Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

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Oh, those clever birds at Twitter. When the microblogging service announced recent changes to its terms of service, its executives knew exactly how to spin the news. For starters, media outlets dutifully went with headlines along the lines of “Twitter Changes TOS, Opens the Door for Ads,” because in a blog post about the changes, Twitter founder Biz Stone chose to make the most noise about the possibility of advertising. Granted, the actual legal language was rather broad (“The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising … are subject to change.”).

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Some of my critics have noted that I’ve been writing a lot lately about the pros and cons of developments that so far exist only in science fiction, such as warp drives for spacecraft and head transplantation. Why don’t you write about something that actually might happen?, they chide me. My response: Let’s see if you like this week’s topic better. Should we be better prepared for a flesh-eating zombie attack?

OK, roll your eyes back into your head. That seemingly far-fetched menace is the subject of an actual scientific study, “When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.”

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Few could imagine a more chilling tale of depravity than the story that has emerged over the last few days concerning the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.

While her alleged kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, has now been revealed to have penned a disturbing blog, some commenters on Boing Boing have uncovered visuals from Google Street View that they believe show him in pursuit of a Google (GOOG) car.

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President Barack Obama again took to the Web to spread his message, launching a new section of the White House’s site Monday to counteract some of the criticism of his plans for a national health-care system.

“If you’ve tuned into the news in the past few days, it’s clear that the debate about health-insurance reform has heated up as senators and representatives return to their home states and districts,” writes Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media, on the president’s blog.

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Twitter Inc., the fast-growing microblogging service, was inaccessible Thursday morning, struck by a “denial-of-service” attack, the company said on its status blog.

“We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly,” the company said in a blog post shortly before 11 a.m. EDT, Thursday.

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When I read the news on TechCrunch that Valleywag’s longtime editor, Owen Thomas, was leaving the gossip site, I wondered whether there was a bit of schadenfreude in this reporting. After all, TechCrunch’s founder, Mike Arrington, was a constant target of the Gawker Media blog and once famously ejected a Valleywag photographer from a party he was co-hosting simply because of the publication the photographer worked for.

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Even a few years ago the word “blog” inspired that peculiar mix of derision and dismissal that seems to haunt new media innovations long after they’re proven. A blogger was a lonely, pajama-clad person in a dark room, typing out banal musings he mistook for interesting ones, to be read by a handful of friends or strangers if they were read at all.

That blogs have now become a fixture of media and culture might, you’d think, give critics pause before indulging in another round of new media ridicule. But it ain’t so.

Twitter, the micromessaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.

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A discussion that began on a journalist’s personal blog has sparked a wider debate on ethics in the age of social media as the lines between journalists’ professional work and their personal activities blur. It began when Adam Tinworth, the head of blogging development for Reed Business International, criticised the National Union of Journalists on his blog for still not “getting” social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and for responding defensively to calls to include social media in their training.

In a follow-up post, Tinworth noted that an NUJ representative had visited his blog from an email with the subject “effing blogs” (http://bit.ly/blogs2). This turned into an unseemly spat when Chris Wheal, a freelance journalist and the head of the NUJ professional training committee, who had sent the email, criticised Tinworth for not contacting the union first for a comment before publishing his post. “Please consider the implications of your actions in future and follow basic journalistic standards and ethics before pressing the ‘publish’ button. Is that too much to ask of a journalist?” Wheal asked.

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I’m not entirely sure that Chis DeWolfe enjoyed our encounter at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The affable American, co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, was jet-lagged, having stepped off a flight from Los Angeles that morning into a punishing schedule of interviews and the launch of a new mobile offering. Then I arrived to interview him for radio–and to point a video camera at him for this blog.

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Los Angeles has long been known as a one-industry town–the movies.

Every waiter has a screenplay, every busboy has an agent, and every lawyer is working on a deal. No matter what job you are working at, it is only temporary until that big break happens, when that audition pays off, or when your pilot series is picked up. But what everyone really wants to do is direct.

My friends have teased me about being the only writer in L.A. who has never attempted a screenplay, and I’ve often thought I just may be the only person here with no aspirations to be involved with a movie.

And so it came as no great surprise when two of my closest friends announced their intention to get their German shepherd, Heidi, into show business.

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The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!
The last time the American newspaper business got this gothic was 1765, just after the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto,” was published, in London, and, in an unrelated development, Parliament decided to levy on the colonies a new tax, requiring government-issued stamps on pages of printed paper–everything from indenture agreements to bills of credit to playing cards. The tax hit printers hard, at a time when printers were also the editors of newspapers, and sometimes their chief writers, too.

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Kanye West’s Twitter, a catalyst in the iTunes sales war between the rapper and “Comedy Central” host Stephen Colbert, allegedly isn’t even West’s own Twitter account. Taking to his blog this weekend, West posted, “I don’t know anything about this…This is not me!!!” and posted an image of the faux-Twitter account, which asked the question “Who the fuck is Stephen Colbert” in the hours following Colbert’s launch of “Operation Humble Kanye.” The Kanye West Twitter page has since been taken down.

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For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.

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