What could have been cleverly co-opted and adapted into a subtle viral marketing campaign has now been yanked from the interwaves (most likely by reactionary lawyers, our ad dept suspects), deeply upsetting committed yet attention-deficit Twitterers. This is reminiscent of NBC's rabid squashing of any content on YouTube that relates to its shows. I can understand entire episodes being pulled, but little clips here and there seem to increase buzz and to potentially earn the shows (specifically SNL) some new fans. While on a smaller scale than NBC's watchdoggery, folks at AMC cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when they silenced the tweets—essentially calling the one or two sentences-long Twitter messages (Twitter messages!!! I hardly know what those are!) unauthorized fanfiction, and therefore verboten. As Alejandra Ramos points out, it's pretty ironic that the show about advertising fails to recognize a good opportunity to... advertise.

We laughed at useless rich girl Brill for her dramatic(-ally blogged) declaration that "even my weekend in bedford wasn’t entirely restful because i still felt ‘on duty’ because i knew i’d be writing about it." Ha! But! Consider this from taser-loving, reporter-helping, cult-like-following-inspiring professional PR man Peter Shankman's long new blog post about how much he hates hearing the phrase "Why Don't You Do Some Work?":

Was having a conversation the other day with someone via IM. She asked me where I was, and I told her I was talking from the lobby of the W hotel in Times Square, waiting to have a drink with someone who runs a marketing firm.

“The W Hotel?! What a tough life! Will you please do some work?!” she IM’d back. It was around 3pm. She didn’t know I’d closed two deals, brought three new advertisers to HARO, and gotten one client onto CNN. Not bad for someone who, according to my friend, had to be nagged to “do some work.”

Shit. Do we really want to open this floodgate? Can you already see where Shankman is prepared to go (at incredible length) with this? That's right, into an exposition of the awesomeness of Peter Shankman and his awesome work-play life balance!

I’ve heard virtually identical comments resulting from Facebook or Twitter updates that have included “Driving from LA to SF, stopped to get gas outside some wind farm,” “Sitting in the lounge at Gatwick, munching on a bagel,” “Singapore–>EWR flight delayed, hitting Duty Free, anyone want anything?” “Sitting on the hood of my rental car, watching the sunset from the desert outside of Eloy, Arizona,” and of course, “working from the Ranch, waiting for them to fuel the plane,” which of course, is code for “handling a client issue via conference call, with my skydiving rig on my back, hoping I’ll finish the call before the next load goes up in the air.”

Just in case you didn't catch his Twitter updates: he goes skydiving! Have you ever been? No? Well some people just aren't born adventurers, don't feel bad.

So Let’s translate “why don’t you do some work” into what it really is: “How come your job lets you fly all over the place, and have meetings in really cool places, and why can’t mine? Your job certainly doesn’t seem like work, why does mine?”

My answer to them? Because you don’t want it badly enough. If you really did, you’d have it. You’d take the risk, and play the game. (In actuality, that’s all it ever is - one giant game.) Face it - Having a job where you’re not the boss is, well, safe.

Peter Shankman thinks you're a pussy, no disrespect intended.

Like to read thousands more words about how Shankman can close client deals on his cellphone immediately before parachuting out of a plane and Twittering about it on the way down and, upon landing, running a road race that ends in a TV studio where he is doing an on-air interview? Read all you want!

"An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind."
—Walter Bagehot

"Everybody's talking trash these days, so why not keep quiet?"
—Dennis Rodman

1. Fireland
Name: Joshua Green Allen
Best: The quote above, and: " What I do while going through the automatic car wash is really nobody's beeswax but I will say it's not particularly 'touchless.'"


2. Fedge
Name: Jeff
Best: "Did you hear? No 3G iPhone. They were all destroyed in that damn quake. What a travesty. Some people died, too. - Sent from a toilet in China"


3. Mat
Name: Mathew Honan
Best: "Why are all these POOR PEOPLE on my plane—do not TOUCH my MacBookAir! No in-flight lattés, WTF? Last time I fly Southwest... #sxsw" (For a week Mathew pretended he was at the annual tech festival.)


4. ScottSimpson
Name: Scott Simpson
Best: "The kid is cute; the father is ugly. I always forget: is it the cosine or the sine that allows you to solve for whether the mom is hot?"


