I do not, however, respect the hype surrounding Matthew Robson, Morgan Stanley’s hottest new market analyst. In case you haven’t heard, Robson works out of London, where he recently penned a report on the attitude of today’s youth toward social media and technology (see a cut and pasted version below) that shot around cyberspace faster than I reach for the off button whenever Jacko’s music comes out of the radio. And please note we are talking about a 15-year-old intern whose market insights were considered worthy of column inches at serious news organizations such as the Globe and Mail, not to mention the Financial Times—which put a story about the kid’s power of observations on page one.

The media attention is probably due to the fact that the report is negative on newspapers and concludes teenagers “do not use twitter.” According to Edward Hill-Wood, Robson’s team leader at the investment bank, the research note on teen attitudes “provides one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. … So we published it.”

But that appears to say a lot about what the adults at Morgan Stanley are reading and writing on a regular basis. After all, nobody, not even the investment bank, is calling the report accurate. My favourite part is Robson’s dubious conclusion that 99% of teenagers have a mobile phone. “The general view,” Robson says, “is that Sony Ericsson phones are superior, due to their long list of features, built in walkman capability and value (£100 will buy a mid-high range model). Teenagers due to the risk of it getting lost do not own mobile phones over the £200 mark.”

Too bad Fawcett didn’t pass away on the slow news day that helped make Robson famous.

How Teenagers Consume Media

(the report that shook the City)

Radio
Most teenagers nowadays are not regular listeners to radio. They may occasionally tune in, but they do not try to listen to a program specifically. The main reason teenagers listen to the radio is for music, but now with online sites streaming music for free they do not bother, as services such as last.fm do this advert free, and users can choose the songs they want instead of listening to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses.

Television
Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average. This is due to programs coming on in seasons, so they will watch a particular show at a certain time for a number of weeks (as long as it lasts) but then they may watch no television for weeks after the program has ended.

Teenage boys (generally) watch more TV when it is the football season, often watching two games and related shows a week (totalling about 5 hours of viewing). A portion of teenagers watches programs that are regular (such as soap operas) at least five times a week for half an hour or so but this portion is shrinking, as it is hard to find the time each day.

Teenagers are also watching less television because of services such as BBC iPlayer, which allows them to watch shows when they want. Whilst watching TV, adverts come on quite regularly (18 minutes of every hour) and teenagers do not want to watch these, so they switch to another channel, or do something else whilst the adverts run.

The majority of teenagers I speak to have Virgin Media as their provider, citing lower costs but similar content of Sky. A fraction of teenagers have Freeview but these people are light users of TV (they watch about 1 ½ hours per week) so they do not require the hundreds of channels that other providers offer.

Newspapers
No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV.

The only newspapers that are read are tabloids and freesheets (Metro, London Lite…) mainly because of cost; teenagers are very reluctant to pay for a newspaper (hence the popularity of freesheets such as the Metro). Over the last few weeks, the Sun has decreased in cost to 20p, so I have seen more and more copies read by teenagers. Another reason why mainly tabloids are read is that their compact size allows them to be read easily, on a bus or train. This is especially true for The Metro, as it is distributed on buses and trains.

Gaming
Whilst the stereotypical view of gamers is teenage boys, the emergence of the Wii onto the market has created a plethora of girl gamers and younger (6+) gamers. The most common console is the Wii, then the Xbox 360 followed by the PS3. Most teenagers with a games console tend to game not in short bursts, but in long stints (upwards of an hour).

As consoles are now able to connect to the internet, voice chat is possible between users, which has had an impact on phone usage; one can speak for free over the console and so a teenager would be unwilling to pay to use a phone.

PC gaming has little or no place in the teenage market. This may be because usually games are released across all platforms, and whilst one can be sure a game will play on a console PC games require expensive set ups to ensure a game will play smoothly. In addition, PC games are relatively easy to pirate and download for free, so many teenagers would do this rather than buy a game. In contrast, it is near impossible to obtain a console game for free.

Internet
Every teenager has some access to the internet, be it at school or home. Home use is mainly used for fun (such as social networking) whilst school (or library) use is for work. Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.

