We've been following the growth of twitter, the social networking and microblogging service, in the govt info arena. Evidently, twitter use is growing at an amazing rate (422% in the past 12 months!). And now there's the GovTwit directory of Twitter IDs and links to official government blogs and URLs noted in Twitter bios! You can even follow GovTwit on twitter to get immediate updates on new govt entities joining the phenomenon.

If you're not sure what the heck twitter is, go to the Twitter FAQ or Twitter wikipedia article. Several of us used twitter to good effect during DLC last month to carry on a back-channel discussion of the presentations and council meetings.

Last month, at ALA Annual Conference 2008, FGI volunteers participated in the GODORT preconference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community". At long last, we've got the video of all the speakers up and available!! It's also available on the internet archive (slightly better quality video). You can now access all the slides, video, and notes from the preconference at the GODORT wiki.

Speakers:

• James R. Jacobs, International Documents Librarian, Stanford University. "Social tagging for building subject portals"
• Amy West, Interim Head, Government Publications Library, University of Minnesota. "Integration of 2.0 tools like Instant Messaging (IM) for reference"
• Jim A. Jacobs, Data Librarian Emeritus, University of California at San Diego. "RSS for documents librarians"
• David Oldenkamp, International Studies Librarian, Indiana University. "Custom search engines with GoogleCSE"
• John Wonderlich, Program Director, Sunlight Foundation. (keynote) Open House Project