Mac’s “Get a Mac” campaign gave us Mac users a sense of superiority for a couple of years but Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” is actually starting to work. The average PC user is starting to no longer accept my jibes about their operating system and see my remarks as snobbery (how dare they!) as opposed to the truth.

The interesting thing about Microsoft’s campaign isn’t that it portrays PCs as cool, in my opinion, but rather as ‘normal’ with everyone, all sorts of people, using them. Whilst Mac’s campaign focuses on Mac’s being fun and creative.

Naturally, the advert has some problems. There seems to be lots of Windows users in Africa but I imagine Linux is much more affordable for them; shame Microsoft don’t support OLPC!

Your thoughts on the adverts?

Well, perhaps the title is an exaggeration. I spent the majority of Thursday night fixing the machine of a gamer; I found myself amazed that a nerd would happily run Norton (which was the cause of the problems) on his machine. Is it not amazing that people who spend the majority of their free time online have no clue about software?

A fairly new class of nerd has suddenly become very popular: the gaming nerd. There’s nerds like me (with a relatively good knowledge of technology and all sorts of miscellany); the Napolean Dynamite nerd (who are somewhat lacking, in both intelligence and social skills); the book nerd (amazing knowledge and intelligence but no speciality in technology); and then there’s the gaming nerd, with level 80 WoW characters but nearly no knowledge of technology.

The gaming nerd loves l337, energy drinks, gaming and Windows. Their knowledge of their chosen games is often amazing; but their knowledge of their computer is not. The only aspect of their computer’s hardware of which they remotely understand the specifications is the graphics card (for it is the only piece of hardware they care about!), they don’t know their ROM from their RAM and they cannot do as much as open command prompt. Long story short, they listen to the salesman at PC World and pay the extra £30 for some sub-standard security suite instead of just using AVG like most nerds!

This isn’t to say the gaming nerd has no role to play outside their games. Sites which produce great memes, like 4chan, are populated by this sub-culture of nerd (amongst others naturally) and software like Skype is frequently used by them.

Gaming nerds (generally speaking) don’t understand their best friend. They use their computer for gaming and only know what they have to. They love games; not computers.

Once it would have been unimaginable to earn an income solely from blogging, but people like Jason Kottke decided to. The latest form of media, one which is becoming increasingly respected, is micro-blogging (especially Twitter) so why is it that we have not seen swarms of full-time Twitterers?

Twitter is a social networking site, so its primary aim is to allow people to stay in contact with one another. This contrasts with blogging, which although is often social is more often or not commentary, advice or Hollywood gossip! The consequence is many Internet personalities use sites like Twitter to complement their other, revenue-generating online activities.

Before we ask if it’s possible to be a full-time Twitterer, we must ask if it’s possible to monetise it. Advertising on the blogosphere has used a wide-range of techniques: text links, contextual adverts, affiliate schemes in addition to more conventional approaches like banners. On Twitter, it’s more limited. Adverts can’t be contextual based on content, as posts are too short to have any ‘real’ content; text links cannot be built into posts as the site doesn’t support HTML and the 160 character limit makes it impractical to add links to tweets; and statistics aren’t provided to the user, so things can’t be charged on a CPM basis.

Sites like Be-A-Magpie suggest Twitter, does, however have the potential to be monetised, albeit at the expense of the followers. Scobles, according to Be-A-Magpie, could earn €22,657 a month. The problem is, followers would dismiss advertisement tweets and I imagine not many advertisers would be willing to make such a gamble.

Perhaps an effective way of monetising Twitter is through affiliate marketing. If popular Twitters suggest a product they like, and link to it with their affiliate ID, I’m sure they could collect a handsome commission.

Companies would also be unwilling to employ full-time Twitterers, as they’d have too much spare time (a Tweet takes but a few seconds to compose). Downing Street’s Twitterer is also responsible for their other social networking activities and I suspect much of our Prime Minister’s website.

Is full time Tweeting possible? Not until tweets become more useful than ‘I’m flying coach with a baby. I +wish+ I was in first class, but have used up all my miles. Sighs.‘ (and that somehow entertains Scoble’s 43000 followers!). Frankly, it isn’t possible to monetise tweets effectively as of yet.