Outside of social networking, the internet is used primarily as a source of information for a variety of topics. For searching the web, Google is the dominant figure, simply because it is well known and easy to use. Some teenagers make purchases on the internet (on sites like eBay) but this is only used by a small percentage, as a credit card is required and most teenagers do not have credit cards. Many teenagers use YouTube to watch videos (usually anime which cannot be watched anywhere else) and some use it as a music player by having a video with the music they want to listen to playing in the background.

Directories
Teenagers never use real directories (hard copy catalogues such as yellow pages). This is because real directories contain listings for builders and florists, which are services that teenagers do not require. They also do not use services such as 118 118 because it is quite expensive and they can get the information for free on the internet, simply by typing it into Google.

Viral/Outdoor Marketing
Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content. Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.

Outdoor advertising usually does not trigger a reaction in teenagers, but sometimes they will oppose it (the Benetton baby adverts). Most teenagers ignore conventional outside advertising (billboards etc) because they have seen outside adverts since they first stepped outside and usually it is not targeted at them (unless it’s for a film). However, campaigns such as the GTA: IV characters painted on the side of buildings generate interest because they are different and cause people to stop and think about the advert, maybe leading to further research.

Music
Teenagers listen to a lot of music, mostly whilst doing something else (like travelling or using a computer). This makes it hard to get an idea of the proportion of their time that is spent listening to music.

They are very reluctant to pay for it (most never having bought a CD) and a large majority (8/10) downloading it illegally from file sharing sites. Legal ways to get free music that teenagers use are to listen to the radio, watch music TV channels (not very popular, as these usually play music at certain times, which is not always when teenagers are watching) and use music streaming websites (as I mentioned previously).

Almost all teenagers like to have a ‘hard copy’ of the song (a file of the song that they can keep on their computer and use at will) so that they can transfer it to portable music players and share it with friends.

How teenagers play their music while on the go varies, and usually dependent on wealth –with teenagers from higher income families using iPods and those from lower income families using mobile phones. Some teenagers use both to listen to music, and there are always exceptions to the rule.

A number of people use the music service iTunes (usually in conjunction with iPods) to acquire their music (legally) but again this is unpopular with many teenagers because of the ‘high price’ (79p per song). Some teenagers use a combination of sources to obtain music, because sometimes the sound quality is better on streaming sites but they cannot use these sites whilst offline, so they would download a song then listen to it on music streaming sites (separate from the file).

Cinema
Teenagers visit the cinema quite often, regardless of what is on. Usually they will target a film first, and set out to see that, but sometimes they will just go and choose when they get there. This is because going to the cinema is not usually about the film, but the experience –and getting together with friends. Teenagers visit the cinema more often when they are in the lower end of teendom (13 and 14) but as they approach 15 they go to the cinema a lot less. This is due to the pricing; at 15 they have to pay the adult price, which is often double the child price. Also, it is possible to buy a pirated DVD of the film at the time of release, and these cost much less than a cinema ticket so teenagers often choose this instead of going to the cinema. Some teenagers choose to download the films off the internet, but this is not favourable as the films are usually bad quality, have to be watched on a small computer screen and there is a chance that they will be malicious files and install a virus.

Mobile Phones
99% of teenagers have a mobile phone and most are quite capable phones. The general view is that Sony Ericsson phones are superior, due to their long list of features, built in walkman capability and value (£100 will buy a mid-high range model). Teenagers due to the risk of it getting lost do not own mobile phones over the £200 mark. As a rule, teenagers have phones on pay as you go. This is because they cannot afford the monthly payments, and cannot commit to an 18-month contract. Usually, teenagers only use their phone for texting, calling.

Features such as video messaging or video calling are not used –because they are expensive, (you can get four regular texts for the price of one video message). Services such as instant messaging are used, but not by everyone. It usually depends whether the phone is Wi-Fi compatible, because otherwise it is very expensive to get internet off the phone network. As most teenagers’ phones have Bluetooth support, and Bluetooth is free, they utilise this feature often. It is used to send songs and videos (even though it is illegal) and is another way teenagers gain songs for free. Teenagers never use the ringtone and picture selling services, which gained popularity in the early 00s. This is because of the negative press that these services have attracted (where the charge £20 a week with no easy way to cancel the service) and the fact that they can get pictures and music on a computer –then transfer it to their phones at no cost. Mobile email is not used as teenagers have no need; they do not need to be connected to their inbox all the time as they don’t receive important emails. Teenagers do not use the internet features on their mobiles as it costs too much, and generally, if they waited an hour they could use their home internet and they are willing to wait as they don’t usually have anything urgent to do.

