Online Media Cultist

If you’ve never checked out Flickrvision (or its cousin, Twittervision), take a second. Or an hour: it’s simply mesmerizing.

People posting pictures all over the world, displayed on a global map in real time. It’s fun to take a step back and think about what a truly revolutionary time we’re living in.

It’s good to be an online media cultist.

I must be the Ebenezer Scrooge of April Fool’s Day (bah hum bug! Let me count my web visitors in miserly and cantankerous fashion, I say!), but I’m just not that into everyone trying to become The Onion in an effort to trick the masses on April 1 each year. I’ll go with yet another Office Space reference here: it’s a little bit like when boss man Lumbergh decrees that everyone can cut loose by (going ahead and) wearing a Hawaiian shirt on Hawaiian shirt day.

And it would be one thing if the hilarity could be contained within a 24-hour timeframe, but it seems that this year things had to start early. Chief jokester Mike Arrington kicked things off on March 31st with the announcement that TechCrunch had acquired F**kedCompany.com (the joke being that a media property that covers start-ups had bought one that covers failures, get it? It’s all just too delicious to breathe).

At this rate, I can smell a wave of jokes and misdirection and boldfaced lying in the Interweb airs. It may make sense to actually leave the house on a sunny California Sunday, in fact, rather than be subjected to the neurosis-inspired madness of not knowing where the lies end and the elusive truth begins.

In any event, I was (mock) surprised by an enormous Starbucks logo overlaying Twittervision this evening, still not-April Fool’s on the west coast. The joke being, I guess, that they had sold out early and huge to the coffee-dishing colossus. Twittervision is super fun, by the way, particularly if you’re a Twitter fan: check out Twitter “tweets” popping up all over a Google maps mashup.

Update: The Starbucks logo has been removed, guess it was a short term gag!