Vermont's Fake Twitter Accounts: A Field Guide

You may have heard about @THISISVT, the new Twitter account which will be operated by a different Vermont citizen each week. It was created by the state Department of Tourism in the vein of @Sweden and @NewZealand, but hopefully without the awkward moments. Picking a citizen to temporarily act as the voice of a polity is officially trending.

@THISISVT's goal of representing Vermont through the real voices of Vermonters is a noble one. But you know what's more fun? Fake voices. More specifically, the jokey Twitter accounts that come about through anthropomorphizing the creatures and machines that populate our state. They're a critical part of the Twitter ecosystem, making sure that it can't be taken too seriously in the midst of all the self-promotion and buzzwords. Sure, they're probably a waste of time — but at least they're fun! (Usually.)

Here's a brief guide to the parody accounts that populate our local Twittersphere. Give 'em a follow if you don't already.

(Note: This list does not include Twitter accounts purporting to belong to pets or newborns. Parents, please don’t pretend to be your child on social media.)

Help Map Burlington's Neighborhoods With New Crowdsourcing Project

Where's the line between the Old North End and New North End? How far does Downtown stretch? How big is the Five Sisters neighborhood?

If you think you know the answers to these questions, your expertise is needed. Burlington cartographer Bill Morris of GeoSprocket created a tool that allows you to draw the Queen City's neighborhoods as you see fit. The results from all the submissions will be aggregated to form a consensus about where the 'hoods are. This project was inspired by a similar undertaking in Boston — check that out here.

What's the point in all this? Well, besides engendering a greater sense of neighborhood pride, it's almost time again to reassess the boundaries of Burlington's seven wards. There's nothing official or binding about this project, but it could help inform redistricting decisions. If you think it's silly to lump Lakeview Terrace and the stretch of North Avenue near Waggy's in with the New North End's Ward 7, now's the time to speak up.

CCTA Bus Schedule Data Now Available on Google Maps

It's now a little bit easier to take a trip on the bus.

CCTA bus schedule info is now available on Google Transit. That means when you're looking for directions on Google Maps between places serviced by these bus systems, Google shows you a public transit option alongside the drive, walk and bike options.

Try it out! Enter your current address and where you want to go — Google will tell you where and when to pick up the bus, which route (or routes, in the case of transfers) to take, and what time you're expected to arrive at your location. It's important to note that this isn't realtime tracking data, so Google won't tell you where exactly your bus is along its route or if it will be late. But it does make it much easier to figure out how to take the bus efficiently, especially if you're just a casual bus rider. And it works on smartphone versions of Google Maps, too.

It's not just useful in Burlington, either. Live in, say, Waterbury? Google will give you driving or walking directions to the nearest park-and-ride and tell you when to expect a LINK bus there. And if you're traveling from Burlington to Middlebury, Google's directions transition from the CCTA to Addison County's ACTR buses, which are also on Google Transit. Easy-peasy!

Getting the CCTA on Google has been a long process dating back a few years, according to Ross Nizlek,  IT and scheduling specialist for the CCTA. To integrate with Google Maps, Google needs the schedule data in a very specific format, Nizlek explains. The process includes gathering GPS coordinates for every last stop and updating how the agency stores its route data.

Mike Daisey Returns to the Stage in Burlington

An anecdote in "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," the monologue about Apple by Mike Daisey, took on a new resonance on Saturday night. It's the part in which Daisey is in China, planning out his visit to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen where electronics are built for Apple and other electronics companies. Daisey tells his translator that he's not a businessman — he just plans to pose as one to get into the factory. The translator, Cathy, asks him if he's going to lie. Daisey reples, "Yes, Cathy. I'm going to lie to lots of people."

When Daisey spoke that line at the Flynn Center during his performance, it seemed to hang in the air a little. Not as long as the painfully drawn-out pauses when Ira Glass was eviscerating him on "This American Life," but long enough to let it sink in. I heard a couple audience members chuckle under their breath.

