Weekend read: My weekly share on Twitter, with favorites

Leave your gloves behind this week? I kept my fingers warm retweeting and passing along good reads, new data and great insights on Twitter, where I'm @dontgetcaught. I picked up a few things I can recommend warmly this week. Here are my best finds:

• Back to square one: Remember when you needed a .edu email to join Facebook? Now Facebook is testing a limited-visibility groups option for universities. These new groups would only be visible to those with a .edu email address for a particular school--which makes it more like email in some ways.
• Changing the paradigm for annual reports: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has issued a list of the 20 most influential health policy research articles of 2011, and is asking you to vote for the "final 5" top articles. It's a smart way of highlighting the foundation's expertise, and more timely and participatory than an annual report.
• Rethinking a blog: As a business owner, I love reading Paul Downs's posts on the New York Times about his failing custom furniture business. Two years in, his business is doing much better, so he shares how the blog got started and asks whether it should continue. A great lesson in confounding conventional wisdom (blogging about failure) and in rethinking your social presence from time to time, as needed.
• More mobile than ever: Time spent on mobile devices passed print for the first time this year. We're now on mobile devices "an average of 65 minutes a day, compared to 44 minutes a day for print (magazines and newspapers combined). Last year mobile and print were neck and neck at 50 minutes each."
• Order in the court: A UK judge has made it alright for live-tweeting journalists to do so in court, without having to seek permission first. Add this to your blog-and-Twitter press policy file.
• On the trail, 2012 style: NBC and Foursquare are partners in getting you to check in on the campaign trail.
• These so-called blog things, here: The Atlantic looks back at how mainstream media reported on the phenomenon of blogging a decade ago. "Don't touch this" seems to be the theme. A LOL read.

Have you signed up yet for the workshops coming up in January and February?  We're already getting provocative questions from communicators registering for the January 10 lunch-and-learn on your best social media resolutions for 2012. And your experts are silently hoping that you'll get some insights on how best to work with them on communications in the Be an Expert on Working with Experts workshop, a one-day offering on February 1--with a discount if you register early. I hope you'll share these opportunities with colleagues, and I hope to see you there!

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