To tweet or not to tweet? That is no longer the question at the New York Times. Standards Editor Phil Corbett has issued a fatwa against the colloquialism that has become both noun and verb as a referent to an entry on the micro-blogging site Twitter.

He does have a point about the inherent silliness of the word which could make the Twitter message of even the most august U.S. senator seem trivial.

Here is Corbett’s memo to the paper’s staff:

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.

Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.

One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)

“Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”

That seems like a silly question when Facebook is the happening social network these days. The stats are familiar to many of us: Facebook has more than 400 million active users, half of whom log on to their page on any given day. The average user has 130 friends and people spend more than 8.3 billion hours per month on Facebook. So gosh, why would anyone want to leave there?

Dan Yoder of Rocket.ly blog has lots of reasons, and he’s bundled most of them into his “Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Quit Facebook.”

Yoder’s main reason is because Facebook not only doesn’t respect its members privacy, it actively shares their information with advertisers and apparently anyone else it deems appropriate. Indeed, the whole concept of “privacy” seems to be foreign to the social network’s creators.

That would be enough to close your account, which, Yoder notes, is more difficult than you might think — so he provides a link to the semi-secret page where you can send your Facebook page into oblivion.

Another reason that Yoder touched on but which is much more annoying is how plain stupid Facebook is if you are a business user trying to set up a brand page. My company had to give up and kill our page and start another because somehow my online DNA became inextricably mixed into our corporate brand page when I set it up. We could never fix it, and Facebook’s favorite problem-solving approach is to cancel the site and start over. It’s like a help FAQ where the most frequent solution is to deactivate your page.

In talking with friends who are experiencing similar problems with a business-oriented site, we have come to conclusion that Zuckerburg and the kids at Facebook are still stuck in their dorm and haven’t really started thinking like adults yet, which is why brand pages are just kind of ineffectual personal pages with some different elements grafted on with crazy glue. It’s like their engineers are really good at making a socnet for college kids, but are completely at a loss for what the world of business needs from a social network.

Of course, they could ask for help from experienced IT people, but that would mean trusting someone over 30.

I’m not sure whether I’ll take Yoder’s advice and permanently close my personal page. Part of me wants to say shove it, Facebook, but then part of me is kind of mildly hooked on the networking parts of it.

In any event, I’m staying as far away from that new Like button as I can.

YouTube turned 5 years old Friday, April 23. Amazing, ain’t it?

Here’s the first video uploaded to YouTube featuring YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, offering up a “really, really, really” cool fact about elephants.

Apparently Karim’s video was the harbinger of things (stupid, pointless things) to come.

Five years since YouYube came in to being, its content remains pretty consistent — self-absorbed people speaking into a camera about not very much, idiots doing stupid things and getting hurt, wannabe musicians and comedians, and companies taking advantage of someone else’s bandwidth to host their corporate videos.

So you need to book a hotel in another city. If you’re like most people, you look the property up online and read reviews written — ostensibly — by other regular folks just like you who have stayed there.

That scenario happens millions of times a day, but should we really trust the information that’s posted on a website?

Like everything else on the Internet, travel reviews should be consumed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Travel review sites like Tripadvisor have become increasingly popular in recent years, though Tripadvisor’s reputation has been tarnished by allegations of hotel and restaurant staffs filing fake reviews to boost ratings.

Then there is the question of who are the reviewers. I addressed this with a Zagat review of cruise lines last November. A patently bogus survey was produced by Zagat — yeah, the people who review restaurants — for the cruise industry, rating cruise lines. No explanation was given about who the reviewers were or how they were chosen, but it was clear to anyone who’s been around the cruise lindustry as long as I have that the results were skewed.

A recent survey by PhoCusWright of online travel review sites found that the traditional review sites like Tripadvisor are being supplanted by online travel booking sites as sources of consumer ratings and reviews. Of course, that doesn’t mean much considering that Expedia acquired TripAdvisor, Travelocity picked up IgoUgo, Priceline brought out MyTravelGuide and SideStep bought TravelPost (which in turn was acquired by Kayak and recently sold to a startup led by Expedia’s original founders).

The survey found that in the past couple of years — despite these acquisitions — more people are reviewing travel suppliers on the online booking sites than on the review sites. In 2008 52 percent of reviews were posted to online travel agent sites while only 46 percent were posted on traditional travel review sites. A year later, that relatively benign ratio has swelled to 74 percent for the OTAs and only 25 percent for travel review sites.

