At least that’s the message in her brand her video for the song “I Wanna Go” from her Femme Fatale album. The video begins with Britney at a press conference answering ridiculous questions from the media about her Brad Pitt love-children and whether or not she hates puppies.

Her reaction to these questions is to channel Guillermo Diaz of Half Baked fame and quote the film word for word as she tells off the nosy reporters – “F*ck you, f*ck you, f*ck you, you’re cool, f*ck you, I’m out.”

The video turns out to be a dream sequence co-starring Guillermo Diaz himself as her male companion. We all know by now the troubles Ms. Spears has had with the paparazzi in her career, so it should be no surprise that this is a major theme of the video.

Check it out below:

As far as the review for the new video, I’ll defer to someone with more Britney knowledge than myself, Megan Gibson of Time –

“I Wanna Go” continues the futuristic theme that “Hold It Against Me” and “Till The World Ends” relied heavily on. Though this time around the futuristic aspect is slightly more subtle (though much more bizarre) as it’s revealed that the paparazzi are actually cyborgs in disguise.

And while the product placement is not as in your face as it was in “Hold It Against Me”, we still get some up close shots of the Volkswagen emblem and… milk.

And of course, while it’s disappointing that there’s no dance sequence at all, at least we don’t have to cringe through the half-hearted steps that Britney’s subjected us to in her two previous videos. In fact, despite the lack of dancing, Britney seems pleasantly energetic and spunky in “I Wanna Go” which is a comforting change from her usual blank-eyed look.

Is Britney making a comeback? Who knows – nothing is really out of the realm of possibility when it comes to American culture and its spastic palette.

The article says that clickliverpool.com, an independent news site, used the Google search engine tool that “divides language used on web addresses into three categories of basic, intermediate and advanced” to look at the Twitter pages of the “most followed Premier League players.”

What they found was that Rio Ferdinand’s tweets consisted of 88% basic language and only 11% intermediate language – the worst of the worst. By comparison, Wayne Rooney’s tweets were a whopping 56% intermediate.

It didn’t take me long to figure out how clickliverpool performed their unscientific study. One of the advanced search options in Google involves the ability to “annotate results with reading levels.” Then you can search within a site or domain to find the range of results in each category – basic, intermediate and advanced. Google calls it the reading level tool.

So all you have to do is search the Twitter page of whoever you are studying with annotated language results turned on and you’ll get a reading of how advanced their language is across their tweets. For example, the tweets of footballer Jack Wilshere, who was included in the study, look like this when you perform the search “site:http://twitter.com/#!/jack_wilshere.”

But here’s where we find some discrepancy. According to the study, Jack Wilshere had a 43% Basic level and a 54% Intermediate level. What gives?

If you search ‘http://twitter.com/#!/jack_wilshire” without the specific denotation of a “site:” search, you will get these results:

They key is the parameters. Without the “site:” search, Google is actually calculating the reading levels for millions of results – basically anything on the web that mentions Jack Wilshere, Twitter, or anything in between. When you add that “site:” search, it simply pulls results from Twitter statuses created by the Jack Wilshere account. 9 million plus results vs. 819. And 819 is what we want.

So this list looks to be inaccurate, except for the top (worst) performer, Rio Ferdinand. His results match the “site:” search. It is likely that when clickliverpool used the Google tool to find its other results, they may have forgotten to search the specific Twitter page and instead searched millions of internet mentions – basically calculating the reading level of articles about the footballers instead of tweets made by them.

But the whole point of pointing this out is to say that this is quite a fun thing to do. By using the Google reading level search tool, you can look at the complexity of language in your friends’ tweets or those of celebrities. It is important to note, however, that these results will include some of your retweets, which aren’t necessarily your own words. But if you use this tool to check out someone who posts original tweets on a regular basis, it should give you a hint at the complexity of their language use on the social media site.