Teenagers do not upgrade their phone very often, with most upgrading every two years. They usually upgrade on their birthday when their parents will buy them a new phone, as they do not normally have enough money to do it themselves.

Televisions
Most teenagers own a TV, with more and more upgrading to HD ready flat screens. However, many are not utilising this HD functionality, as HD channels are expensive extras which many families cannot justify the added expenditure. Many of them don’t want to sign up to HD broadcasting services, as adverts are shown on standard definition broadcasts, so they can’t see the difference. Most people have Virgin Media as a TV provider. Some have Sky and some have Freeview but very few only have the first five channels (BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five).

Computers
Every teenager has access to a basic computer with internet, but most teenagers computers are systems capable of only everyday tasks. Nearly all teenagers’ computers have Microsoft office installed, as it allows them to do school work at home. Most (9/10) computers owned by teenagers are PCs, because they are much cheaper than Macs and school computers run Windows, so if a Mac is used at home compatibility issues arise.

Games Consoles
Close to a third of teenagers have a new (<2 ½ years old) games console, 50% having a Wii, 40% with an Xbox 360 and 10% with a PS3. The PS3 has such a low figure because of its high price (£300) and similar features and games to an Xbox 360, which costs less (£160). The Wii’s dominance is due to younger brothers and sisters, they have a Wii and parents are not willing to pay for another console.

What is hot?
• Anything with a touch screen is desirable.
• Mobile phones with large capacities for music.
• Portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones)
• Really big tellies

What is not?
• Anything with wires
• Phones with black and white screens
• Clunky ‘brick’ phones
• Devices with less than ten-hour battery life

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DOUBLE TAKE: Aside from trying to promote myself while generating Web traffic that helps put bread and butter on my table, this blog aims to stir debate by taking a harder look at current news and events. I obviously enjoy voicing my own opinions, but I am a big boy and I welcome all comments that don’t require R ratings. So let me have it via this blog or send me an email at tom.watson@canadianbusiness.rogers.com. I reserve the right to post email comments without disclosing the sender’s name. If you don’t think I am a total twit, follow my posts via my NotSOCRATES Twitter site.

THOMAS WATSON is a senior writer, market columnist and editorial board member at Canadian Business magazine. Since winning a community journalism award as a cub reporter with the Hamilton Spectator in the early ’90s, he has covered business, finance, politics and technology for various news outlets. Prior to joining CB in 2001, he reported on the steel and automotive sectors for the Financial Post. Watson received two National Magazine Award nominations for business feature writing in 2008, winning a silver award for his coverage of Canada’s ABCP fiasco. He landed his first NatMag nomination for exposing a stock manipulation plot aimed at Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text during the dot-com boom, when he headed investor relations for an international venture capital outfit in the City of London. Watson holds graduate degrees in journalism, international relations and public finance and undergraduate degrees in history and politics.

The event was moderated by tweeter Boyd Neil, who is also senior VP and national director of Hill and Knowlton’s corporate communications practice in Canada. He set the tone by asking audience members if their employer was prepared to withstand an attack launched on YouTube or Twitter.

Peter Acteo was on hand to share his reasoning for tweeting as the CEO of ING Direct Canada. You can find them on Twitter. But simply put, he thinks anyone who can talk openly and honestly online as an executive, without plugging products, has an opportunity to better connect with consumers.

Suzanne Fallander, Intel’s manager of corporate responsibility, flew in from the States to explain why her company runs CSR@INtel. The intent is to use social media to create greater transparency through an open dialogue with Intel bloggers, who manage Intel’s CSR strategy in the areas such as environmental sustainability and philanthropy.

My job was to express my opinion on social media as a print journalist. “In all the discussion about the impact of social media on the declining financial health of print and broadcast media, the most interesting question,” according to Boyd, “is whether journalism today is surrendering its role as the watchdog of political and business behaviour to a much broader cadre of watchers, which sometimes includes members of the public who are simply in the right place at the right time.”

“Is this true?” Boyd asked me. My answer, of course, was: “No.”