PhoCusWright explains the growing disparity this way:

There are several factors behind this shift in where travelers are posting hotel reviews. While category leader TripAdvisor’s review volume and unique visitor traffic both grew considerably in 2009, the OTAs have been aggressively building their portfolios of hotel reviews. They have significantly improved their processes for collecting reviews from customers. Most hotel and package bookers on OTAs receive some kind of trip follow-up communication soliciting their feedback, which feeds the hotel review pipeline.

And they have good reason for doing so: hotel review content appears to play an important role in the online hotel shopping process. Not only do more travelers identify hotel reviews on OTAs as influential in their purchasing decision than other types of online features or content, but OTA shoppers who visit hotel review pages are twice as likely to convert.

The question remains — should we trust our fellow travelers to post honest, objective reviews of the hotels, bars and restaurants they visit? I would give a skeptical yes answer, and here’s why: the more reviews there are, the less likely that the overall rating can be manipulated by fake reviews. Online travel booking engines obviously have recognized that — as well as the positive effect that ratings have on booking conversion — and therefore are striving to increase the number of reviews submitted by their clients.

So while it’s not a perfect system, it does have built-in checks and balances that only benefit by a higher volume of user-generated reviews.

The South Florida Business Journal featured a column by Jeff Zbar that examined the success of the Florida Keys & Key West Web site’s use of online video as a marketing tool. The agency’s Andy Newman — who came up with the video idea — was interviewed for the article:

Visitors inside the Key West International Airport see art, sculptures and images reminiscent of Old Key West. Paintings and other images of architecture, herons and foliage dot the walls.

Except some viewers aren’t in the airport. They’ve visited www.fla-keys.com and are watching a “video of
the week.” It’s the latest installment of a recurring feature on the site incorporating low-cost, streaming
video to enhance the site’s viewer appeal.

“We thought we would post what people who are coming to the Keys might want to see,” said Andy Newman, senior VP with Newman PR, the Miami-based public relations firm that handles the Monroe County Tourist Development Council account. “To us, it seemed pretty evident that video on the Internet was going to grow and take on an increasingly important role. So, it was important for the TDC site.”

The popularity of video continues to grow as the cost of photography equipment, video editing and production software, and hosting options continues to drop. Overall online video usage grew in double digits as recently as December, the Nielsen Co. noted.

Such user stats as year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams and streams per viewer were up, paced by time per viewer, which was up 13 percent from December 2008, the company reported.

Newman conceived the idea to post videos to the Keys site in 2008. Since that time, they’ve posted videos on how to make a key lime pie and fly fish for black fin tuna. In October, managers posted a video on the Florida Keys Overseas Highway being designated an All-American Road by the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program. In May, they posted video on the sinking of the Gen.
Hoyt S. Vandenberg, a ship that became an artificial reef off Key West. The most popular video is on “Snuba,” an apparatus that allows swimmers to breathe beneath the water’s surface.

For the Keys marketers, the videos are often simple to come by. Newman already has a collection of video the firm shoots for use on TV news shows. His team takes the video, edits it down to 90 to 120 seconds, and posts to the site.

“Shorter is better,” he said. “People’s attention span is very short these days.”

Once posted to its own server, the TDC also links the videos to YouTube, and promotes them using Twitter and Facebook, he said.

Others take a more do-it-yourself approach. Since 2006, the team at CableOrganizer.com has used a “prosumer” grade Sony Handycam DCR-SR82 to shoot the images in the company’s Fort Lauderdale conference room, said Paul Holstein, CableOrganizer.com’s VP and COO. They shoot videos of product sampling in one take — meaning no editing necessary — and post to a YouTube channel they created for the company. They also host videos to the company’s own video player staff Web designers created in Adobe Flash CS3.

“We generally keep things simple,” Holstein said. “We have a few employees who are comfortable talking about and demonstrating the products on camera, so they take turns starring while someone else mans the camera.”

Setting up a custom YouTube channel is free and simple, he said. Once a YouTube account has been registered, code can be embedded on a personal or company Web site to show thumbnails of videos uploaded to the service. By including text content about the video and topic, the videos then are searchable by potential visitors. This will be critical to improving search results as more consumers search for video content on the Web.

Newman cautions, though, that the availability of low-cost or free tools or services shouldn’t encourage businesses to post low-quality video.

“If you’re going to have them on the homepage or Web site, they have to be professionally done,” he said. “I used to think you could get by with a substandard product. But, I came to the realization that your Web video to market your product or showcase your destination has to be just as good as if you’re going on TV with it.”