So, I conducted my own little unscientific study of the top 10 users on Twitter, based on number of followers. I wanted to see who was the most eloquent of the bunch.  What I found surprised me, as I expect it will surprise you.  Here is the top 10 list, organized by number of followers:

1. Lady Gaga
2. Justin Bieber
3. Barack Obama
4. Britney Spears
5. Kim Kardashian
6. Katy Perry
7. Ashton Kutcher
8. Ellen DeGeneres
9. Taylor Swift
10. Shakira

And here is how they ranked when it comes to language complexity, based on the biggest percentage of Intermediate results:

1. Britney Spears (67%)
2. Katy Perry (66%)
3. Ashton Kutcher (49%)
4. Barack Obama (23%)
5. Lady Gaga (13%)
6. Kim Kardashian (6%)
7. Taylor Swift (5%)
8. Justin Bieber (4%)
9. Shakira (3%)
10. Ellen DeGeneres (<1%)

Surprised?

The next question of course is what classifies something as intermediate text as opposed to basic text? It’s hard to say. Telling the difference between the intermediate tweets and the basic tweets is incredibly difficult.

The only person in the ten to score a tweet on the “Advanced” spectrum of the reading scale was Katy Perry. She received that distinction for this tweet:

Is it the melatonin reference? Two of them? Albino? Something about this tweet has Google labeling it advanced.

Of course, this language search tool isn’t perfect. But it’s pretty fun.

[Photo Courtesy Twitter]

• They found that while celebrities have a large number of followers, most of them are low authority users.
• Social media heavyweights, like @chrisbrogan, @jowyang and @jasonfalls seem to attract fewer but very engaged Twitter users with high authority rankings.
• They also looked at the countries where these users have their followers.

Celebrities

Social Media Veterans

Comments

CNN is also an unlikely contender after acquiring procuring control of CNNbrk, an account set up by a fan to tweet news breaking on CNN. Likely that account was attractive because of the 970,000 followers the account’s owner, James Cox, had amassed. But as our own Chris Crum has reported, that appears to be an illegal move, though Twitter has yet to take any action against it.

Meanwhile, over night “basementdad,” a spoof Twitter account set up in the name of Joseph Frieschel, has grabbed 200,000 followers as a result of a protest campaign set up by the anonymous frequenters of 4chan, a notorious image forum most famous for hacking, staging Scientology headaches, and a highly offensive sense of humor based on shock value. That last characteristic is fairly evident in the person they’ve chosen to spoof on Twitter. Frieschel’s claim to fame is being arrested for holding his daughter prisoner in a basement and sexually abusing her for a quarter of a century.

Stuck at 200,000 or so followers, the basement dad group is promoting a special script to help create accounts and artificially inflate the follower count. (No links. Just a run a search on "basementdad " and you’ll find it.)

You’ll notice Oprah Winfrey’s account is devoid of any tweets at this point. Regardless, she already has 29,000 followers. Likely the account was very recently set up (she didn’t, after all, even know about YouTube until last summer or something). Robert Scoble says she’ll be talking about Twitter on her show tomorrow, and everybody knows that when Oprah tells her audience they should do something, they know they’d better stinkin’ do it!

My money’s on Oprah, from behind, approximately one hour after her show airs tomorrow. All hail the power of Oprah. 
 

Of the 1.4 million spam emails analyzed by SPAMfighter in December, Michelle Obama was the subject nearly five times as much as Britney Spears was, nearly six times as often as Paris Hilton, and ten times as much as Angelina Jolie.

Maybe spammers are making use of free online measurement tools like Google Trends to map out current spikes in interest. A Google Trends analysis shows Obama beating the former queens of the Internet lately as well.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” said SPAMfighter cofounder and CMO Martin Thorburg. “As the big inauguration day nears, it’s likely we’ll see an even bigger increase in Obama related spam. E-mail users can beat spammers to the punch, however they must be vigilant.
 

“E-mail users should get their Michelle Obama and celebrity gossip fix from trusted blogs and Web sites rather than risk opening unsolicited e-mails. By clicking on spam, users identify their e-mails as a working address and it is then sold off to more spammers resulting in even more spam. It’s important that we work together to help eliminate spam.”
  
