Weekend read: My weekly share on Twitter, with favorites

Time to untangle all the loose ends of your week, now, and plug into the weekend. I've got plenty of weekend reading for you, based on my finds on Twitter, where I'm @dontgetcaught. Consider yourself wired into my world of resources, starting now:

• Is there an app for your community? A Knight Foundation/Federal Communications Commission "Apps for Communities" challenge had more than 50 entrants close to this week's deadline. There's $100,000 in prizes at stake. Read more about the community apps entries here
• Video, meet questioners: Here's a mashup of question-and-answer sites and online video: VYou, a video Q-and-A site. You can ask questions of experts and track their new answers, and the startup already has more than a half-million videos loaded. How might you make use of this site for your experts, community relations or practical and advice information?
• A conference without walls shares experience: The Case Foundation just convened 1,000 people at a virtual gathering, and does the useful thing by sharing insights on that process here. A good list to review before your next online meeting.
• Give 'em something to talk about: Facebook's new metric on pages, "people are talking about," rolled out this week--some pages can see it already, with the number of people talking about your page listed right under the number of likes, on the left. And that's a lot of people: Facebook's user base is now as large as the entire number of Internet users was in 2004, the year it was founded.
• Are you a five-shot wonder? I mean with video, silly. Here are the five shots that let you take video like a broadcast journalist: Closeup of the hands, closeup of the face, wideshot, over the shoulder and unusual/alternative.
• Chalk this up to memory: This memorial to a Canadian political leader--chalked messages on a gigantic public plaza--is beautiful, participatory, and visual. 
• Search your ancient tweets, finally, with CloudMagic, a Chrome extension that lets you search Google apps as well as Twitter. Being able to search your own tweets is a cumbersome task on Twitter; this fixes it. Check out the introductory video, below:

And a few items I favorited, for later reading:

• Let's repeat that again: This Tumblr of unnecessary journalism phrases (think "estimated at about" or "free gift") is useful as a reminder to any writer, or maybe just the laugh you need today. Reminds me of the NBA color commentary I once heard on TV: "You know Fred, to win tonight, Denver has to score more points than the other team." We might need another Tumblr of Obvious Journalism Observations, come to think of it.
• Plugged-in network maven Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup.com, shares his insights about the popular networking and social site in this video interview.

Next week, I'll be in Arizona for the ScienceWriters 2011 meeting. Let me know if you'll be there so we can meet up--and thanks again for reading the blog this week.

Use the Evernote clip button, above, to save this post in an Evernote notebook or start an Evernote account. Subscribe to For Communications Directors, my free monthly newsletter, which features content before it appears here on the blog.