Since 1975, the wordmeisters at Lake Superior State University have submitted for the world’s edification and delight an annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”

For additional commentary that accompanies each entry, check out the university’s Web site.

And now, without further ado, the 2010 list of banished words:

SHOVEL-READY — “Stick a shovel in it. It’s done.”

TRANSPARENT/TRANSPARENCY — “I just don’t see it.”

CZAR — “We have appointed a czar of such-and-such; clearly that’s better than a ‘leader,’ ‘coordinator’ or ‘director’!”

TWEET (and all of its variations: tweetaholic, retweet, twitterhea, twitterature, twittersphere …) — “People tweet and retweet and I just heard the word ‘tweet’ so many times it lost all meaning.”

APP — “Is there an ‘app’ for making this annoying word go away? Why can’t we just call them ‘programs’ again?”

SEXTING — “Any dangerous new trend that also happens to have a clever mash-up of words, involves teens, and gets television talk show hosts interested must be banished.”

FRIEND AS A VERB — “‘Befriend’ is much more pleasant to the human ear and a perfectly useful word in the dictionary.”

TEACHABLE MOMENT — “This phrase is used to describe everything from potty-training to politics. It’s time to vote it out!”

IN THESE ECONOMIC TIMES — “Overused and redundant. Aren’t ALL times ‘these economic times’?”

STIMULUS — “Everything in the news is about the stimulus packages…it is no longer a grant, it’s stimulus money, stimulus checks, etc. I think it is just being over-used.”

TOXIC ASSETS — “Whatever happened to simply ‘bad stocks,’ ‘debts,’ or ‘loans’?”

TOO BIG TO FAIL — “Does such a thing exist? We’ll never know if a company is too big to fail, unless somehow it does fail, and then it will no longer be too big to fail. Make it stop!”

BROMANCE — “I am sick of combined words the media creates to make them sound catchier. Frenemies? Bromances? Blogorrhea? I’m going to scream!”

CHILLAXIN’ — “Heard everywhere from MTV to ESPN to CNN. A bothersome term that seeks to combine chillin’ with relaxin’ makes me want to be ‘axin’ this word.”

OBAMA-prefix or roots — The LSSU Word Banishment Committee held out hope that folks would want to Obama-ban Obama-structions, but were surprised that no one Obama-nominated any, such as these compiled by the Oxford Dictionary in 2009: Obamanomics, Obamanation, Obamafication, Obamacare, Obamalicious, Obamaland … We say Obamanough already.

There’s one denizen of the social networks that won’t show up among the avatars of your Twitter followers or among your friends on Facebook, though it’s there all the same — the U.S. Justice Department.

Seems Justice and some other federal agencies have been using social networks as a source of information on citizens, though how they do it, how often they do it, how much info they mine and what they do with it is a secret. That’s why the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the government to find out what agencies’ policies and practices are when it comes to data collection and surveillance using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

EFF sued only after the agencies refused to comply with its Freedom of Information Act requests within the mandatory 20-day period.

According to a Bloomberg.com article, EFF claims there have been incidents where law enforcement organizations have used socnets for investigations, though no one knows how often or how many:

The EFF said in its complaint that it is seeking the information to “help inform Congress and the public about the effect of such uses and purposes on citizens’ privacy rights and associated legal protections.”

It cited news articles that reported police searching Facebook photos for evidence of underage drinking and an FBI search of an individual’s home after the person sent messages on Twitter during the G-20 Summit notifying protesters of police movements.

The potential number of citizens who could find their social network invaded by cops and feds is huge — Facebook, the biggest socnet site in the world, has 300 million users, while Twitter boasts 58 million.

But you’ll have a blast while it lasts. The FakeAPStylebook is just what it says — a compendium of bad grammatical and style advice on Twitter that satirizes the Bible of the Newsroom. Simply put, it’s a lot funnier than the original.

Here’s a couple of examples:

Breasts should not be referred to as “jugs” unless you need it to rhyme with something else in the article. See also: cans, sweater puppies.

To denote air quotes, “use quotes.”

If the second paragraph of your story begins with “He/she isn’t the only one,” don’t come back to work on Monday.

When there’s no more room in Hell, omit the final paragraphs to save space.

In the most recent edition of TrendWatching, the editors introduce the concept of “nowism” to explain the transitory and hyper-current currency of our high-speed, now-focused lives. While I am adverse to making up cute names for passing fancies, there is something about nowism that seems to ring pretty true.

