Tweety tweety! Kabloom! 
Kent Newsome is bang on about Twitter. What I find interesting is that there are a bunch of people who, when faced with a new technology ask only as to it's 'faddishness' and whether anyone's making money.
What this business magazine perspective fails to take in to account is that fun and creativity are requirements for innovation. Blogging wasn't set up in order to return investment or to get sticky eyeballs (whatever they are).
The point about Twitter is that it's fun and useful.
If one is making money, the intention is that you use it to have fun. Now, if your definition of fun involves snorting cocaine off a hooker's backside, perhaps Twitter (or blogging etc.) won't satisfy your need. But if it involves communicating with one's fellow human beings, then maybe it will.
With the music industry, the people who focus on the dollars and pounds are useful but not the people you want to take advice from on what's interesting. They often drain the excitement out of music in order to pimp boy bands.
This is why I get very bored reading Techmeme - it is often far too high level for me. It's almost TechBusinessMeme, rather than Techmeme. The quarterly revenues or Google AdSense ROI of Silicon Valley startups doesn't interest me - technology does. If we had Musicmeme, we wouldn't be discussing the amount of money that EMI or Sony Music makes, we'd be talking about music, goddamnit!
This is also why I don't go to conferences any more (or rather, why I have my 20 pound/dollar/Euro rule).
No kids, no marriage
The Telegraph reports on a study by the Institute of Education which claims that a third of women graduates will never have children. Somehow, people think this is a bad thing. I have absolutely no intention to have children, nor do I have any intention to get married. Relationships - fine. But marriage and children - like body art and lost teeth - is for life. Both tend to come with mortgages and suburban houses attached. Not for me, thanks. I'm optin' out. And I'm not alone, it seems.
According to BabyCenter.com, it costs around $468,000 to raise a child born in 2007. And that excludes the cost of university or college - which, in the UK, tripled just like that last year.
That reality doesn't go away. Much as anyone can bitch about restaurants that have crayons in cups on the table, I love kids. I love the idea of teaching children and raising them. But, as I said, emotion and reality.
Movies and television have drummed in to us the idea that family life is normal - it's those barmy people in institutions who are unloved. I love my family - don't get me wrong. But that doesn't mean I need any more of them.
It's okay for me - I'm a guy. But for women, it's a different thing. It's not men who become 'spinsters', it's women. There is a negative stigma for women who choose not to have children - which largely doesn't exist for men.
