Twitter-Birds

Who said Time is Money? I was just curious abut that and by Googling this globally used truth I got yes…to the very first marketeer, the genius of many “hats”: Benjamin Franklin.

How would Benjamin Franklin have done in the modern Media age? He said: “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”

So what is new under the sun, nothing much only now this message is spread by the trillions of digital devices. Today we put out and utilize on our digital devices a contant flow of media and knowledge, accessible for everyone by everyone.  Who actually knows or remembers  what is an Almanac?
Franklin borrowed the name “Richard Saunders” from the seventeenth-century author of the Apollo Anglicanus, a popular London almanac which continued to be published throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin created the Poor Richard persona based in part on Jonathan Swift’s pseudonymous character, “Isaac Bickerstaff.” In a series of three letters in 1708 and 1709, known as the Bickerstaff papers, “Bickerstaff” predicted the imminent death of astrologer and almanac maker John Partridge. Franklin’s Poor Richard, like Bickerstaff, claimed to be a philomath and astrologer and, like Bickerstaff, predicted the deaths of actual astrologers who wrote traditional almanacs. In the early editions of Poor Richard’s Almanack, predicting and falsely reporting the deaths of these astrologers—much to their dismay—was something of a running joke. However, Franklin’s endearing character of “Poor” Richard Saunders, along with his wife Bridget, was ultimately used to frame (if comically) what was intended as a serious resource that people would buy year after year. To that end, the satirical edge of Swift’s character is largely absent in Poor Richard. Richard was presented as distinct from Franklin himself, occasionally referring to the latter as his printer.

In later editions, the original Richard Saunders character gradually disappeared, replaced by a Poor Richard, who largely stood in for Franklin and his own practical scientific and business perspectives. By 1758, the original character was even more distant from the practical advice and proverbs of the almanac, which Franklin presented as coming from “Father Abraham,” who in turn got his sayings from Poor Richard.

So the question stays:  if alive today, would Benjamin Franklin have invented the next big trend? Would he run a site with proverbs and quotes? Would he hve been a partner in the Almanac online?