It looks like the Twitpocolypse is upon us – Twitter is down, as of 6:30 Sunday Central time. Here’s something to do while you wait for your microblogging fix: check the status.twitter.com site for an update and watch this free documentary that looks at the current state of the music industry:

Twitter plans to add video tweeting to its mobile microblogging platform. According to a story in the  Telegraph: Twitter users may soon be posting real-time video tweets in addition to text tweets under plans to modernize the site. Twitter’s founders hope by adding live video-tweeting it will help boost its prominence as a fashionable social-networking […]

CBS News reports that Drew Carey, the host of CBS’s The Price Is Right, is willing to donate up $1 million to Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong Foundation if he gets 1 million followers by midnight on December 31, 2009. On Saturday, Carey tweeted that he would bid and donate $25,000 to Drew Olanoff, who currently owns […]

Fast Company has an interesting article that looks at Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter. It features the work of Dan Zarella, who analyzed 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets to find out what factors influence your “retweetability”. There are some surprises. For example, newer URL shortners, such as bit.ly, ow.ly, […]

While the Associated Press and newspapers around the US debate to compete against online news sources, they may be missing an even bigger threat: you and your iPhone. The New York Times reports that Fwix – a local news aggregator – plans to enlist mobile social media creators to generate realtime local news coverage: Fwix, […]

Chicago’s Horizon Realty, a property management company, filed a $50,000 libel lawsuit Monday against a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen, over one of her alleged Twitter posts. Horizon argues that Bonnen libeled the company with her May 12th tweet, which read in part “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty […]

Cato Unbound has published an interesting article by Clay Shirky that looks at the future of journalism. It looks at the chaos in the world of journalism created by new media, and how maintaining the status quo is impossible: Like driving, journalism is not a profession — no degree or certification is required to practice […]

Mobilecasting startup Audioboo and SpinVox, a leader in voice to content messaging, have announced that the SpinVox API (Application Programming Interface) will be used to automatically convert speech to text across Audioboo’s applications – including iPhone podcasting and Twitter posting. This is a cool new feature that will have all types of uses. For example, […]

Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor posted an interesting article yesterday looking at ways artists could use the Internet to promote themselves, even if they are new or unknown. In the article, Reznor shared these tips for how to use the Internet, new media and social media sites: Have your MySpace page, but get a site […]

Print Media Deathwatch Update: Joshua Karp, founder and publisher of The Printed Blog, a Chicago newspaper startup that aggregated news blogs in print form, has announced that the newspaper is a money-loser and is shutting down: It is with great sadness that I must report that, due to a lack of outside investment capital, The […]