C&RL News July/August 2010  392

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.
unc.edu

G a r y  P a t t i l l o

International tweets
More than 60 percent of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the United 
States. There is even a Twitter account for a user on the International Space 
Station. In the wake of the Chilean earthquake, new account signups spiked 
1,200 percent, most of which were using Spanish as their primary language.
Matt Sanford, “Twitter Blog: Growing Around the World,” Twitter, blog.twitter.com/2010/04/growing-around-world.
html  Retrieved May 1, 2010.

Popular WorldCat books
During the month of March 2010, the Top 10 most popular WorldCat items in 
order of views were:
1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
2. Respect for Acting, by Uta Hagen
3. Sailing Alone Around the World, by Joshua Slocum
4. The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
5. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
6. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
7. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
8. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
9. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
Bob Shulz, “Top 20 Most Popular Items for March,” WorldCat, worldcat.org/blogs/archives/2010/04/top-20-most-popular 
-items-for-1.htm. Retrieved June 1, 2010.

FTC on photocopier security
“The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is urging the photocopier industry to 
address privacy risks arising from the fact that digital copiers store thousands 
of documents on their internal hard drives. CBS News reported in mid-April 
that nearly every copier built since 2002 stores images of documents that pass 
through the machines. The report found sensitive health and law-enforcement 
information on copiers ready to be resold.”
Grant Gross, “FTC Examines Privacy Risks of Copier Hard Drives - CSO Online - Security and Risk,” IDG News Service, 
www.csoonline.com/article/596022/ftc-examines-privacy-risks-of-copier-hard-drives. Retrieved June 7, 2010.

Managing the news flood
ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus has advice for managing news 
consumption in the real-time Web era. One obvious suggestion is to limit the 
number of times that you check news sources and social networking sites.  
Technological solutions include using topic trackers, such as Google Alerts, 
PubSub, or LazyFeed, which allow you to subscribe to keywords or phrases 
in news feeds. Another strategy is to use news aggregators, such as Topix, 
Techmeme, or Thelibrarynews.com, which filter news from multiple sources 
for you. One additional strategy is to try a single feed of various sources. You 
can accomplish this by using folders in your RSS reader or by using filtering 
services, such as PostRank.
Richard MacManus, “How to Manage Your News Consumption in the Real-Time Web Era,” ReadWriteWeb, www. 
readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_manage_your_news_consumption_in_the_real-time_web.php. Retrieved June 9, 
2010.

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