Library Stuff

NYT – “A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette.”

American Libraries Magazine – “Last-minute wrangling in the Florida legislature produced a deal to preserve state funding for libraries at the current-year level. At just before midnight on April 26 the House, which originally wanted to zero out all funding for the State Aid to Public Libraries program, accepted a Senate offer to restore it to the FY2009 appropriation of $21.2 million. The restored funding level makes the state eligible for $8.4 million in matching federal funds.”

PCWorld – “Android users, listen up: Firefox has finally arrived for your phone. Well, almost. Mozilla released an early build of its mobile browser, codenamed Fennec, for Android phones this week. The browser is described as a pre-alpha build, meaning it’s still heavily under development and far from being a final product.”

Library of Congress Blog – “Twitter is part of the historical record of communication, news reporting, and social trends – all of which complement the Library’s existing cultural heritage collections. It is a direct record of important events such as the 2008 U.S. presidential election or the “Green Revolution” in Iran. It also serves as a news feed with minute-by-minute headlines from major news sources such as Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. At the same time, it is a platform for citizen journalism with many significant events being first reported by eyewitnesses.”