I wasn’t just offering a self-serving answer. It is a free market. The advertising revenue that supports traditional media is obviously free to (and should) search out the best means possible to attract eyeballs. There will be an adjustment period for news organizations. There will be lost print publications. And the survivors will have to explore the proper mix of paper-based and electronic forms of information delivery. But there will always be a need and demand for traditional journalism.

As I told the Empire Club audience, anyone can run around screaming like the town crier, but they can’t deliver information with the same authority. I do not, in any way, dismiss the power and reach of bloggers. I just do not feel that my profession (trade actually) is threatened by bloggers like Toronto’s Neil Pasricha. He posts about things like loving warm underwear on 1000 Awesome Things, which recently won a coveted Webby Award in the best personal/cultural blog category. He could report news as well, but the coverage would not necessarily be awesome.

I am privileged to work for Canadian Business magazine, which frequently allows me to spend months chasing major feature stories that could not be told, at least not nearly as well, without the resources of a traditional media organization. That includes folks in the art department, not to mention the editors, who help me package my stories and investigative reports. It also includes the researchers and fact checkers and lawyers who help me report complex and controversial tales the right way.

I don’t know exactly how daily news and magazine-style journalism will be delivered a decade from now, but I do know there will always be a market for the kind of unique content that recently helped Canadian Business land a nomination for best magazine of 2008.

In the meantime, corporation must indeed take note that social media has empowered consumers. Last year, I wrote about the Canadian investors who used Facebook to face down Bay Street insiders during the ABCP restructuring. A similar event just took place in the UK, where Busts for Justice, a Facebook campaign launched to support large-breasted women, just forced Marks & Spencer to admit it “boobed” when trying to charge extra for bras with a DD cup or larger.

But be advised, social media also has made journalists of all stripes more powerful than ever before. I just published a massive feature in Canadian Business after an 8-month investigation into UK-based shareholder complaints directed at three Montreal businesses, including the former Canadian franchise partner of socially responsible Ben & Jerry’s. I used the Internet to collect information while joining overseas chat groups to see if other shareholders had similar concerns with these companies. What I found is a fascinating tale of international investor protection woes. To find out more, please check out the current issue of our magazine, which is also jammed with other interesting features and our I500 market data on Canadian companies. And, hey, you really can’t get that combination of informative goodies anywhere else.

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DOUBLE TAKE: Aside from trying to promote myself while generating Web traffic that helps put bread and butter on my table, this blog aims to stir debate by taking a harder look at current news and events. I obviously enjoy voicing my own opinions, but I am a big boy and I welcome all comments that don’t require R ratings. So let me have it via this blog or send me an email at tom.watson@canadianbusiness.rogers.com. I reserve the right to post email comments without disclosing the sender’s name. If you don’t think I am a total twit, follow my DOUBLE TAKE posts via my NotSOCRATES Twitter site at http://twitter.com/NotSocrates. THOMAS WATSON is a Senior Writer and editorial board member at Canadian Business magazine. Since winning a community journalism award as a cub reporter with the Hamilton Spectator in the early ’90s, he has covered business, finance, politics and technology for various news outlets. Prior to joining CB in 2001, he reported on the steel and automotive sectors for the Financial Post. Watson received his first magazine award nomination for exposing a stock manipulation plot aimed at Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text in 2000, when he was head of investor relations for an international venture capital outfit in the City of London. Watson holds graduate degrees in journalism, international relations and public finance and undergraduate degrees in history and politics.

Sponsored by Behance, a kind of New York-based industry association for creatives, and coolhunting.com, a website that has built a massive online following by aggregating cool stuff, the idea is to ask successful creative people to explain how they get things done — in the complete absence of any precedent or structure.

The lineup ranges from Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, a global nonprofit that functions as a kind of venture capitalist firm for social start-ups, to Ji Lee, the creative director of New York-based Google Creative Lab. (He’s the guy behind those white speech bubbles that cropped up on billboard and poster ads all over the world a few years ago.)

We’re also hearing from  Scott Thompson, the designer of the Obama campaign’s new media strategy, and Seth Godin, marketing blogger extraordinaire and author of business bestseller the Purple Cow. (For the session on Thompson, Obama’s new media guru, check out my Twitter feed here.)

Oddly, the organizers decided to dispense with time for questions, which is of course disappointing to a journalist. It’s also a bit weird, given the line-up are all people whose success depended on others’ participation and ideas.