 

So, since the people have had their very own broadcast medium, every indiscreet, accidental nudity moment has been chronicled on the World Wide Web – from wardrobe malfunctions to topless beaches to falling bikini tops to private recordings in the wrong hands to completely faked Photoshopped fantasy pics to pre-fame-to-further-my-career-only shoots to whoopsy-getting-out-of-an-expensive-car-I-accidentally-showed-you-my-

mommy-parts.

The Paparazzi follow Britney around in decadent, disgusting, depraved swarms, documenting her every move. Yet, no matter how many reports of completely unabashed nudity surface, forgive my forthcoming country-ness, ain’t nobody got a picture of it nowhere.

Not that we should. And not that I’m condoning such behavior or necessarily looking anymore – when she was freshly adorned in schoolgirl outfits and pretending innocence and wholesomeness, the Internet couldn’t get enough and hoped and prayed and begged that one day they’d get lucky and see what MTV wouldn’t show us but Playboy would, even if she refused to do Playboy. At one point in time Britney Spears was a real Jessica Alba.

That’s not the argument  — whether or not we should be presented with the photos or that we should want to see them. I just find it strange that the Internet that has, celebrity or not, splashed sex in front of us at every corner possible, depicting every disturbing deviance imaginable (2 girls 1 cup, anyone?), whether we sought it out or not has failed to produce a truly disrobed Britney all this time despite all of her public nudity.

It’s like the Internet has become some kind of Britney twilight zone. Sure, the pics of Britney (and Lindsay and Paris) getting out a car sans underwear circulated, but they weren’t exactly attractive – those types of scenes generally aren’t – but were kinda unsettling and most of us felt pretty dirty for even looking just once.

But let’s review, shall we?

There are pictures of Britney in a swimming pool making out with a stranger and she is topless. The photos are very Inside Edition friendly, cleavage up. A supposed topless Britney peaks out from behind a dressing room curtain and there’s one snapshot, which is grainy and nondescript. When the cops come to Britney’s house during her custody battle meltdown, she reportedly came out topless and put on a see-through nightgown to cover up. She hung out with a bunch of strippers one night at a strip club and played dress-up with them. And let’s not forget she was caught on video pantsless on a balcony with a paparazzi beau, went swimming in just her underwear in front of everyone, and was pantsless at a club with Paris Hilton.

Most recently – Sunday, actually – Britney was reported to go on a shopping spree with Adnan Paparazzi Whatshisface, where the two of them disappeared into a dressing room, and made "strange noises" before Britney came out stark naked to look at clothes despite the protests from store employees.

We might say she really likes being naked and doesn’t care who sees her. And no pictures anywhere? No camera phones. No nothing.

The Internet, for perhaps the first time, has really let us down. Not that it matters anymore. I think many of us are over her, even if there’s been a place on the Internet for everything else.

Not that I’m looking. Really. 
   
 

British tabloid The Sun was either duped, or didn’t bother to check into it too carefully. In case you missed the short-lived buzz, The Sun reported that FoxNews.com was reporting that a sex tape showing a bald Britney Spears engaged in a multi-tasking event (what? Sexathlon, then?) with two girls and a guy while imbibing cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol.

A helluva night by anyone’s standards.

And the blogosphere got very excited, and then very disappointed, typical when dealing with Britney’s career in general. I looked and looked – you know, for strictly journalistic purposes – but there was nary a link nor censored screenshot to be found of the video anywhere. There were only links to the Sun’s article, and a few screenshots of the FoxNews.com report.

Only, it wasn’t really FoxNews.com that reported it – just a look-alike designed by, well, who knows? It was convincing though. The page was spoofed from this Britney/Dr. Phil article, but the URL isn’t structured the way Fox usually does it, and there’s no Fox icon like there should be in the URL bar.

The URL has a dozen or so (an exaggeration) subdomains that resolve finally to a ccTLD for Samoa. I’m not going to link to it, because it might have something contagious in it.
Contrary to a few blog commentator reports, it doesn’t look like FoxNews.com was hacked, but rather effectively spoofed.

Effectively enough to put one over on The Sun, anyway.       
 

The emergence of Bald Britney was one of those moments in history that you knew was going to have a much deeper impact than merely becoming the top story on the evening news.

