Has the LinkedIn backlash begun?

Current.com recently posted a video mocking LinkedIn, the professional social networking website, as a useless service.
Current was an early basher of Twitter through video satires. Now that microblogging service is losing steam.
Is Current on to something now with LinkedIn?
The main points of Current’s video are that LinkedIn is a waste of time and that it won’t help you get a job as advertised. If these beliefs take hold, it could mean the start of a backlash against LinkedIn. (See the video at sister site One Stop Video.)
LinkedIn describes itself as an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world. The service has more than 50 million members in over 200 countries worldwide.
“Our mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” the Mountain View, Calif., company says. LinkedIn says it can connect people to potential clients, service providers, subject experts and employers.
I like LinkedIn. It’s Facebook for professionals. I use it to manage my online professional profile and to connect to sources and colleagues. I use it as a digital Rolodex to keep track of sources, their titles and employers.
I do think LinkedIn is useful. But I’m not interested in paying for a pro account. Too expensive. The cheapest plan costs $24.95 a month. I would like the ability to put contacts into folders based on subject areas. That would be helpful for me, but isn’t worth $300 a year to get the LinkedIn Pro feature.

United Football League has an uphill climb

The United Football League finished its inaugural season Friday with the Las Vegas Locos beating the Florida Tuskers 20-17 in overtime for the UFL championship.
It was a good game, but one that few watched.
UFL officials really need to get some butts in the seats to generate some excitement. That means cutting ticket prices and increasing advertising and promotion.
Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ed Graney estimated the attendance for the championship game at 8,000. If people aren’t interested enough to see a game in person, why bother watching it on TV? Crowds attract crowds.

Photo: Las Vegas Locos running back DeDe Dorsey scores a touchdown in the UFL championship game Friday in front of a sparse crowd. As my brother Bill says, “There were a lot of fans disguised as empty seats.” UFL photo.

Nerf: Training tomorrow’s soldiers

Toy weapons are filling children’s TV commercials and toy store newspaper ads this holiday season.
Hasbro’s Nerf division is leading the assault with ads showing kids firing automatic weapons that shoot spongy projectiles. These kids look like they’re getting ready for combat in Afghanistan or Iraq. Just trade the foam Nerf bullets for the real thing.
Also, McDonald’s is giving out Nerf weapons in its Happy Meals now.
Toys R Us has its own line of foam dart guns, including the Air Zone Punisher Gatling Blaster.
Is this part of some covert plot to train our kids for military service?
Of course not. Toy makers simply are filling a need young boys have to play army or cops and robbers.
The pendulum has swung away from the days when parents refused to give their kids toy guns. Those parents didn’t want to glamorize guns or desensitize their children to them.
It’s only a matter of time before parents get up in arms again about the proliferation of toy guns. Kids will complain then. But the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t give kids the right to bear toy arms.

Photos, from top to bottom:
Nerf N-Strike Recon CS-6
Nerf N-Strike Longshot CS-5
Air Zone Punisher Gatling Blaster from Toys R Us. (Check out the grin on the kid gripping that toy Gatling gun!)

Where did all my sexy Twitter followers go?

I used to have a harem of gorgeous Twitter followers that would have made Charlie’s Angels look like a bunch of plain Janes.
But in recent weeks they’ve abandoned me.
Maybe they realized I was just a 47-year-old married father of two, instead of some cool, young, pop culture-savvy journalist.
More likely it was my refusal to follow them. Unlike many Twitter users, I don’t usually reciprocate when someone follows me. I mostly use Twitter as a news wire to track tech and entertainment news and to post links to my articles on Investors.com and my blogs.
So goodbye sexy lingerie company that followed me after posts about the Lingerie Football League. And goodbye marketers selling dating services and teeth whitening products.

Photo: Lingerie model from @LoveHerLingerie, which followed me on Twitter for a bit.

United Football League championship game: Final game of the season or forever

The United Football League ends its inaugural season with a championship game on Friday pitting the Las Vegas Locomotives (4-2) against the Florida Tuskers (6-0).
“The who vs. the what?,” you might ask.
The UFL experiment looks like a failure. Attendance has been miniscule. The games are broadcast on the low-rated, hard-to-find Versus sports network and HDnet. And the UFL has had to compete with college football and the National Football League for attention this fall.
The UFL tried to position itself as a minor league to the NFL. But now it looks like it will end up on the trash heap with the Arena Football League, XFL, United States Football League and World Football League.
One of the goals of the UFL was to bring pro football to markets that didn’t have teams. But the markets for two of the four teams in the inaugural season weren’t that inspired. The California Redwoods play in the San Francisco Bay area, home to the NFL 49ers and Raiders. The New York Sentinels plays in the same region as the NFL Giants and Jets. The other teams are the Florida Tuskers of Orlando, Fla., and the Las Vegas Locos.
Officially the UFL has committed to a second season and plans to add more teams in 2010. Expansion teams are planned for Hartford, Conn., and Los Angeles.
In the meantime, the UFL championship game on Friday afternoon will have to compete with college football and Black Friday shopping madness.
By the way, the Florida Tuskers have already played the Las Vegas Locos twice this year and beaten them both times.

What twit is going to buy a book of tweets?

This is the height of absurdity: A company is offering to publish custom-made books filled with people’s posts on Twitter.
Imagine a 200-page book filled with nothing but your comments and observations made on the microblogging site.
TweetBookz is offering to compile your best tweets in a hard cover book for $30 and soft cover book for $20. It sounds like a joke, but it’s backed by a professional marketing campaign, including a slick Web site at TweetBookz.com.
Twitter was created for people who thought blogging was too much work. It’s got all the charm and literary merit of text messaging.
Most tweets are in-the-moment notes, written in shorthand and often as part of a conversation. They’re full of typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. Other tweets simply share Web links.

Are these the sort of things you really want to archive for posterity?
There are a few clever writers on Twitter, but I doubt even they would buy a book of their tweets. It’s a digital medium after all.
A press release announcing TweetBookz on Monday revealed some interesting limitations for tweet book publishing:

“To keep the tweets authentic, users are not allowed to edit past tweets or add new tweets directly to the books. Additionally, users CANNOT purchase books of other people’s tweets, although they can send gift cards to fellow Twitter users enabling them to print their own books.”

Tweetbookz timing is pretty bad considering that there are indications that Twitter’s popularity has peaked and is in decline.

Microsoft meets ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Twice this year I’ve had to reinstall all my software, files and settings to my Dell desktop PC after Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system suffered a fatal system crash.
Is it a coincidence that the fatal error in both cases bears the same name as the homicidal computer in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
When my PC crashed, I got a black screen of death with the message: “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \system32\hal.dll.”
That’s right – Hal, like the astronaut-killing HAL 9000 computer from “2001.” The cinematic computer suffered a system error that it tried to cover up by murdering the witnesses.
Hal.dll errors are serious. Luckily I didn’t lose data, but I did have to reinstall all my software programs. I reinstalled Windows, Office 2007, McAfee security software, applications for burning CDs, editing photos, a virtual private network to access my company’s system, to name a few. Then there’s all the Web browser customization, including toolbars, plug-in apps, bookmarks and passwords.
I’m still recovering from the mess created by the most recent crash last week.
By the way, Hal.dll stands for “hardware abstraction layer” in Windows’ “dynamic-link libraries.”