However, the caliber of the people presenting just about makes up for the lack of interactivity.

Right now, the two guys who founded Threadless are explaining their working process.

Threadless is a company that uses opensource design to develop new T-shirts. Graphic designers email designs to the company, which means new T-shirt designs can go up on the site every week. A client selects a design; the company prints it and mails it to them. The company has been around for about nine years. It is now a multi-million-dollar going concern.

The guys who founded it are two designers named Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell. Standing at the podium, both sport the ubiquitous Brooklyn-creative uniform – skinny jeans, running shoes and T-shirts.

“From 2000 to 2004, we had no idea what the potential would be,” explains Nickell. “I did not take a penny of any sale that came in, we used every penny to develop t-shirts.”

By 2002, they started building websites for clients—but didn’t leave their jobs to build Threadless. “2002 was where I came in,” explains Kalmikoff. “I was laid off, so I decided to come and work in their offices. We worked for every agency and our focus in working on Threadless was twofold – to keep it going, but also to show to clients that we could use Flash. It became our working model. So for the entire time it was just this fun personal project for everyone involved.”

“The site was 100% reactive to what the community wanted,” says Nickell. “If people were saying, ‘you should print on this T-shirt, not this T-shirt,’ then we’d do that, no questions asked.”

“We didn’t need Threadless to do anything for us,” Kalmikoff goes on. “It was basically just serving this small group of people, with no client and no clear-cut consequences. So we learned to be 100% reactive to our own ideas.”

Says Nickell: “I am a web designer, but with Threadless, I found I had to make T-shirts. Initially, I didn’t know where to find a printer. So I just opened up a phone book and found a local printshop. I had to learn how to print T-shirts, process credit card orders, and so on.” The basic principle: if you don’t know how to do something, work it out.

“I became a web designer to showcase my print work, and everyone said, that’s a great website and nobody commented on the print work,” says Kalmikoff. “Part of me learning how to be a web designer was tackling O’Reilly and HTML books. I had no idea what I was doing. That was my Friday nights and Saturday nights: working. There was a period of time where it was important to me to just work it out. It was important to figure this out or go back to agency hell — and I wasn’t going to do that.”

In January of 2004, the pair fired all of their clients. “We needed to do something because we were competing for our own time,” says Kalmikoff. “We’d had a bad experience with a client so we fired everyone. We gave the good ones to our friends who were starting small things — and then went out on our own.”

“So we were asked to go to MIT to speak — we were seeing a significant revenue stream coming in and realizing this is something we could actually do for the rest of our lives,” says Nickell.

“We were expected to give a presentation, which we didn’t know,” says Kalmikoff. “The MIT guy told everyone what we did, which was helpful, because we didn’t know what it was. We didn’t try and look for answers — we fell into it. We were doing crowd-sourcing and applying these web 2.0 principles just because it made sense to us. We just rocked it— and it happened to coincide with what was going on.”

Once “rocking it” started to coincide with major success, the pair were confronted with one of the toughest aspects of building out a successful start-up — scaling their growth. “We were a real company and we were starting to grow faster than we could keep up with ourselves,” Nickell says. “We had a Christmas sale, and we sold so many t-shirts we were needing a month to fill orders. We said to ourselves: if our sale is this successful, we need to be set up to ship those orders. We didn’t want to just outsource everything.”

“Along the way we realized — we had to peel off portions of our jobs that would fill other people’s full time jobs,” says Kalmikoff. “We weren’t answering customer service emails anymore, we were like, hey, let’s hire people to deal with that. So, basically at this point we had maybe twenty people, maybe a little bit less – things were getting busy but we did try to keep it simple.”

“We were always in this mindset of: we can do it, just figure it out. Our fulfilment software in our warehouse – we wrote it ourselves, and we figured out ways to do things that are just not the way things are done,” says Nickell.

Their biggest hitch was in their initial phase, after they had fired their clients. “When we fired all our projects and clients,” explains Nickell, “we started up another bunch of websites – a music site, a drinks-recipe site – a bumper sticker company…”

“We thought we’d focus on Threadless full time but then we started sprouting up other companies — we had too large ambitions.”

