Weekend read: My weekly share on Twitter, with favorites

This week, Twitter once again proved its mettle during the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. I turned there first for updates, and I have the utter luxury of getting those from some first-class reporters who tweet, including NBC's Jim Long or @newmediajim (who tweets from the cameraman perspective); NPR's Andy Carvin or @acarvin, who's a live-tweeter of the first order; and the New York Times's Patrick LaForge or@palafo. Nice to have that kind of expertise to fall back on. Even the reporting errors got quickly corrected, and ways to handle breaking news discussed.  Mashable did a good roundup of the shooting from the social-media perspective.

I'm @dontgetcaught on Twitter, and here are some of the insights, good reads and news I shared from others this week, followed by items I favorited for later reading or writing:

• YouTube's on the move, starting a weekly talk show that features YouTube's version of celebrities, people who've had millions of views. Another good source of case studies.
• Hack a DSLR to get top video? Lifehacker looks at firmware Magic Lantern, which gives you professional-quality video from a DSLR camera.  Would you try this option?
• Dig deep: The New York Times updated its tool for swiping, linking and highlighting parts of articles so you can link to a specific paragraph, highlight a paragraph or a group of 'graphs, and more. They even give you a shortcut to figure out the paragraph number. A caveat: Updates mean paragraphs and text will move throughout the day.
• Sources, heads up:  Mashable looked at a loophole in the shield laws that may affect you if you're sourcing a journalist on social media sites, relevant in the wake of the U.S. government's subpoenas of social sites in its pursuit of charges against Wikileaks. Then Nieman Labs looked at how news organizations pursued sources in the Arizona shootings on Twitter, with mixed results. Finally, one that had me in disbelief: Media-watcher Howard Kurtz confessed--late--that he did an interview with a congressional spokesperson, whom he thought was the member of Congress, wrote it up that way, then waited till now to correct it, even though the spokesperson set him straight much sooner. WTH moment of the week.
• Don't get caught, calendar edition:  The President's State of the Union will be January 25.  Really, don't schedule major announcements for the several days before and after. You'll be happier.
• Don't get caught, app edition:  I see this far too often:  Companies, firms and organizations who think that an iPhone app will give them their entire social content strategy.  A good refutation of that pipe dream.
• Mobile + health topics + open source = awesome: If you work in health communications, check out Open mHealth -- it could lead to all sorts of possibilities.
• Who's talking to LinkedIn?  LinkedIn has a speaker series for its employees, and it blogs about the sessions.  It's a fun inside look. If your campus, corporate or otherwise, brings in speakers, this is a great opportunity for blog posts. Makes you look smart and shows with whom you're consulting on topics of the day.
• Hitting the links, two ways. And I don't mean golf:  Ever wish you could turn a link into content you could embed on your website? Embedly lets you do that--it's part of the technology Storify uses.  And Trunk.ly can index the links you and your friends share on social-media networks, like Twitter. Finds like this keep me on Twitter.  Let me know if you try these options.
• Next, 911 on Twitter? I called that, right after reading that Amber alerts for missing children will be on Facebook. You might call Amber alerts an early version of crowdsourcing, so this works.

And now, a couple of  favorites:

• Networking special:  I follow @dangillmor, who tweeted he'd be in DC speaking about his new book, Mediactive (about empowering citizens to report news).  So I signed up, and there saw @stevebuttry (at one time, Gillmor's editor, now community manager for TBD.com). And I favorited a tweet Buttry captured before I could:  Gillmor recalled when Intel's former chairman, Andy Grove, spoke to the newspaper editor's conference and urged them not to approach a sea change by cutting, but by investing more. That didn't happen, as we've seen.
• A real don't-get-caught moment:  @jayrosen shared this post on how the Columbus Dispatch could have had a plan in place to deal with its video of the golden-voiced homeless man going viral. Instead, it just took it off YouTube. Amy Gahran @agahran) is the author--great thoughts here.

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