Stephen Colbert, the swiss army knife of late night political satire, has joined Reddit’s Gift Exchange for the troops. The program is part of ‘redditgifts’, a popular subreddit where users sign up to give one another gifts. It’s especially popular during Christmas time each year.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
For years now, oblivious or simply stubborn politicians have felt the remorseless wrath of YouTube, with video evidence of every public word ever spoken available to point out anything the least bit hypothetical. Late night satirists have used this to consistently point out lies and double-speak, which is sometimes amusing and often disheartening. Few politicians seem to know what to do with YouTube, and how to use it advantageously (Anthony Weiner is a notable exception), but while they deal with that, one of the sharpest of satirists has taken to another social medium to call out the inane.
Twitter’s year-end wrap-up continued in full force, as the microblogging service followed up Monday‘s Top 10 Twitter Trends of the Year and Tuesday‘s 10 Most Powerful Tweets with Wednesday’s installment: The Year’s Most Retweeted Tweets.
Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, will receive the first-ever Golden Tweet award during Wednesday night’s broadcast for topping the list. The 10 Most Retweeted Tweets:
1: Stephen Colbert, @StephenAtHome: in honor of oil-soaked birds, ‘tweets’ are now ‘gurgles. http://bit.ly/cIhZNf
2: Drake, @drakkardnoir: We always ignore the ones who adore us, and adore the ones who ignore us
3: Lil Wayne, @liltunechi: aaaaaaahhhhhhmmmmm baaaaakkkkkkkkkk
4: Justin Bieber, @justinbieber: te quiero mucho mi amor
5: Al-Qaeda, @alqaeda: Just noticed Twitter keeps prompting me to “Add a location to your tweets”. Not falling for that one.
6: Joe Jonas, @joejonas: I cry because I love Justin Bieber!!!
7: Lady Gaga, @ladygaga: I’m beautiful in my way, ’cause God makes no mistakes. I’m on the right track, baby. I was Born This Way.
8: Kanye West, @kanyewest: I’m sorry Taylor.
9: Rihanna, @rihanna: Justin Bieber just flashed me his abs in the middle of a restaurant! Wow! He actually had a lil 6 pack! Sexy,lol!#Beliebersplzdontkillme
10: Justin Halpern, @shitmydadsays: “Don’t focus on the one guy who hates you. You don’t go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has more important things to worry about, like trying to secure his release on bail from prison in Sweden. There is no celebrating in the office of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Lady Gaga is not dancing. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have one less thing to be smug about on Comedy Central, and ditto for Glenn Beck on Fox News Channel. President Barack Obama is dealing with more significant issues, like war and unemployment. Steve Jobs is gearing up for the release of the second-generation iPad. The Chilean miners are probably just happy to be alive. And, much like Assange and Obama, the unemployed American has far more significant issues to deal with.
What do all of those people have in common? They all finished ahead of Mark Zuckerberg in voting by TIME readers for its 2010 Person of the Year, yet the Facebook co-founder and CEO rebounded from finishing No. 10 on the readers’ poll and impressed the magazine’s editors enough to be named TIME 2010 Person of the Year.
From the explanation penned by managing editor Richard Stengel:
Like two of our runners-up this year, Julian Assange and the Tea Party, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a whole lot of veneration for traditional authority. In a sense, Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: In Assange’s case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg’s case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appears to be one step closer to being released from prison, according to reports, but even if prosecutors in Sweden appeal the ruling to release him on bail, he has one piece of good news to hold onto: Assange was the readers’ choice for TIME‘s Person of the Year 2010.
Editors from TIME will reveal the magazine’s choice for Person of the Year on NBC’s Today Wednesday morning.
TIME said Assange collected 382,020 of the total of 1,249,425 votes cast, far outdistancing second-place finisher Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who finished with 148,383 fewer votes. However, the magazine added that Lady Gaga crushed Assange on Facebook, totaling 65,417 likes versus 45,643.
The readers’ top 10, unchanged from last Wednesday:
1: Julian Assange
2: Recep Tayyip Erdogan
3: Lady Gaga
4: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
5: Glenn Beck
6: Barack Obama
7: Steve Jobs
8: The Chilean Miners
9: The Unemployed American
10: Mark Zuckerberg
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may be cooling his heels in a London jail, but he will likely be heartened by the news that with four days left in the voting, he is atop TIME‘s voting for Person of the Year.
Voting ends Sunday, and the magazine will name its Person of the Year Wednesday, Dec. 15.
The top 10, as of Wednesday:
1: Julian Assange
2: Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
3: Lady Gaga
4: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
5: Glenn Beck
6: Barack Obama
7: Steve Jobs
8: The Chilean miners
9: The unemployed American
10: Mark Zuckerberg
Bloggers fretted the possibility of a war with Iran, while Mashable accounted for all of the five most-Tweeted news articles, as it did during the week of Oct. 18-22, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was an animated parody of the Tea Party movement, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Nov. 1-5.
Talk of a potential conflict with Iran was spurred by an Oct. 31 column in The Washington Post by David Broder, and it accounted for 35 percent of news links shared by bloggers. It was followed by: the midterm election results and their consequences, at 17 percent; another Washington Post column, in which Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke explained his organization’s response to the economic crisis, at 13 percent; the Oct. 30 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C., organized by Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, at 10 percent; and a report from the British Broadcasting Corp. about a female boa constrictor that scientists claim had 22 baby snakes with no father, at 8 percent.
Can’t make it to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C., Saturday? If you own an iPhone, Comedy Central has got you covered.
The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear app is now available free-of-charge via the iTunes App Store. It features a map of the rally site; links to Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare (including the option to check in to sanity or fear); a portal for users to upload photos from the event; and an exclusive welcome message from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
According to the event’s official site, an Android version is coming “soon,” but since the event was 24 hours away at the time of this post …
Bloggers lost their religion over a Los Angeles Times story about a survey showing that atheists and agnostics were more knowledgeable about religion than followers of major faiths, while the most-Tweeted news link was a BBC item about a British food production company that was forced to pay a fine after a man found a dead mouse embedded in a loaf of bread, and the most-viewed news and politics video on YouTube was Swiss finance minister Hans-Rudolf Merz laughing uncontrollably while delivering a speech, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Sept. 27-Oct. 1.
The holy war (or non-holy war) accounted for 23 percent of news links shared by bloggers, and it was followed by: an item from The Washington Post about the administration of President Barack Obama urging a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit over its targeting of a U.S. citizen living overseas with alleged ties to Al Qaeda, at 15 percent; another Washington Post offering, this one a column by Princeton University philosophy Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah suggesting that future generations will condemn the current one for institutions such as the prison system and practices such as industrial meat production, at 9 percent; also at 9 percent a Los Angeles Times report about comments from former CIA director Michael Hayden that the president should have the authority to shut down the Internet in times of crisis; and astronomers’ discovery of Gliese 581G, the first planet found in another solar system believed to have the basic conditions needed to support extraterrestrial life, at 7 percent.
Comedian Iliza Vie Shlesinger is channeling her very best Maria Bartiromo for Slate V, hosting Up in Your Business, a weekly series that Slate said “aims to do the world of business and business news what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do to politics and the mainstream media.”
The debut episode (below) examines how fictional character Gordon Gekko of Wall Street and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps rates against Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as poking fun at Netflix.
