We are all in a grip of intense twitter-mania. Here is a moment of reflection.

The New Scientist reports on the death of the newspaper Rocky Mountain News. The staff chronicled its final staff meeting and last hours on Twitter:

This sparked a flurry of correspondence on the US National Association of Science Writers mailing list, the New Scientist reports.

Jim Hathaway, a science writer for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, observed, within Twitter’s 140 characters limit:

‘This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a twitter.’

After this twist on T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, the New Scientist concludes, there didn’t seem to be anything further to say.

And now, over to this week’s search engine news.

• Real-Time Google Translate

  Google China has recently released an experimental version of Google Toolbar that allows the toolbar to translate web pages that use AJAX extensively and even web sites that require SSL. (Google OS Mar 29 2009)

• How Long Should the Page Title Tag Be?

  If you want to keep your whole title in SERPs, create a title tag containing fewer than 70 characters including spaces. (SE Journal Mar 23 2009)

• What Attributes Make Up a Good Web Directory?

  How does an SEO or webmaster know which directories are quality and which are not? (SE Roundtable Mar 26 2009)

• Live Search Rolls Out Instant and Active Answers

  When you search for specific flight details, Live Search Active Answers will give you the latest flight details including gate information, flight delays and more. (SE Journal Mar 24 2009)

• Google Docs Gets a Drawing Program

  The Google Docs suite with its text, spreadsheets and presentation editors got a new tool: a vector drawing program. (Blogoscoped Mar 26 2009)

• Google’s Wonder Wheel Experiment, and More

  On the search results a link in the top blue bar will read Show options…. Click it, and a side bar full of options expands (Google Blogoscoped Mar 24 2009)

• How Google Shot Microsoft After It Took A Knife To A Gunfight

  It was true that Google lost traffic during the malware problem but as soon as it ended, things went right back to normal. (SE Land Mar 27 2009)

• Danny Sullivan’s SEO & SEM Q&A Session Via Twitter

  Twitter discussion on search engine marketing (SE Land Mar 27 2009)

• Yahoo Releases Inquisitor for iPhone

  The application is considered to make searching on mobiles faster since it will give suggestions and auto-complete your search (PageTraffic Mar 27 2009)

• Google Releases Major Blog Search Blogroll Algorithm Update

  Google has launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. (SE Roundtable Mar 27 2009)

• SES NY: Improve SEO Through Blogs & Feeds

  Bad titles lack keyword focus, are often clever or amusing and therefore not intuitive to a reader or search engine. (Online Marketing Blog Mar 26 2009)

• Google’s Data Fetish Drives Away Its Top Designer

  “When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem.” (Bowman quoted by Valleywag Mar 20 2009)

• Google Apps missing enterprise social-networking revolution

  Apps remains a suite centered on e-mail communications and document sharing, devoid of social-networking capabilities. (IDG Mar 23 2009)

• Search multiple social bookmarking sites at once with Social Mention

  Social Mention is a a search engine that takes your query and focuses on blogs, bookmarks, comments, and other social Web errata (About Mar 23 2009)

• Twitter, the Most Important Website Since Google?

  Anything I need to know about something that is happening right now or has happened in the last 12 hours I use Twitter search for. (97th Floor Mar 19 2009)

• Two new improvements to Google results pages

  An expanded list of useful related searches and longer search result descriptions (Google Blog Mar 24 2009)

• Google Doing a Little Tweaking to Its Search Results

  You can now get semantically-related searches for some queries, and more complex queries will yield longer “search snippets”. (Researchbuzz Mar 24 2009)

• Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up

  Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under UK proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum (Guardian Mar 25 2009)

• Start-up that took no note of Google

  Financial Times covers Evernote and Google (Mar 25 2009)

• Google and Semantics

  IEEE Journal has an unusual write up “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data” in its current issue (Beyond Search Mar 27 2009)

• The Web 2.0 Way to Search Craigslist Classifieds

  Craiglook allows you to browse the popular classified website, Craigslist; in a web 2.0 and user-friendly manner. (AltSearchEngines Mar 27 2009)

• The Top 30 Alternative Search Engines by Market Share

  The most popular alternative search engine is indeed.com (AltSearchEngines Mar 27 2009)

• An update on stealth search engine Hunch

  Hunch is a decision-making site that gets smarter the more it’s used. (AltSearchEngines Mar 28 2009)

• Simploos Search

  No point in sitting on what may be the first Chrome-centric rendering engine I have come across. (Beyond Search Mar 29 2009)

• Do Search Engines Look at Keywords in URLs?

  A newly published Yahoo patent application gives us some ideas on how it might extract keywords from the URLs of pages, and rank them (W Slawski Mar 26 2009)

• The Wicked Lies that Social Media Gurus Weave

  Social media sites don’t come with instruction manuals (The Marketing Technology Blog Mar 27 2009)

• The genius behind Google’s web browser

  His most recent computer software program, called V8, is part of the Chrome web browser, a lynchpin in the business plan of Google. (Financial Times March 27 2009)

photo credit: Birdfreak.com