5. AinsleyofAttack
Name: Ainsley Drew
Best: "You know how a Venus flytrap snaps shut when you poke it with a pencil? My vagina does that when you say 'recumbent bike.'"


6. Strutting
Name: Jay Hathaway
Best: "Heard of maxin' and relaxin', but can't figure out maxin' by itself. Unless it's something the Fresh Prince couldn't comfortably rap about."


7. Mike_FTW
Name: Mike Monteiro
Best: "Working out to Pavement is amusing. It's like neither of us is REALLY trying too hard."


8. Hotdogsladies
Name: Merlin Mann
Best: "Hipster-Hat-and-Beard-Guy-with-One-Pant-Leg-Always-Rolled-Up, you'll henceforth be known as 'Tattoos McFixiepants.' Or, 'TatMac,' for short."


9. Moltz
Name: John Moltz
Best: "Dear California: while we applaud your gay weddings, we don't really give a shit how hot it is there. Love, the Rest of the World."


10. Mulegirl
Name: Erika Hall
Best; "Damn right I'm having a Fluffernutter bagel for breakfast. (The fluff is 2 months past its freshness date, so I've dialed 9-1- on my cell)"


11. Meowrey
Name: Briana Mowrey
Best: "Good news! I found the greatest love of all inside of me! Other stuff I found inside me: sangria, Red 40, lactobacilli, tiny Dennis Quaid."


12. Lonelysandwich
Name: Adam Lisagor
Best: "I don't want to leave my office to pee because I don't think anyone knows I'm here today. On the other hand, I'm out of empties."

Nick Douglas
Jason Calacanis
Jackson West
Anil Dash
Allison Mooney
Lockhart Steele
Scott Kidder
Caroline McCarthy
Kelly Reeves
Jason Kottke
Peter Rojas
Lindsay Robertson
Julia Allison
Anthony Volodkin
Choire Sicha
Nicholas Carlson
Alisa Leonard
Jaclyn Johnson
Ana Marie Cox
Heather Snodgrass
Jessica Coen
Alex Blagg
Rex Sorgatz

Don't Shoot the Canary [YM]

For each time you did the following in the last thirty days:

1 point

• Asked for a digg
• Added someone on Facebook the day you met them
• Visited MySpace
• IMed someone asking who they are
• Messaged someone on a site like Facebook when you could have called or e-mailed
• Used a "Sent from my Blackberry/iPhone/etc." e-mail signature
• Discussed an Apple rumor
• Made a joke about fonts

2 points

• Commented on a blog just to say you liked or hated something
• Posted a Craigslist missed connection
• Used MySpace
• Submitted your own blog post to Digg
• Asked someone to blog you
• Added to a Wikipedia talk page
• Bought a Threadless T-shirt

3 points

• Told a personal story in a Yelp review
• Used Tumblr
• Gave a bad review on Amazon to a book written over thirty years ago
• Added a celebrity on Facebook
• Made a YouTube response video
• Twittered about your blog
• Got fake-married on Facebook
• Friended someone on MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, or Yahoo 360
• Asked anyone to tag anything

4 points

• Invited someone to add their photo to a Flickr group
• Invited someone to a Facebook app
• Vlogged
• Made a Facebook event that wasn't really an event
• Blogged about dealing with someone in the service industry
• E-mailed a press release
• Wrote "why do I care" in a blog comment

Death Round: 20 points

• Sent an unneeded "reply to all"
• Sold someone's contact info
• Played Second Life
• Rickrolled someone
• Reviewed your own book on Amazon
• Complained that someone reblogged a third party's content without crediting you for finding it first
• Said the word "microcelebrity"
• Invited your whole address book to something
• Talked like a LOLcat in real life

Results
0-10: Get the hell off my blog. But first digg my story.
11-15: You must feel great about yourself. Add twenty points for taking the quiz.
16-25: Very mediocre. Why are you reading this on your Playstation? Go play GTA IV.
26-40: All your Tumblr posts are stolen from other people's blogs. Your Twitters are about Twitter. But somehow all the YouTube clips you IM me are two years old.
41+: All my base are belong to you. Oh god, you probably laughed at that. You can haz the finger, jackass.

Picture: A very funny College Humor article. Before you go, I was serious about the digg.

Reporters Twitter site to launch [Journalism.co.uk, via Fimoculous]