“We were in client mode,” Kalmikoff explains. “We couldn’t stop – we felt we couldn’t just focus on one project. We were saying, we’ve got all this great time on our hands, so hell, let’s crowdsource everything.”

The positive of that, Kalmikoff goes on, is that a couple of projects failed. “When you are working on your own projects, failure is awesome … you realize you got checkmated and you learn so much. Learning from failure is such an important thing. So don’t be afraid going out on a limb on certain projects.”

Ending off, Kalmikoff throws up a slide entitled “How we roll now.”

“In 2006, we took a minority investment because we were making a lot of money and weren’t able to keep the business going without crushing under our own weight,” he explains. “Our investors bought in to us and we benefited from all their expertise. There’s a lot of things we have done since. Our first CEO stepped down as CEO, which was a realistic decision. It made sense to bring in a CEO, VP of operations and marketing—the kind of people who belong in a company our size”

That said, says Nickell, Threadless is still a scrappy company. “We need to remember how we worked in 2004, 2002—and remember how we got it done. So just figure out what you need to do and go ahead with it. Don’t debate. Figure out what is realistic to do, don’t overthink or overnegotiate, just do.”

Ending off with such a simple message shouldn’t obscure the point of this conference:  the plain hard work that goes into making something new and innovative take off.

The Threadless guys’ success, for example, clearly required an obsessive-complusive personality; the willingness to work on weekends; an openness and flexibility to their customers; and that fearlessness that accompanies all successful entrepreneurs.

Milling around at lunch after the Threadless session has wrapped, it occurs to me this conference is kind of like paradise as envisioned by Richard Florida. I’m surrounded by a sea of artfully mussed moptop hair, fauxhawks, stapled-up tapered jeans, and suit-and-sneakers combos. It’s the creative class on steroids.

Though the variety is fun and refreshing, I can’t help but ask myself why every human ‘tribe’, no matter their focus, orientation, or, in this case, strong commitment to individual expression, eventually develops its own “rules” — its own costumes and codes of conduct. Why does every graphic designer in Brooklyn have to wear skinny jeans and Converse sneakers? Second thought: figuring out how and why those codes happen, would probably make a great Malcolm-Gladwell-style anthropological business book.

Such thoughts aside, though, the overall tone is relaxed, open and friendly. And the speakers, to date, aren’t trying to be anything other than who they are: people who’ve decided they prefer working for themselves to working in an office, and have made a real success of it. As the cliche goes, they’re living their dream.

For those who have long wanted to bust out of the cube farm, but aren’t quite there yet, the formula is apparently pretty simple. (At least, if this group of speakers is to be believed.) Be true to yourself. Find a world and community whose codes and costumes work for you. Work like crazy. (Emphasis on the last point.) Eventually, you’ll hit on a way to make your head and your heart work in tandem. You’ll make some money.

And if you’re really obsessive compulsive, like the Threadless guys, you might even end up with a multi-million dollar company.

Conservatives are heralding the organizing as an example of powerful grassroots activism, using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to spread the word. Many are describing the movement as the face of the “new” Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and the other, erm, browner face of the “new” GOP, announced last week that, like all ambitious pols in the Era of Obama, he is writing a book about—what else?—himself. Tentative publication date is 2010, just in time for Jindal to make what’s widely anticipated to be a run at the GOP nomination for President.

The White House is countering the protests by reminding the American public that President Obama included tax cuts in his administration’s stimulus package.

Watch this space for Beltway commentary tomorrow from D.C. pundit Frank Micciche of the New America Foundation on what we should all be making of Obama’s recent statements about the health of the U.S. economy (and the economy’s inconvenient refusal to cooperate—courtesy dismal March retail sales) plus the administration’s recent decision to throw the books of 19 of America’s biggest banks open to the public.

First, an interesting analysis of some research conducted by HP Labs on Twitter.

Also, a fellow bloggers’ report on how Twitter propelled a Toronto charity event, #hohoto, to raise $10,000 in five days.

No, Twitter isn’t making money yet, and only recently does it seem to have worked out its issues with crashing. But hey, it’s still at the experimental stage. Maybe it always will be at some kind of experimental stage.

