All a-Twitter

I’ve been preoccupied by the new love of my life: Flash 8. I don’t know what I’m going to do when the free trial ends in 27 days …

OK, since I’ve been very nerdy lately (Hello, I just professed my love for a computer program. It doesn’t get much nerdier than that.), I should admit that I signed up for Twitter. So that I can get news alerts IM’d to me. (I tried to warn you.) CNN isn’t very good at it — but it’s not run by anyone actually with CNN either. New York Times does a good job, although it’s not always timely — usually just their top stories. Reuters is pretty good. BBC is the best and most timely, but the international news isn’t always as appealing as national/local news. So why aren’t more papers doing this? I even found a program that takes your RSS feed and converts it to twits — it can’t get much easier, right? I’m tempted to try it with the Post-Dispatch feeds, just to make sure. Because really, who doesn’t have RSS feeds now? (That answer is coming up, actually.) Chicago Sun-Times does. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel even has a breaking news feed. Love it.

Now, who doesn’t have RSS feeds? The Times. Which brings us to confession time. Talking to Yuri today, I suggested The Times start Twittering — I even went so far as to give them the address (after making sure it was available). Folks at The Times had not heard of Twitter yet. (How is it that I’m on the cutting edge? This is strange.) Yuri signed up and did take it a step farther, adding a NWI/Twitter promo to the Web site; so far they have two followers.

While I’m on the Twitter tangent, there are all kinds of fun things that can be done with it:
• Twittervision: See twits as they’re sent, plotted on a Google map. “A savvy journalist might watch Twittervision during a crisis for leads or eyewitnesses.”
• Twitterment: Search and compare what people are Twittering about.
• Twitterverse: Shows and weighs what people are Twittering over the last hour, five hours, 10 hours and day.
I’ll get over Twitter now, I swear.

Other tech stuff:
• Mashable: News on social networking — MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Also features thought-provoking questions, including which social network is most likely to get you laid?
• iStalkr: Still a beta, but it monitors feeds and social sites for updates
• FranticIndustries: Web 2.0 reviews

Boris Yeltsin died Monday. I did a Google search, preparation for an A1 shift, for Yeltsin-St. Louis ties and came across a band, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, from St. Louis. Evidently I wasn’t the only one to find ‘em: “Comments mourning the death of the former Russian leader have been flooding onto the page of an indie rock bad [sic] called “Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.” No sign of an official response from the band.”

ODDS & ENDS
• For Mark: Pugs!
• Speaking of … Is this a young Mark? (Thanks, Kevin.)
• Police: Naked recruiter broke into home
• Adopt a baby through MySpace?