Library Stuff

“We’re constantly working to make Twitter search the simplest way to discover what’s happening in real time. To that end, today we’re introducing search autocomplete and ‘People you follow’ search results to twitter.com. In addition to recent improvements like related query suggestions, spelling corrections and more relevant search results, these updates make it even easier to immediately get closer to the things you care about.”

via Twitter Blog

WSJ – “Looking for medical information on Internet message boards can be risky for consumers. Some of it is confusing, misleading or downright wrong. But for medical researchers, all that chatter can yield some valuable insights. Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, for example, are mining message boards and Twitter feeds to see what breast-cancer and prostate-cancer patients are saying about herbal and nutritional supplements—including whether they take them and why and what side effects they encounter.”

Ars Technica – “Currently, any research funded by the NIH is made open access within a year of its publication. Many academic publishers have been pushing to have the policy reversed, and a bill introduced earlier this year would have done exactly that. This triggered a public backlash, including a boycott of medical and scientific publisher Elsevier. The publishers have since backed off, and the bill was withdrawn. That hasn’t, however, stopped the boycott—its support of the bill was just one of a long list of issues academics have with Elsevier. And, in the intervening months, one researcher has turned to a bit of guerilla public relations, starting a Fake Elsevier blog and Twitter account.”

USATODAY.com – “[t]he Modern Language Association, one of three major style sources for academic writing, released formal guidelines on how to cite tweets.Rosemary Feal, the New York-based groups executive director and herself an active Twitter user, wont take credit for legitimizing tweets as source material. She said her group merely decided the right way to do something students and academics were doing all along.The explosion of interest after MLAs online post with the rule stunned her.”

TNW – “Since Twitter launched in 2006, there have been tons of unique uses of the platform, including fundraising, live tweeting the State of the Union, and now thanks to Penguin, a book club. I’ve seen some corners of Twitter take to using hashtags to create a conversation on the platform. While it can be difficult to follow a conversation on the service, especially in real-time, Penguin thinks that the time-shifted hobby of reading books is a perfect way to bring people together.”

The Next Web – “The highest court in the UK has launched a Twitter account and will begin tweeting news about its latest judgements imminently. The @UKSupremeCourt account has yet to tweet, but the court’s Twitter ‘broadcast service’ will kick-off by tweeting live coverage of the new justice Lord Reed being sworn in at the Supreme Court later today. It will tweet updates during the brief ceremony at the building in Parliament Square, London, to explain proceedings to those watching via a live Web stream. The ceremony start at 11.30am.”

Federal News Radio – “The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library’s repository of historical documents. “We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,” said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library’s national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. The archives don’t contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there. Lefurgy joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Amy Morris Tuesday morning to talk about the library’s digital mission.”

I just reached 1,000 Twitter followers!!

Thanks to Alvin, who is sitting right next to me.  

You can follow me here

Boston Globe – “Library of Congress’s ambitious plan to create a Twitter archive still hasn’t taken flight.”

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.”