In an age where one’s life can be parsed into a series of 140-character tweets or posted on a page where all the world can see your friends, hobbies and pet peeves, where scanning headlines has replaced reading the newspaper and we only watch or listen to TV or radio programs that support our world view, it’s difficult to argue against the existence and power of nowism.

Here’s the definition:

NOWISM: Consumers’ ingrained* lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the “now,” in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.

*In the end, just like all our other trends, NOWISM represents a case of consumers jumping on something the moment they actually can. So the need is never new, the new ways to fulfill it are.

Well, they certainly have the instant gratification angle covered, but is there something deeper than that at work here? Trendwatching’s editors direct the reader to the writings of Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist, who posited the effects of what he calls “liquid modernity”:

“Liquid Modernity” is Bauman’s term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the “solid” modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from “solid” to “liquid” modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives.

Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like “career” and “progress” could be meaningfully applied.

Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

“Nowism” actually sounds a lot less scary than Bauman’s “liquid modernity” with its reduction of life to an episodic, unpredictable and essentially meaningless sequence of events. Man, it sounds like 1940-1950s existentialism all over again, except accelerated by Twitter and Facebook and smartphones and DVRs ….

With all this liquid modernity, I need a drink.

That guy you just friended on Facebook might be a second-story expert looking to liberate your plasma television while you’re on the vacation you just wrote about on your wall. And it’s possible some of your followers on twitter are following you, not because they care what you had for lunch, but for larcenous reasons.

Social networking is potentially more dangerous than you might think, according to a report, The Digital Criminal, released by U.K.-based Legal & General, a financial and insurance organization.

The study found that 38 percent of users of sites such as Facebook and Twitter post status updates detailing vacation plans and more than a third of socnet users post updates that say when they are going to be away from home. Mash those numbers up with the finding that a high percentage of users are willing to be “friends” online with people they don’t know, and you’re looking at a potentially serious security threat to your home and stuff.

More disturbing still, the report found that nearly a quarter of social media users discussed their vacation plans publicly “wall-to-wall,” or outside the privacy of their own page, and 17 percent reported seeing people’s residential addresses posted on publicly accessible pages.

Legal & General’s research uncovered a widespread casualness among socnet users toward meeting strangers online: 79 percent think social media are a great way to find people they met on vacation, three-quarters feel they are a good way to meet friends of friends, and 47 percent use socnet sites to meet new people based only on the person’s photo.

Legal & General conducted an experiment to see how many U.K. social media users would accept a “friend” invitation from a complete stranger. Of 100 “friend” or “follow” requests issued to randomly selected strangers, 13 percent were accepted on Facebook and 92 percent on Twitter — without any checks. As a result, it’s possible that a complete stranger with evil intent could learn about a person’s interests, location and movements in and out of their home.

Reformed burglar Michael Fraser, star of the BBC’s “Beat The Burglar” series, consulted with Legal & General on the study:

“In just one week, a professional burglar, or a team, can use social networking sites to harvest dozens of potential targets,” said Fraser. “New users of Facebook, for example, will be a key target, as they are keen to build up their number of ‘friends’ or ‘followers’. People with specific interests are also easy targets. Pet owners are a good example — their home security is often not of a sufficiently high level, as they rely on their dog for security, have cat flaps that weaken a back door, or leave their alarms turned off.

“For a burglar, this kind of information is power — it breeds confidence. Once you start seeing people’s holiday movements, for example, you know when they are leaving their home unattended. By giving away this information, people are making the burglar’s job a lot easier.”

Other study findings include:

• Nearly half of respondents are not worried about the security or privacy of social networking sites.
• Of all social networking sites, Facebook creates the most concern, with 46 percent of respondents believing there are some security and privacy risks.
• The younger you are, the more likely you are to give information away concerning your whereabouts, with 64 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds sharing their vacation plans, which could be a cause for concern for parents.
• 34 percent of respondents have seen someone’s phone number posted on their social networking profile.
• Nearly one in 10 respondents have included their phone number and 5 percent have included their address in the personal information section of social networking sites that are visible to friends.
• Some people share cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses directly with strangers — 6 percent have written their phone number and 3 percent have written their address “wall-to-wall” or on pages open to those who are not accepted contacts.
• Men are more blasé about personal information — 13 percent have included their cell number on their profile compared with just 7 percent of women, and 9 percent of men have included their address, compared with just 4 percent of women.
• 70 percent of users think that social media sites are a great place to share photos of new purchases and presents.