This sordid tale of hair clippers, tattoo artistry and Red Bull has burned itself into the collective consciousness of the United States, evidence of which can be clearly observed by looking at last week’s Google Zeitgeist.

You guessed it; Britney Spears has found herself in a familiar place in the hearts and minds of Internet searchers across the country. She takes the top spot in the weekly Zeitgeist and in the tabloid headlines as fans of the pop starlet await the “Shave Me Baby One More Time” remix of her debut single.

Taking a backseat to the newly shorn Spears was the Lunar New Year, which finished a respectable second in the weekly poll of the most popular searches on Google. Also known as the Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival, the event took place on February 18th as billions throughout China and across the world ushered in the year of the Pig.

Tom Brady and Bridget Moynahan also cracked the top ten following the announcement that the recently estranged couple are expecting a child together. With the greatest quarterback of our era and one of the most beautiful women in the world as the parents, this child looks to carry a pedigree that has “fame” written all over it.

Lent and Ash Wednesday also gained search popularity as Catholics across the world prepare for the upcoming celebration of the Easter holiday.

Here’s the entire Zeitgeist for the week ending February 24, 2007:

1. Britney Spears
2. Lunar New Year
3. Antonella Barba
4. Bridget Moynahan
5. American Idol
6. Ash Wednesday
7. Tom Brady
8. Dancing With The Stars
9. Lent
10. Black Snake Moan

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If you want the "ultimate Britney Spears experience," which includes her hair, the electric shaver she used, a partly consumed Red Bull, and one used blue Bic lighter, you’ll have to visit BuyBritneysHair.com. Oh, and you’ll need (pausing menacingly as I place my pinky finger to the corner of my mouth) one meeel-yun dollars.

Originally, the shorn remains of Britney’s career were posted on eBay with the minimum bid set at a cool million. But as noted on the new auction page (where bandwidth costs money, and hence the slowness), eBay cancelled the auction for unknown reasons – unless hair is considered a body part.

Now you can search on eBay and find two full pages of auctions offering Britney’s hair, but those are bald-faced lies it would seem, even if some of them are quite convincing about getting it shipped all the way from America. Some of the hair for sale is blonde, so it must have been collected pre- um – wig out.

No, if you want real, dyed in the sink, made in America Britney hair, you’ll have to pick it up personally from the proprietors of Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California, who really, really hate this boost of free publicity and would never exploit this hair-raising, er, hair-falling situation. That’s why a portion of the proceeds will go to charity. Oh, and their phone number, in large comforting numbers, is at the bottom of the webpage.

If you’re too poor, or too mentally healthy, to buy the real thing, there’s no shortage of memorabilia still on eBay. There are the printed out screen caps of the original auction starting at just $14.99; Britney Spears Buzz Cut Special barbershop signs; paintings of the newly Sinead-o-fied starlet; and of course the entrepreneurial opportunist staple, the completely copyright-infringing tabloid cover t-shirt.

Don’t worry about them being deleted. Sellers are reposting them faster than eBay can say "hair-brained scheme."

Next thing you know, they’ll be auctioning off Lisa Nowak’s diapers. Oh, no.

eBay could not be reached for comment.

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Hitwise weighs in to tell us that searches for keyword [britney spears] jumped 930 percent last week. Look closely, there’s no decimal where there should be. In fact, out of the 1.3 million queries Hitwise snatched last week, Britney ranked number five.

The rest of the story is a sad one, not because of the relative lack of voyeurism or the abundance of skirt-chasing hoards, but because the other top search terms are painful reminders of just how unsophisticated most searchers are.

Or maybe all of Federline’s kids got online at the same time, skewing the results.

The Top Ten Search Terms Driving Traffic to All Categories:

1. myspace
2. myspace.com
3. ebay
4. www.myspace.com
5. britney spears
6. yahoo
7. mapquest
8. walmart
9. myspace layouts
10. craigslist

Boy, it sure is a good thing we developed the greatest communication/informational/educational system in the history of humanity. Seems like the people sure are getting use of it.

But at least those following search trends get something out of this (besides gratuitous, um, you know). LeeAnn Prescott seems less discouraged by it:

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