West has been letting rip on Twitter with unrelenting detail about himself. He has picked a fight with a journalist from the LA Times music blog who had the temerity to accidentally miss out a word from the title of his album but the incident that generated the most ire was his use of a robot to pump out 300 tweets in a few minutes containing lyrics and some nasty invective.

With a lot of people complaining about his bombardment and suggesting that it was “time to give that ego some beautyrest”, it’s clear that Kanye has been digging his own grave in public.

You only have to go to his Twitter site to see the lurid details. As Grace Dent put it in a tweet yesterday morning: “kanye is actually a complete twitter bellend. they should suspend his account for spamming about himself.” He has proved that a sleb can disengage a fan base in mere moments.

Other celebrities take note – the world really is watching. Take your publicist’s advice and quell the urge to pick fights with the world. And please find something to talk about other than yourself.

Jones has succeeded in projecting his need to be self-important onto a world stage and to use his religion to put down another religion. The US media, which gave Jones the oxygen of publicity, should hang their collective heads in shame. All that’s been achieved is a dangerous fanning of the flames of extremism and further terrorist activity.

This is yet another example of why covering protests and demonstrations can be so problematic. Government, religious and opinion leaders have been almost universal in their condemnation of the event (thankfully now postponed – I suspect that Jones’s ego would not allow him to cancel it altogether), but do they represent the great unwashed?

All this hype has, with sad irony, elevated an act by a previously unknown figure with a tiny congregation to the level of international news – and it’s not even something he’s actually done yet. This is the danger of the split-second internet and Twitter news cycle, in which information can travel worldwide in less than 10 minutes. This lunatic pastor has proved that creating a captivating narrative (one which has all the elements that the media desire to turn into rolling, snowballing news) can create a global phenomenon regardless of taste, ethics or common sense.

Arcati, whose blog is the current darling of the blogoshphere and one of its best, sexiest reads, muses, with an amused raised eyebrow, on the possibility that the article – which threw light on Green’s angling for a $9 million raise for Cowell and the idea of broadcasting an American X Factor on Fox to tie Cowell to American Idol for the next two and a half years.

Arcati wryly pricks the egos at work, acknowledging that the story could either be a fabrication or an irritant to the moguls behind X Factor and American Idol. The missing Sabbagh story is either full of “unusually fearless objectivity” or “total tosh” – either could have prompted its pulling.

Regardless, the good Madame, by exposing the article’s vanishment, is gleefully and gloriously helping expose the powerful PR muscle that keeps the X Factor in the public eye.

As we know, the X Factor is the current role model for promoting celebrities, if not neccessarily the ones it is purportedly creating. I’ve been looking at the rise of Cheryl Cole; the Independent asked for my opinion on her success. It all ties in rather nicely with Madam Arcati’s timely piece.

“She is a phenomenon of the moment,” I told the Independent. “There is a time and place for opportunities driven by The X Factor. Marketing is built to capitalise on the moment. With every level of pop, it’s going to be transient. It’s about harvesting the brand at its prime, and knowing their sell by date is firmly tattooed on their arse. There’s no long-term future with Cheryl Cole. You drill your marketing through the ears listening at that moment in time to the music. They’re sinking the drill into the deep well and sucking up the crude while it’s where it is.”

You could say the same about the X Factor and, if the missing Times article is to be believed, the people behind it know this and are pushing to squeeze out every last drop of milk whilst they still can…