After joining the unwashed masses of the Twitterati just this past weekend, media mogul Rupert Murdoch discovered the downsides of telling the whole world what’s on your mind on a moment’s whim. Murdoch slammed Brits for taking too many holidays despite the poor economy: “Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!” RELATED: Rupert [...]

Trying to follow coverage of Hurricane Irene? Wonder what hurricanes are like for people who’ve never experienced ‘em before? Then consider following The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter — media guy-turned-storm chaser (for the time being) — as he livetweets the hurricane, along with pictures and video footage.

Hurricane Irene is taking over our Twitter feeds today (or mine, anyway, given most of the people I follow are New York media types or friends in other cities who insist on mocking New York relentlessly), and, right now, it’s seems like a mix of conflicting news reports (Is everything going to be ok, or are we going to sink under a barrage of half-drowned sewer rats?), well-meaning calls to hoard canned goods and preserve small pets in salt, and jokes. Terrible jokes, great jokes, obvious jokes, and jokes indicating a worrying lack of familiarity with the lyrics of Dexys Midnight Runners.

Here are some of the best (and/or worst) hurricane Tweets I’ve noticed today. Feel free to add any you happened to think were especially hilarious or cringe-inducing.

Gilbert Gottfried, the comedian whose unique voice has been featured in Aflac insurance commercials for some time now, has been relieved of his duck voicing duties after a string of controversial Tweets about the recent string of disasters in Japan… a country which happens to be the company’s most important market.

Though the media set has doubtlessly taken to Twitter, a new study found that only 16% of Twitter message types are sharing a type of news or analysis, with 10% of tweets being links to blogs or articles and 6% about “politics, sports or current events.” The largest set of messages, though, is the “user’s current status” at 30% followed closely by “personal conversations” at 27%, according to a new study by SemanticHacker.

When The Awl asked “What Were Black People Talking About Last Night?“, which Mediaite’s Robert Quigley called “lazy and, well, casually racist,” one of the things that got lost was an actually interesting question – how do these seemingly random hashtagged trending topics get started?

So we found out.

Web technologies often allow you to scale things that weren’t scalable before. Unfortunately, that list of scalable things includes spam. From unsolicited phone calls to unwanted emails to unnecessary tweets, it can seem like we’re getting progressively overloaded with information we don’t necessarily want. One group blamed for the increase in online spam are Twitter [...]