I’ve watched with some interest as mainstream media start to tap into the Twitterstream. Sure, the Globe and Mail’s TV critic, John Doyle, pokes fun at how The National’s Susan Ormiston and Peter Mansbridge’s chuckled last week at comments posted to Twitter during last week’s political crisis in Ottawa. But for a brief moment on Thursday, while the country waited for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to emerge from his meeting with the Governor General, #coalition and #Canada were among the most-tweeted subjects on all of Twitter. It is an obvious source of instant reaction to any event, and a pretty simple way to have real-time dialogue with an audience. Even Rex Murphy’s Sunday afternoon CBC radio show, Cross Country Checkup, started using it yesterday.

Personally, one use I have of Twitter is to watch headlines from the major news outlets, which are automatically fed from their websites. Troll around on Twitter for awhile, and you’ll come across lots of traditional media outlets starting to use it.

But how’s this for irony: the “old” media (as a magazine writer, I am obligated to put that in quotes), can also use Twitter to keep up on its own shrinking ranks. @themediaisdying tracks the career movements of journalists in the print and broadcast industries, as well as job cuts. A selection from over the weekend:

“THE MIAMI HERALD is being shopped around to be sold / is up for sale.”

“BROKER magazine is no longer publishing.”

“METRO has canned 4 Canadian reporters quietly. Expect more layoffs.”

Is it true? Maybe, maybe not. Twitter can also be a modern day rumour mill, but gone global and instant.

No wonder the mainstream media is paying attention to it. If there is one thing reporters love, it’s rumours—especially about their own industry.

And where did I hear about themediaisdying? On Twitter, of course. I follow Kaan Yigit, a senior team member of Solutions Research Group in Toronto, a consulting firm that researches entertainment, media, and technology. Yigit tweeted about it this morning. (For the uninitiated: on Twitter, “to follow” is to subscribe to someone’s messages, which are known as “tweets,” these are limited to 140 characters in length.)

By the way, you can follow me on Twitter: @AndrewWahl.

You can see it here, on YouTube, posted by “nortelvids” and aptly described as: “This fully animated piece follows a lonely robot as he finds an energy efficient Nortel oasis in a dark and dreary future world.”

A couple of things spring to mind. First off: Way to go Nortel for not exactly blowing the advertising budget! Considering the financial pressures they have (this morning, Lehman Brothers joined a conga-line of other analyst downgrades and slashed its price target to US$6 from US$15.50, citing “several possible headwinds,” and in particular, the carrier networks division’s grim outlook for revenue growth), the idea of a crudely drawn cartoon with eerie background music posted to YouTube does seem more prudent than, say, a lavish network television ad blitz.

Mind you, the cartoon doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Nortel’s professionalism, and the premise that Nortel will be the remaining bastion of technological hope is pretty funny. It’s almost too easy to mock. Have at it nonetheless.

Now, in case you think I spend time searching on YouTube for videos about Nortel, I don’t. Instead, I heard about it through Twitter: I follow the company’s Twitter profile, run by Texas-based employee Bo Gowan. He also manages the Nortel Buzzboard blog, where he explains in a post today that the “Robot” spot is the first of a series of videos he will be posting that were homemade by Nortel employees on their own time to “highlight Nortel’s green and energy efficiency benefits.” He’ll be posting more this week. And then….

Then the fun starts — next Tuesday I’ll post two brand new Nortel commercials (professional ones), bringing the video tally to five, and you’ll get to vote for your favorite video among all of them.  Will the masses like the slick, professionally-created ads, or the YouTube-style spot that a random Nortel employee created at home on her Mac?  That’s for you to decide.

And here’s the really cool part.  Whichever video wins the vote will be used as an actual online ad as part of Nortel’s online advertising campaign!  So as they say, “your vote counts!”

Oh goody.

Admittedly, this is completely irrelevant to all the many serious business challenges Nortel faces right now. (It recently made Motley Fool’s list of Deathbed stocks.) But it’s interesting to watch how the company is attempting to leverage (low-cost) social networking tools to promote the company. Several high-ranking executives, including Chief Technology Officer John Roese, have blogs, which come across as being pretty authentic and not just ghost written by public relations people. (Mark Evans, a Toronto-based blogger and social media expert who used to cover Nortel as a reporter at the Financial Post, continues to tracks the company at All About Nortel and seems to like its efforts. See other posts here, and here.)

But homemade videos as the source for an online ad campaign? Maybe those employees could better spend their personal time looking for alternative job prospects.