Mediagazer: Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! — I vowed I would never become a Twit. (Roger Ebert/Roger Ebert's Journal)

Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! — I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters.

Nick Bilton / Bits:

The Defense of Computers, the Internet and Our Brains — If you're reading this blog post on a computer, mobile phone or e-reader please stop what you're doing immediately. You could be making yourself stupid. And whatever you do, don't click on the links in this article.

Discussion: GigaOM, Rough Type, Fast Company, Boing Boing, The Huffington Post and Gizmodo

Felix Salmon / MediaFile:

Zach Kouwe fired again — In February, a NYT blogger, Zachery Kouwe, was fired for plagiarism. The proximate cause of the firing was a complaint from the WSJ, but he'd had run-ins with other publications in the past, including nicking a memo from Dealbreaker without attribution.

J. David Goodman / New York Times:

Now in Blogs, Product Placement — Welcome to quid pro post. — When a marketer representing Absolut Vodka first offered to sponsor her annual blog festival, Louise Crawford guessed how the other bloggers might react. — “Some of them are going to call me a sellout,” Ms. Crawford remembered thinking.

Discussion: City Room

David Cohen / WebNewser:

The Beautiful Game: Social Media Suits Up for 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa — With 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa set to kick off about one hour after this post, Twitter and Facebook — which meant nothing to the average soccer fan during 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany — are donning their jerseys and painting their faces.

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable, rbr.com, Mediaite, Multichannel, SportsGrid, The Daily Beast, Gawker, Speakeasy, Variety, Digits, The Atlantic Online, MediaMemo and PRNewser

Discussion: B&C, rbr.com, Speakeasy and Guardian

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
On Twitter, Even a New iPhone Can't Keep Up With the World Cup

Discussion: The Twitter Engineering Blog, WWD Media Headlines, NewTeeVee, The Book Bench, AdFreak, Media Matters for America and Beet.TV

James Rainey / Los Angeles Times:

On the Media: Overdosing on social networking media — (Chris Jackson /, Chris Jackson / / February 2, 2008) — It's hard not to get irritated with a company that urges you to share all sorts of things but makes it hard for you to say who's part of the party.

Discussion: Kirk LaPointe's …

Adam Tinworth / One Man & His Blog:

What Does Facebook Like Do For Blog Traffic? — The Typepad team have just published a graph of referrals from Facebook since they made Facebook Like available as an option for their users: — Now, admittedly, this is only from a few thousand blogs, and the figures are relative rather than absolute …

Discussion: Everything TypePad

Andrew Alexander / Washington Post:

For The Post, anonymous sources remain a problem — Last month, a story about conflicts between parents and childless adults began with an anecdote about an unleashed puppy pestering a toddler in a District park. After the child's father complained, the dog's owner told The Post that parents …

Antonina Jedrzejczak / The Wire:

National Geographic Admits Photo Fraud (Plus: 10 Major Photoshopping Scandals) — Recently, National Geographic ran a photo by William Lascelles that had won the magazine's February 2010 Your Shot competition. — That would be the picture on the right, the authenticy of which some seem readers called …

Steve Buttry / Pursuing the Complete Community …:

New York Times protects its readers from reading about “tweets” — Self-anointed guardians of the English language show an amazing, amusing lack of respect for the language they purport to protect. — Phil Corbett, Standards Editor of the New York Times, decreed this week that tweet was not …

Discussion: The Wardman Wire and Slate

Business Week:

Spotify: Why Europe's Hit Music Site Isn't Playing the U.S. — Big labels have blocked Spotify—the first site that's “sexy without having the Apple name on it”—from offering streaming music — Sweden has a new music export, and it's attracting an audience way broader than an ABBA greatest hits album.

Robin Sloan / Snarkmarket:

The Atlantic rides again (again) — Back in college, the Atlantic was basically my introduction to the world of ideas. I still remember reading this classic article by James Fallows and feeling whole new lobes of understanding come online. This was policy, not politics. Macro, not micro.