The weekend read

The bloom is off the rose, is it? Well, it's Friday, and I never promised you a rose garden. But I have a bouquet of beautiful reads, leads, tools and ideas for you, plucked from the garden that is Twitter--all things I shared this week with my tweeps. Stop and smell these roses before you head into the weekend:

• Pressed flowers: Recollect is a new tool that will archive all your online social posts and let you search through them.
• Double blooms: Audio and video streaming make up 65% of all online traffic between 9pm and midnight...that's just one nugget from a study showing that online traffic in North America has doubled this year.
• You don't bring me flowers, but now you can email them: You soon will be able to email tweets.
• The bloom is off the retweet: Do you retweet without clicking on the link? 10,000 Words blog has a look at the data, and it's not pretty. All those RTs may not mean actual engagement with what you've written, no matter how nice your Klout score looks.
• Meddling with the petals: Facebook is testing a new algorithm for comments on FB pages that will make them work as they do on its web plug-ins, so that popular comments rise to the top, and all comments' replies get threaded.
• Plastic flowers: If you liked my post about what communicators should know about what's fake in social media, this New York Times article has a deeper dive into one hospital's problems with fakery on Facebook.
• Where have all the flowers gone? Don't know about you, but my freelancers are like gold to me. So if you have freelancers in New York State who were affected by Hurricane Sandy, let them know how they can qualify for disaster assistance. You'll be the Best. Client. Ever.
• Keep off the lawn, for now: The New York Times has a data mining tool, called Chronicle, that can look at the vocabulary patterns in use in its coverage, among much else. Try not to drool when you read all about it. No, it's not available to us mortals.
• Let a billion flowers bloom: TED.com has reached one billion page views for the videos of its famous talks. You can play with this interactive timeline showing the growth of TED and great moments along the way to one billion, then watch my 7 favorite TED talks by women, over on The Eloquent Woman blog.
• Morning glory? The Today Show has had some management shakeups and Don Nash is now its day-to-day producer.
• Pin this to your lapel: Pinterest launched business accounts and tools for them. Word is that you'll be able to convert a personal account to a business version, if you wish. Visit Denver joins the convention and visitors bureaus with a Pinterest presence.
• Customers at the garden gate: I've had some utility companies ask whether I thought social media would be useful to them (YES). Now we learn that mobile traffic to electric utilities soared 16,000% during Hurricane Sandy.

Jobs in bloom: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is looking for a communications officer focused on its programs to increase health insurance coverage for Americans...TEDMED is looking for a program officer for its Great Challenges program...an online campaigns and engagement associate is needed at the Natural Resources Defense Council...Mercy Corps (in Portland, OR) needs a vice president, marketing and communications...our pals at GuideStar are looking for some smart PR interns...the Girl Scouts of the USA seek a communications officer...and the United Nations Foundation is looking for a senior communications director for campaigns and initiatives, here in Washington.

A garden of learning: Registration closes today at midnight ET for my workshop on public speaking for introverts, which takes place November 27...I've extended the registration deadline for my December 7 lunch-and-learn for communicators who want to make the case for a training program for your experts, so you now have until November 30 to register...and registration is open--still at the early reg discount--for the popular Be an Expert on Working with Experts workshop, coming up January 10. Don't delay, though. Seats are filling for all three sessions, and I'd love to see you there.

After this weekend, there are just a handful more left in 2012, so let's savor this one, people. Thanks for coming to my garden this week, and enjoy your weekend.