social media – that people can and will invest enormous amounts of time and fragment their lives in the pursuit of voice, connection, and community that has no depth, no resonance, and no sustainability. Social media is very good at certain things. User comments on products purchased at Amazon are phenomenally useful. Blogging sites such as The Huffington Post that assume, and to some degree require, a high bar for the quality of its citizen voices, perform an incredibly valuable service in behalf of the “new journalism”, particularly as the old journalism issues forth its death rattle. But if most of us received Twitter posts in our email inboxes, even on an opt-in basis, we would quickly declare it to be indistinguishable from spam.

Recently, epidemiologists have learned they can rapidly identify and track flu epidemics using Google. And we may end up learning that Twitter as a communications organism can also offer similar benefits for identifying the “viral” transmission and movement of illness as well as political events, business cycles, cultural phenomena, and even environmental change. But we do not need Twitter to perform these functions, and at best Twitter can only provide very primitive signals of change or disruption, while other technologies and communications methods exist to more fully vet, call out, and confirm meaning on significant events.

Ouch! Apart from straying into “it’s just people saying what they had for breakfast” he pretty much nails it. Tweets are so short that there’s very little way to derive meaning from them, even when you slice and dice the firehose with search terms and tweetdeck. Twitter’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.

The next step is longer form blogging systems like tumblr and posterous, but really that just puts us back to where we started – these systems are essentially blogger integrated with Google reader. The only real change is that twitter has made very short posts acceptable.

Me, I’m going to stick around on twitter to see how things develop. I expect most of my tweets will be piped in from http://matthall.posterous.com though.