Below, the six most annoying articles from Twitter’s late-March tipping point, each worse than the last.

Just one question: What are you doing? [Taz Tagore, Toronto Star, Mar. 21]: A freelance submission at the moment the Star decided they must feature Twitter in their pages: “I set out to understand what makes a good tweet and, by extension, uncover why some of us are obsessed with Twitter.com. Is there an art or a science to Twittering successfully, so that tweets enthrall rather than annoy?”

When a Twitterer becomes a Twit [Diane Ziomislic, Toronto Star, Mar. 22]: First attempt to make an issue of @mayormiller getting the rhythm of 140-character updates: “Tweeting mayors looking to connect with populace risk alienating them with banalities, critics say.”

Twitter beats email, friends find [Corey Mintz, Toronto Star, Mar. 24]: Restaurant reviewer recaps Twitter exchange with friend who doesn’t know the abbreviation “IMO.”

24 hrs of tweets [Sarah Hampson, Globe and Mail, Mar. 26]: Columnist follows celebrity tweeters for a day, comes up with this conclusion: “We twitter to hope we matter. That’s as profound as it gets, I think. Mostly, it’s a way to feel cool. It’s a new social elixir, like smoking was at the height of its popularity. You do it because everyone else is. For now, anyway. Life is like walking through a funhouse. It’s dark, people are pushing, and you can’t turn around. You just follow the cracks of light.”

Pro athletes turning into ‘twits’ [Bruce Arthur, National Post, Mar. 26]: “Now, this correspondent’s first instinct regarding this latest Internet fad is one of rather undisguised contempt. Twitter is, in its most popular form, a vapid regression of the language for those without the patience, facility, or spelling ability to properly blog. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but Twitter seems to be doing its level best to demolish that assertion. (Now that I am old, this column will contain a number of blatant generalizations about Twitter, the Internet, and kids these days. Oh, how they dress, those kids.)”

Ego tweeto, ergo sum [Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, Mar. 28]: “If you thought Facebook was banal, try Twitter. It makes people who write their thoughts on Facebook sound like Shakespeare. Of course, it’s also possible I’m too old and out of it.”

RELATED: A decade long search for tomorrow by Larrry Borsato.

You got a problem with the future? Then they don’t want your kind hanging around nextMEDIA, a two-day conference at the Design Exchange to wind down another year, as the pause button pushed last fall amidst the economic meltdown gets lifted a little bit. What awaits on the other side? A service from Rogers allowing their customers across Canada to access TV shows they weren’t going to watch on TV won over attendees. Also, smartphones that push information people barely care to know. Gavin Purcell, supervising producer of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, turned up to tell attendees that you can’t predict which online bits will go viral — “so stop trying.” And certainly, if there’s anything that Toronto-based content providers have experience with, it’s stopping trying.

Not everything produced for the web needs to be so self-consciously clever, though — the ones making money aren’t fretting over the future of journalism, or delusions of creative integrity induced by rock ‘n’ roll rebels like Pearl Jam. So, if 90 per cent of Canadians are really visiting a social media site every month, as claimed by perennial enthusiast Bryan Segal of comScore, best to figure out how to adapt topics of interest to 90 per cent of the population. That means deferring to regular folk few media types care to meet.

“Crowdsourcing might be the biggest thing since radio,” proclaimed advertising executive Chuck Porter this morning, while citing the shift from a read-only society back to a read-write one, which sounds familiar. “Someone’s doing Larry Lessig’s bit,” observed a lurker already on the cluetrain — but if it’s new to you, it’s still new!

Consider how, over the past decade, most conversations about media were guided by the assumption that all media was better in the preceding decade. Yet, the same sentiment was expressed throughout the decade before that, and so on. These past 10 transformative years will merit no such fond reminiscences — the high-wired Millennial generation won’t buy that one. Where does that leave a grown-up trying to generate an advertising buck or two today? Cashing any cheques they can while waiting for somebody else to figure out a formula that works. This ain’t an art form worth starving for.

