Pew has just released the results of a survey on Twitter usage and they seem pretty surprising. For instance, if you had to guess, just from the hype, what percentage of American internet users–not total Americans, mind you, just those who are actively the web–use Twitter, what number would you say?

How about 8 percent.

As a raw number, that’s a lot of people. And good for Twitter. But 8 percent of internet users puts a damper on the notion that Twitter is everywhere.

Next up: demographics. Twitter users are disproportionately young–14 percent of internet users 18-29 use it. No surprise there. But how about this: Twitter users are also disproportionately black and hispanic. Only 5 percent of white internet users use Twitter; 13 percent of black internet users and 18 percent of hispanic internet users do. This is probably a function of internet usage among minorities being more heavily-concentrated among the young than it is in the general population. (Nota bene: I don’t know that this is true! I’m just proposing an explanation.)

Twitter users also tend to be more urban; it’s not clear if this is a driver or effect of the racial and ethnic data.

The other big surprise is that of those 8 percent of internet users who use Twitter, 41 percent–41 percent!–say that they check in with Twitter either “never” or less than once every couple weeks. That’s a pretty high attrition rate for a medium. I can’t imagine that, 15 years ago, 2 out of every 5 people who tried email eventually hopped off the bandwagon.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Twitter is the pet rock of the Internet age. The only question is whether some sucker will pay $250 billion for it before it becomes passe.*

(I wish Pew had asked the question Annenberg asked in July about whether or not Twitter users would be willing to pay for the service. You’ll recall that in the Annenberg study 0.0 percent–that is, not one single respondent, said they would be willing to pay for Twitter.)

*Unless everyone on Twitter turns their icons green–then the medium’s true power will be unleashed!

In a follow-up to the great NYT piece about the guy who sold glasses on the internet and then terrorized his customers, Slashdot reports that Vitaly Borker, the asshat in question, has been arrested and is being held without bail.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Enjoy the showers Vitaly!

Every op-ed page publishes embarrassing stuff from time to time–it’s hard to fill that many inches, 365 days a year, without some mistakes.

Even so.

Don’t miss this dandy from the NYT’s Yoko Ono essay. Yoko manages to be self-important, sub-literate, and preposterous all at the same time. For instance:

“The most important gift we received from him was not words, but deeds.”

But those words were real doozies. Because “He believed in Truth, and had dared to speak up.”

So his words were really important. Or maybe, in the mouth of John Lennon, words actually were deeds.

And because of his word-deeds, “We all knew that he upset certain powerful people . . .”

Perhaps it was these powerful people who had John not murdered but–in Yoko’s word-deed–“assassinated.”

Also, John and Yoko made tea together once. With their cats.

The NYT on NYC schools chancellor Cathleen Black: Maybe the meanest profile of the year.

Over at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has opened up a store selling “Dish” gear. And hey, that’s cool. A blogger’s gotta make a buck–even at the most popular one-man blog in the in world galaxy.

So how much is an Andrew Sullivan t-shirt? Go ahead and guess. I’ll put the answer in invisotext below.

$50.*

Evidently the Gilded Age never ended in P’town.

*Chaps not included.

Galley Friend M.W. sends along this site, a funny running critique of newspaper comics. It’s much, much funnier than it sounds. Sample awesome:

I’m a little embarrassed by how much information about the world of Shoe I carry around in my head, but it took today’s strip to make me notice a gaping hole in its bird-person society. The denizens of Treetops, East Virginia (that is the name of the town where the bird-people live — one of the many things I am embarrassed to know) are, as we see today, represented by an elected bird-official; their society also features dying print media, a medical system and associated pharmaceutical industry, institutions for disposing of their dead honorably, and sexually deviant auto mechanics. But where do these birds go for spiritual comfort? I can’t think of any appearance of the sort of stereotypical priest-bird-man that one might expect from the strip; the resulting need for divine guidance explains the weird sway that Madame Zoo Doo has over her customers. Look at how desperate the Senator appears for news of his soul’s fate in panel one, and how relieved he is in panel two! Yet the Madame never offers any guidelines for living, never creates the foundation for a system of ethics that might transform her superstitious mummery into a great moral belief system; instead, she merely uses her mystical connection to the “other side” as a source of power and control here on earth (or whatever the hell the freaky bird-planet these creatures live on.)

I haven’t watched a Sunday politics show since 1998, but alert reader J.P. sends in the following rally cry about Christiane Amanpour trying to Zucker punch George Will:

I’ve just watched, um, this week’s This Week and concluded that now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of George Will. It’s clearer than ever that Amanpour’s strategy is to marginalize him — this morning by convening an alternative (unbalanced) roundtable to discuss DADT and by deferring to Zbigniew Brzezinski and the two (!) Afghan guests in the discussion Will was in on.

The poor man looks increasingly forlorn, and one of our top 10 (five? two?) conservative pundits is being wasted week after week. We should organize and demonstrate for him to replace Kathleen Parker.

PS: Having watched the alternative round table, I’m thinking the compromise to be sought on DADT is to prohibit gay males from serving and allow lesbians.

TNR has a great essay by Laura Bennett on Conan O’Brien’s new solipsisim. The only bit I’d disagree with is this line from Bennett:

DVR, Hulu, and YouTube have done away with the singular importance of the time slot. We can handpick clips to watch online and reshuffle programming to suit our own schedules by pressing “record.” And there is no longer much of a place for the generalized subject matter and stock formula of the late-night talk show—the monologue, interviews with movie stars who have a new project to hawk, a few interspersed sketches. Modern attention spans are too slim to accommodate bald self-promotion from celebrities and too readily able to seek customized entertainment elsewhere. Now, niche-iness is key, which is why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are so popular. They are emphatically topical; Leno and Letterman, when it comes to shaping the national conversation, tend to be beside the point.

The DVR and Hulu have actually done very little to alter the importance of time slot. Just ask the shows that have been condemned to Fox’s Friday Night Slot of Death (Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse). Or shows like Big Bang Theory or Glee which found immense popularity by piggy-backing off of a monster lead-in. Time slots may not matter as much as they did ten years ago, but they’re still the single most important factor in a show’s ratings prospect. If I tell you that Show X airs at 8:00 p.m. on CBS, that tells you more about what number than show will draw than if I tell you the show’s premise, title, stars, budget, etc.

Secondly, late-night show’s don’t exist to provide self-promotion for the entertainment industrial complex. Providing that self-promotion happens to be what they do, but it’s not their raison d‘être. They exist to generate enormous net profits, via large ad revenues and cheap production costs, for their broadcast network. That’s what Letterman and Leno do for CBS and NBC, even in their diminished status. In 2006, Leno’s show accounted for 15 percent of NBC net profits. I very much doubt that John Stewart or Stephen Colbert do that kind of business for Viacom.

In a way, it is about niches, though. Stewart and Colbert’s niche gets them talked about; Leno and Letterman’s niche generates revenue.