Are you able to type out the ASCII smiley face by memory on the keyboard? If so, do you know how to type any other ASCII smileys without looking it up? I comprehend reading them, but have never made the effort to learn how to type them out. When reading them, I do not perceive a few characters grouping, each represents one symbol in totality, and each symbol is overloaded with more than one meaning, which needs be considered contextually for proper understanding of its meaning. It is language, pure and simple. If you were trying to convey the same concept that you intended with the 3 character smiley face, using only words found in an English dictionary, what would be the smallest number of characters required? Living languages constantly evolve. New words are in reality the synthesis and condensation of a concept down into one self-contained unit, decreasing the amount of data that need be exchanged to express it.

Twitter is a net service providing a communications tool, that properly utilised, is able to facilitate some communication tasks. I have found it to be well-suited for quick hyperlinked pointers, very much akin to what is being communicated in an HTML anchor tag. Twitter itself leeches off of another free net service that decreases the size of data necessary to be exchanged, TinyURL, which means that any URL, regardless of its actual length, is passed on Twitter using less than 30 characters, leaving 110 characters for the maximum size of the anchor text. That is almost always sufficient for communicating a hyperlink to all individuals in a personal network.

Twitter is presently in a cycle of media overhype. I suspect that a part of the reason for this has been Twitter's successful recapitalisation effort. The principles suddenly made themselves very accessible to media contact. Another reason for the hype has been the embrace of it by politicians, many of whom are themselves clueless about its limitations for use as a communications tool. They were advised to use the service by NetHepCat analysts, who are Hired Guns contracted after Obama's election, because these dim-witted pols believe that Obama won, only because he more effectively utilised new tech. tweetcongress.org is a great source when needing new material for a comedy routine.

Maybe you should look at how a true wired journo uses Twitter. I recommend Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette, because you are aware of her, she is a published author, now employed by Time Magazine as a journalist, and can often be refreshingly satirical with blunt and brutal realism in her analysis. I just peeked at her Twitter stream page, and she Twittered Jon Stewart's televised interview with Jim Cramer. How is that for bringing this thread comment drift back into its original focus? Her current most recent tweet is an excellent case in point:

Honestly I would pay to have Stewart interview Cramer every night. Not that much. But some. Like, what's left in my 401K. #fcu

As to the particulars of Google's recent agreement with publishers regarding their indexing of published works still under copyright protection, and whether this agreement means they won't be indexing books that are illustration collections, I haven't the answer presently. I use GoogleBooks frequently, even have my own personal account, and the last time I logged onto it, briefly scanned their notice of the agreement, but I seldom use GoogleBooks for accessing copyrighted product, and consider that to be of limited utility. I am evangelical about GoogleBooks, because they freely provide complete text indexes, and scanned PDF reproductions of an incredible number of texts that time has freed into the Public Domain. The size of that knowledge base is almost beyond my ability to comprehend it. You are much more focused on illustrations than I am. Does Google Books include non-copyrighted works of illustration collections? I am unsure if they have many, but know that there are a few I've run across.

On the TPM issues--

I used to know but forgot how to check source code for a page. I know where it is on the I.E. menu "View" but I don't get anything when I hit it.

I do understand what you are saying about it triggering the spam filter for you even though they are dead links.

But I don't understand what you are saying about what you did with the urls because what I see is that you put "site" in front of it without a space, and that in itself would make it a dead url, wouldn't it? I do understand what you mean by the system stripping your code out and replacing it with the slashes, but I don't know what "escape code" is.

I've seen a couple of oddball thread occurences here lately. One had the margins screwed up for the replies, reminsicent to me of that old problem with bulletin board software when you put in too-long urls.

on this thread, a possible tip that could be of help to you? My Windows Vista IE (being used in default, "factory" mode, unaltered) is giving me the following message: To protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked has blocked this website from displaying content with security certificate errors. Click here for options.... I think that's happened with another thread here too recently.

On google--

I am pretty experienced in all manner of specialized searches, rather, I meant that I am increasingly disappointed with what is covered by google, not with the order of what is returned. I realize that it is often the choice of sites themselves not to be included (proprietary databases, etc.) But that doesn't solve the problem of most people going there for their information in the next decade or so and presuming they are accessing most everything of import out there. More and more, it seems to be just the equivalent of "MSM," in many areas, they cover less of quality.

Their "News" is one area where they are actually still quite good if you do specialized searches, but in many other areas, they are just missing so much. I see the problem as giving the illusion of informing, but not really even giving a small percentage of what is out there if you want expertise. People think they can give themselves expertise, on say, a medical condition, or, say a point of geneology, using google. But they can't, because a lot of the important stuff is either not included by google or is on google but is pay-per-view beyond synopsis. So they go to the crummier sites on whatever topic they are researching, because they are on google and free, and get garbage info., and think they are informed on everything on topic. And it's ye olde "garbage in, garbage out" problem rearing it's head as I see it.

Example: a while ago, I went searching for 19th century English political cartoons on a certain now considered esoteric topic. There wasn't jack squat on the google, just one, out of the many I know that were done. I know that the New York Public Library has a lot of them, but their related database is not accessed via google.

Most history sites included on google, even university ones, are actually pretty pitiful, I expected more by this date, I guess it's because a lot of university databases aren't included? Its absolutely pitiful when it comes to records of American artists, I know that for a fact. You have to know to go start basic research at askart.com, they are not on google, but they have over the years basically taken over the transcription of all the major American artist compendiums. In any case, it's increasingly being used as if it's the font of all human knowledge, nothing else out there, and increasingly to me, that's looking like a very very bad trend. I can give another example of what I mean from my own field: most of this information is not on google, and most of it is never going to be on google, even with google books, because it's not standard "books." Likewise, they'll have some medical journals, but not others. Seems more and more to me like they are just becoming the "lowest common denominator of human knowledge" site, and it's sad.