It’s not news that the 22-year-old daughter of Jim Carrey, frontwoman of the Jane Carrey Band, is expecting a baby soon with a musician fiancé relieved that he won’t have to quit his night job. What’s new is that Jim is on Twitter, and now that he’s winding down promotional duties for A Christmas Carol, the birth is the main thing on his 47-year-old brain — or, you know, it was yesterday: “can’t wait! i will build him a tree house in my beard.” (A statement followed, like many of his tweets, by a cryptic emoticon code.) Fear not, man-children of the universe! Jim is looking out for you with a social media strategy no celeb has bothered with in a decade: a vanity website. Which is blowing everybody’s mind, because the design by Flash-happy Hollywood webmakers 65 Media is likely hiding so many surprises, it’s impossible to leave feeling that you haven’t missed something. A click on the “Origins” section leads one down a rabbit hole that crashes into a clothesline of images — both Carrey family snapshots, and unexpected video clips like his impression of Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond on the CBC, while tweets fly over the Toronto skyline. Grandpa, this is too confusing!

Last week’s Creative Places + Spaces conference was but one example of the kind of event this new media age hath wrought: so much to talk about, if just because everybody privileged enough to pay attention can end up feeling like they run this town. No wonder the mayor who presided over the city as such events emerged figures his work is just about done. Cp+S brought together gregarious culture guru Sir Ken Robinson, mass nude photographer Spencer Tunick and Cirque du Soleil executive producer Lyn Heward — plus local neighbourhood watcher Richard Florida — to collectively say what sounded like nothing anyone would disagree with. And you know this because, if nothing else comes out of these events, there will be meticulously detailed reports scattered online.

Announced from the Carlu stage of CP+S: HIGHRISE, a long-term National Film Board documentary project about vertical suburbs, overseen by senior producer Gerry Flahive. This global endeavour is fittingly based in this town, where mostly negative notions of inner city living have been transposed to concrete stacks in the outskirts — althouh, by the time they’re done sampling stories from around the world, those waterfront CityPlace condos may have reached their full potential as a seedy slum.

“Building a city that thinks like the web” was the credo of the Toronto Innovation Showcase earlier this week at City Hall. Feeding into the post-Web 2.0 feeling that even the most basic municipal data has gotta serve somebody, a familiar clique of contract-seeking developers assembled to hash out ideas of what to do with it, making the initiative’s champion Mayor David Miller feel a little more hip. This is, after all, the same bureaucracy not five months removed from its turn as an internet laughing stock for Photoshopping a black guy on the cover of their Fun Guide in the name of diversity. But, for all the information they’ve been given the opportunity to figure out applications for, the freelance web monkeys still have yet to successfully wrestle much data away from the TTC.

PREVIOUSLY: What can’t Twitter do? (September 2009 edition)

Canada’s Web Conference is holding a satellite event today that cuts out their rickety bridge between journalists and technologists and gets straight to the point: Mesh Marketing. The nightclub CiRCA, originally conceived as a transformative Studio 54-level presence in the Entertainment District, to no avail, is at least getting some use as the ideal spot to explore the next online goldrush. Five folks who applied two months ago were granted media accreditation to the $489 day-long event, but why bother? This might be the most tweeted event in Toronto history! Morning keynote speaker, business card cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, has earned enough of a following to move into book form with Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity — and actually get people to buy it. He also sold a Moleskine notebook with an illustration inspired by Psalm 23 for $1800. What does he have to say in the company of hitherto ignored folks like the marketing director for Frito Lay Canada? Find out below!

Knowing no one is actually going to look at you when you’re on deck to speak at a conference can’t be too encouraging, but the Mesh Marketing attendees were looking out for your best interests, see. Hugh MacLeod’s most quotable quote: “Being fucking amazing is job Number One.” Also: “If you’re not interested in people you’re kind of screwed!” “Passion is social!” “People matter, objects don’t!” His line that Web 2.0 was invented in 1917 in the South Pacific relates to where and when modern relationships were first documented by anthropologists. And in more than 140 characters, probably.

With the delegates dispersing into different rooms for panel discussions and workshops, the thoughts become more scattered, though. Strategies put up for scrutiny from Molson, and Rogers, and Canadian Tire all seem to translate in the same way: we are trying to figure this out before we get busted for not having figured this out. Remember: spin is dead!

And the benefit of having a marketing conference in a nightclub? You don’t have to relocate elsewhere for the party afterward. Nor will there be any need to dress to impress a doorman along a velvet rope.