Over the past 10 days, we’ve been counting down our Top 10 Favorite Oprah moments on Twitter. Why? Because we love Oprah, that’s why. In fact, we love Oprah so much that we created a @YoOprah twitter account with the goal of getting a Follow Friday (#ff) from @Oprah. And we even put it on our homepage. So it should come as no surprise that our top moment needed more than 140 characters.

1. Oprah vs. Dave. Dave vs. Oprah.

“The Feud” allegedly began when Letterman hosted the Oscars and kept filling time by introducing Oprah to Uma Thurman. Of course, Dave had a different theory. But the alleged feud gave us many terrific moments over the years, including our #1 within our #1, “The Super Bowl of Love” TV spot.

Hey, the only thing we love more than Oprah is advertising.

Our friends at New Uniform Design pointed us to this video on social media, and as they say, it’s a “fairly dramatic but powerful message about social media.”

I’ve emailed the video’s creator, Erik Qualman, to find out the source of the statistics.

We’re super excited to be the featured guest on tonight’s Design Chat. That’s right kids. Andy Kiel and I will be chatting about design on the interweb. It’s going to be massive.

What exactly is Design Chat? It’s weekly, real-time twitter-based conversation between creatives. Video chats start at 8pm CST on Wednesdays and last about an hour on mashable.com/chat. You can continue before and after on twitterfall.com/#designchat.

Tonight we’re going to be talking about all kinds of stuff, and the format is very loose–which we like. So there’s no topic off limits. The rough pre-chat set list may or may not include the following:  brand transparency in the digital age, designers being pulled in too many directions, the biggest changes happening in the industry right now, corporate brands’ adoption of social media and our perspective on how design and advertising can actually make people fall in love with your brand.

Really, we’re honored to have been asked to speak. Thanks to Ryan McGovern for inviting us. Please stop by, join the conversation, ask us some questions or heckle us.

When news of Michael Jackson’s death broke yesterday, the Internet nearly broke with it. People flocked to their computers, if they weren’t already in front of them, to share their thoughts and feelings on the passing of a true music icon. Everyone had something to say, at the same time, giving the Internet’s infrastructure a thorough testing. All of this illustrates a fundamental change in how we experience events collectively.

According to The New York Times, “Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, tweeted that Mr. Jackson was a more popular topic on Twitter than the Iranian election or the recent flu outbreak ever were.”

Mr. Zucker’s quick research shows that approximately 15% of all posts on Twitter last evening mentioned Michael Jackson. The percentage may seem small but considering the sheer volume of tweets per day, which some estimate to be close to 20 million, the statistic is amazing.

What does this say about how we communicate as a society now? Major pop cultural moments in our country, and around the world, used to be passive events. The Kennedy Assassination. The Lunar Landing. The Challenger Explosion. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Even 9/11. We watched as history was broadcast into our homes, and we discussed the significance with our friends, family and co-workers in our communities. Now, with pop culture episodes like Jackson’s death, we actively share the experience and participate in a larger collective conversation via the web.

Here’s an interesting and very debatable question:  is the new shared cultural moment more meaningful than the old?

What’s not debatable is the breadth of Jackson’s career. At Red Square Agency, we are paying tribute to the “King of Pop” with an all-day MJ Marathon on our Internet radio station, WRED–visit our web site and click the link in the upper right.

After bookmarking the Time Magazine article “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live” a week ago, I finally got around to reading it. A week on the web is eons. Many of you have already read the article, or maybe you haven’t, given the world’s attention span has been relegated to information delivered in 140 character bits.

In the piece, @StevenBJohnson delivers an interesting read on end-user innovation and an optimistic take on American ingenuity.

I whole-heartedly agree that Twitter is delivering positive innovation: “ambient awareness,” a truly open social web and an incredible way to search what people are saying now. (The implications for search alone are enormous.) However, as a agency responsible for delivering branded content to our clients’ fans, I worry that Twitter may be birthing an entirely new kind of hyper-distracted society. (What was I saying?)

Now excuse me while I post this blog link on our Twitter page.

William Strunk Jr., in Elements of Style, famously declares: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Though not prone to following rules to the letter, I believe this to be true. I also know that clarity and simplicity is not easily achieved.

The other day as I struggled to write a tweet (a word that I cannot say without feeling funny), I came to this conclusion: Twitter is making me a better writer. Not in the traditional sense. (See, that was a fragment.) People surely do butcher the Queen’s English in texts, IMs, tweets and emails. I’m speaking strictly to conveying a point in as succinct a fashion as possible.

Twitter’s 140 character limit forces me to get to the point. I’ve found myself writing and rewriting entries, and I know I’ve deleted far more than I’ve posted.

Every tweet must tell.

So the world has gone social media crazy. When Oprah got in on the action last week, Twitter had officially arrived on main street. (For the record, @redsquareagency was here before Oprah.)

With Web 2.0 widely adopted, old media like print, newspaper, outdoor and broadcast are suffering. Some more than others of course. But we feel like the death of “old,” traditional media is greatly exaggerated. The old media that learns to adapt to the nature of new media will thrive.

It’s about conversation and timeliness.

Social media is a conversation. Brands, like people, have the opportunity to interact with their friends (or fans or followers or whatever you want to call them) and engage unlike ever before. The result is awesome brand loyalty. You don’t just eat Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut is your buddy. You hang out online with Pizza Hut.

Timeliness cannot be overstated. This is where old media, especially newspapers, are behind the eight ball. The news cycle, buzz cycle, fame cycle is real time now. (In fact, Google searches are even becoming obsolete due to real-time search on Twitter Search.)

In the midst of the “Ashton Kutcher/CNN race to 1 million Twitter followers” pop culture moment last week, Lamar Outdoor Advertising showed all of old media how to play ball. They took part in the conversation. “Follow Ashton Kutcher.” Okay then. That’s how Lamar rolls. Team Kutcher. Beyond joining the discussion, they demonstrated agility and that they could mix it up in real time. Lamar had the board up in nearly 1,200 locations nationwide within hours. We love it.

Here’s our prediction: soon again, new media and old media will just be called “media.” Only smarter and faster.