Mark Twain, lauded by many as America's greatest humorist, has a strong online presence nearly a century after his death.

Following the Equator

Mark Twain's Mississippi

The Mark Twain Project

Twain Quotes

Last week, American lexiphiles celebrated the 250th birthday of Noah Webster — or his semiquincentennial, if you want to be sesquipedalian about it. On the other side of the pond, British word lovers recently had their own Dictionary Day, on the 299th birthday of Samuel Johnson. (Mark your calendars now for the big Johnsonian blow-out of September 18, 2009, sure to be a rollicking tercentennial!) Continue reading...

Should words like podcast, Bluetooth, and crowdsourcing be included in mainstream dictionaries? Computerworld talks to leading lexicographers about which high-tech terms make the cut.

Jack Kerouac, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath: they're all on YouTube, believe it or not. The Guardian has the full list of YouTube's greatest arts footage.

Doing research, scholarly or otherwise, increasingly requires acumen with online resources. Here are some books to help sharpen your Internet search skills.

Librarian's Guide to Online Searching

The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook

Mastering Online Research

Internet Research Skills

Are online readers "selfish, lazy, and ruthless"? That's the theory of Web guru Jakob Nielsen. Slate's Michael Agger investigates.

It's hard to keep up with techie terms these days. Last week, Apple Inc. announced it would no longer use the word push to describe the way that its new online MobileMe service communicates to personal computers and electronic devices like the iPhone. Turns out the service wasn't always "pushing" data to "the cloud" as quickly as users were expecting. To which non-technophiles would probably say, "Huh?" Continue reading...