Today, as , the New York Observer made it official: "." You don't read the Observer, but every status-obsessed journalist in Manhattan does. It's now officially cool to do a Twitter Backlash story.
Here's how it works:
1. The Observer says there's a backlash.
2. A uses the article to say there's a media backlash to Twitter. He's right: It's in the Observer, which means that it will be repeated by the most trend-conscious journalists all over Manhattan. Didn't you know about the Twitter backlash? It was in the Observer.
3. Many of those journalists will now quote Gartner, a widely respected technology analyst firm, that there's a Twitter backlash.
4. The backlash topic will become a hot Twitter topic: #backlash
5. Didn't you know there's a Twitter backlash? It's all over Twitter.
The real winner? CNN, who will claim to have broken the story.