The latest buzz from butterbeep HQ - by the end of the year we aim to be making an independent income from iphone/itouch applications (objective c here we come) which will enable us to pump a million times more energy into writing, blogging, podding and creating. Roll on 2010!

Tweet generation is a book being put together by butterbeep about the power of social media and the people who use it
as a enabling tool and a way to create wide-reaching and potent connections. The book, which touches on a number of
social networks and prominent posters, geeks and visionaries, is different from many books about tech in the desire to
capture the intersection of art and science, the heart and the mind that is so prevalent in these emerging communities.
Can these tools, in the right hands, be a force capable of reclaiming the human heart and placing it smack bang in the
middle of the technosphere. How knows, but it’s going to be a lot of fun finding out.

Anyone can contribute to the book by going to http://butterbeep.com/tweetgeneration and sending in their quotes, experiences and thoughts. Not every upload will make it - think of them as frenzied spermatazoe on their way to the ovum. Make them fertile and fast, and they may get there!

The book will be finished by August 28 2008 and final submissions will be accepted up until August 15. Happy posting!

My insides are the size of an ocean, mountain, star. I feel so connected and interlaced I could explode. When I find the right key and turn it all creation will spill out. I refuse to live another second in a second-rate fashion. Who’s with me? Who’s coming along for the ride?

I knocked down the knucklebones, shufflestones, mud pies an lullabies, fruit flies that whisper lollipops deep into my ear where hammer and anvil clik clak and qik qwak. Each qik each qwak from head to feet becomes a tweet shoots down through pipes and guttering of interweb lamplights to drop brain food as pow, wow and horseradish.

I am seeking out the visionaries of social media and web 2.0 programming - looking for our very own Captain Beefhearts, our Zappas, our Mozarts. So - I give you why the lucky stiff. Writer, artist, cartoonist and mad genius of the Ruby programming universe, this human being exudes the energy typical of a creator who straddles the kinetic hotspot where art and science, code and poetry meet and jam. He is the writer of why’s poignant guide to Ruby, surely the maddest and most enertaining introduction to a programming language ever created, the maker of the camping microframework and many other eccentric and out-there code machines and plugins. We need people like this on the planet - please mr stiff, more more more!

Yep, tweetgeneration now has its very own home. Why not drop in and send in your stuff?

I think the social media wave is cresting. It’s all more more more, as soon as a new network is mentioned we all flock to it, sign up, start fluttering and muttering and swamping it with tweets and posts and microbleeps. I’m sick of this constant custard. We need to rinse the value out of the networks we already use. We need to unearth the true poets and visionaries of this medium. We need to be tweetcore!

I just ordered a 40+ track Captain Beefheart CD. I love Don Van Vliet, and I just happened across this appraisal of Trout Mask Replica by Simpsons creator Matt Groening:

The first time I heard Trout Mask, when I was 15 years old, I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony.

Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn’t believe Frank Zappa could do this to me - and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose: they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I’d ever heard.

I played Trout Mask for my blues-loving friends, who all went through the same reaction I had, and we’d sit around saying, Wow, if this is how great pop music is in 1969, just think what it’ll be like in 1984! Of course, we didn’t realise this was the best album of 1984… and it remains the best rock album I’ve ever heard.

I saw him perform in 1970, when he came to the Paramount Theater in Portland, Oregon, and all seventy-five weirdos in the city showed up. These were the people the hippies had rejected. I remember the lights dimmed, and then Ed Marimba came out with a plastic toy raygun, pulled the trigger a few times to make sparks, and intoned the words ‘Raygun, raygun’ over and over again . . . finally concluding with ‘Ronnie Raygun’, who was already Governor of California. Then Drumbo came out and they played a duet for a while, and finally the whole band walked on. It was the best concert I’ve ever seen, easily.

In 1975, at the very end of an orchestral concert that Frank Zappa did at UCLA, I remember Don came out after the orchestra left the stage and just started blowing his soprano sax. After the show, a couple of friends and I tracked him down and had lunch with him. He showed us this incredible sketchbook, full of stuff that was for more figurative than anything he does nowadays. One of the friends I was with actually bought a picture of a trout that he’d drawn. He got quite nervous when she offered to buy it and called his wife to check that it was OK. Not long ago, I went to a private view of his paintings in Santa Monica and he was there. But by that time weirdness had become hip, so he was surrounded by every hipster weirdo in L.A. And in any case, I got waylaid by Henry Rollins.

After four weeks of cloak and dagger tactics we can now bring our latest project out into the open. Butterbeep is currently in the process of writing a book, working title The Tweet Generation, about social media and the people who use it (heavily). Feelers have been put out, interest sparked, and 30+ peeps are in the process of providing mini-biogs that will form the backbone of a coffee-table style book complete with photography. The book is changing as fast as the social media landscape - it was all twitter and seesmic at its inception but is already changing shade to move its focus onto phreadz and identi.ca! Interested in adding your biog? Just get in touch!