Saturday night marked Daisey's second "Agony and Ecstasy" performance since "This American Life" busted him for inventing and embellishing some details about his trip to Apple's Chinese factories in his ostensibly nonfiction monologue. It was his first in a couple of weeks, since the scandal began to cool down and Daisey had a chance to rethink and rework parts of the monologue.

Sure enough, there were some differences: The guards at the factory gates didn't have guns. Daisey didn't meet a 12-year-old worker. He did not claim that someone saw his iPad turn on and called it "a kind of magic." Daisey did still say that his taxicab came to a stop at a highway exit that ended in midair.

Somewhat surprisingly, Daisey did not address the controversy directly in his monologue. It wasn't until after the show, during a Q&A with Flynn Center executive director John Killacky and UVM Lane Series director Natalie Neuert, that the scandal actually came up — and even then, no one simply said, "Mike got in trouble a few weeks back because he said untrue things on 'This American Life' and Ira Glass really didn't take kindly to it."

Tax Storm Still Brewing for Vermont Tech Businesses

Vermont's tech "geekosystem," as Union Street Media founder and president Ted Adler termed it today, are still rallying to knock down a controversial tax on cloud computing.

I wrote about the debate — which pits the tax department against the state's up-and-coming software and technology industry — for Seven Days in mid-February. It's a complicated issue, as matters of tax law typically are, but the debate boils downs to this: Business leaders are balking at a new interpretation of Vermont tax law that applies a sales and use tax to software in the "cloud." That could include everything from doing your taxes with online software to logging on to an email service.

In 2010, the tax department issued a "technical bulletin" to clarify its interpretation of how cloud computing should be taxed. The department reasoned that software in the cloud wasn't all that different from software that customers used to buy at a store or download to a hard drive — and so they applied the same 6 percent sales tax to these products.

Tech industry advocates take issue on a few fronts. They think the tax could put Vermont at a competitive disadvantage with other states and would hurt small businesses, who increasingly use cloud computing in some form or another. They also take issue with the tax department's approach. The technical bulletin went into effect without any legislative oversight or public discussion. And it also applied to backward-looking audits, so some companies found themselves being penalized for not filing their taxes correctly for the past four years — despite the fact that the interpretation wasn't clarified by the department until 2010. 

These were the complaints that business leaders aired today at a press conference at Dealer.com's Burlington complex.

Pulling the Plug: St. Mike's Goes Offline for Tech Fast

Tracking down students and faculty "fasting" from technology this week at Saint Michael's College is easier said than done.

Email? Nope. Cellphones? They're out, too. In a neo-Luddite's take on Lent, the school is encouraging students, faculty and staff to unplug for a few days. This week's "Disconnect to Reconnect" event kicked off Monday night with a screening of "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier" and continues this week with a panel discussion and three-day technology fast. 

That means 72 hours away from computers, cellphones and video games — think truly wireless.

Anthropology professor Adrie Kusserow is not fasting right now, and did respond to an email request for an interview. She has enforced a similar ban on technology with her students for several years. She goes so far as to collect students' cellphones, which she hoards in a basket until the end of the experiment. Now, she and a group of other professors are taking the experiment campus-wide during a series of events designed to help students reflect on the impacts — good and bad — that digital media has on their lives.

"The degree of technological saturation is changing our consciousness in so many ways," says Kusserow. "Our family lives, our spiritual lives, our relationship to nature, our conceptions of time."

Study: Sen. Bernie Sanders Tops List for Congress' Most "Influential" and "Engaged" Tweety Bird

"Gentlemen, start your hashtags:" Ever sat up nights wondering which political party spends more time tweeting and which members of Congress do so most effectively? Me, neither.

Still, that didn't stop the social-media gurus at Edelman Digital in Washington, D.C., from lighting up the twalaxy (or "Twitter galaxy," for you newbies) with the results of its new study, "Capitol Tweets: The Yeas and Nays of the Congressional Twitterverse."

