The media's fake Twitter backlash begins

If you've been waiting for the inevitable Twitter backlash, the fun starts now. Sure, CNN ran an "is there a Twitter backlash?" story last month. But for those of us who work in the media, we knew the question mark in the headline meant the answer was "No."

Today, as Oprah tweets on TV, the New York Observer made it official: "The backlash begins." 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 Gartner analyst 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. 

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