Edelman identified five metrics for measuring so-called "Twitter success — engagement, mentions, amplification, follower growth, and tweetlevel influence — and looked at the behaviors that influenced those metrics across key demographics." 

Over a period of 112 days spanning from September 2 to December 25, 2011 — who Tweets on Christmas Eve? — the researchers examined 456 member handles who made a total of 59,270 tweets. During that time, the researchers found, congressionaal tweeters had more than 5.1 million followers, more than 1.3 million "mentions" and an average of 130 tweets per handle. And you thought your job was boring.

After all the numbers were crunched, guess who came out as the grand master of the 140-character word form? Vermont's own independent senator, Bernie Sanders, who ranked number one for both overall "influence" and "engagement," number three for "trust" and number four for "popularity." Imagine that: a Brooklyn-born socialist from Vermont tops the list for most engaged and influential member of Congress. That noise you're hearing is the sound of Fox News-watching heads exploding all across the heartland.

An Interview With Embattled Monologuist Mike Daisey on His Apple Show

You may have heard about Mike Daisey by now. He's the monologuist who's spent the past year and a half performing his new monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," which examines the links among Apple, industrial design and overseas manufacturing. Pieces of the monologue focusing on the harsh working conditions at Apple's Chinese factories were excerpted on "This American Life" earlier this year. It made for an incredibly compelling hour of radio.

And then this happened. Daisey made a repeat apperance on "This American Life," this time to answer to charges that he made a bunch of stuff up about his trip to the factories in China. It was compelling, too — this time in a raw, incredibly uncomfortable way as a Hulking-out Ira Glass deconstructed the lies.

After that show aired, Daisey gave a talk at Georgetown responding to the controversy (transcript here, audio here). He sounded defensive, even angry as he defended the greater impact of his work and condemned the media for focusing on him instead of the factories.

But when I spoke to him a few days later, he seemed contrite, content and ready to move on and fix his mistakes as best he could. It should be fascinating to hear him perform "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at the Flynn Center on March 31. Will Daisey's tale still resonate emotionally with the audience? Will people still care to listen?

Click here to read the full interview with Mike Daisey.

Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus

Reid Postpones Vote on PROTECT IP Act; Leahy Criticizes Senate Colleagues

Wednesday was the day the internet stood still to protest a pair of antipiracy bills in the U.S. Congress — and it looks like it worked. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has postponed a vote on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), a much-criticized bill sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy.

"In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act," Reid said in a statement. This doesn't mean PIPA is dead, though — just sleeping for now. Reid, who supported the bill, praised Leahy's work on PIPA and stressed that there remains a need for strong antipiracy legislation.

In a statement of his own, Leahy said he understood Reid's decision to indefinitely postpone the vote, but he blasted his Senate colleagues for making a "knee-jerk reaction," and said that criminals are "smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy." Leahy's full statement is after the jump.

Shit Vermonters Say

You may have heard about the "Shit People Say" meme that's taken the internet by storm in the past month. It began with the "Shit Girls Say" video, in which a guy dressed in drag recites stereotypically girly phrases. This went viral after a few million people said "OMG this is soooo true!" and shared it on Facebook. Next came the copycat videos, which became increasingly specific/offensive — "Shit Guys Say," "Shit Black Girls Say," "Shit Drunk Girls Say," "Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys," "Shit Middle-Aged Guys Say While Waiting In Line at the Bank," and so on.

A recent sub-genre of the "Shit People Say" meme has been the rise of the geographically focused videos, ranging from the obvious ("Shit New Yorkers Say") to the less-obvious ("Shit Austinites Say"). Fashionably late as always, there still hasn't been a Shit Vermonters Say video, but Vermont's Twitter community filled the void admirably today, beginning with @whitneyinvt. Here are a few of our favorites. Thanks for giving us an excuse to stare at Twitter instead of doing real work today, Whitney.