Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

Twitter Needs Your Help Generating Buzz | Given it's practically impossible to go five minutes without hearing someone talk about Twitter, Americans are probably getting sick and tired of hearing about the "revolutionary" micro-blogging service, right? Not so much. A new survey of 2,025 adults found that 69 percent didn't even know what Twitter was. [LAT]

Fran Lebowitz Will Not Be Tweeting Today | It's a good thing that author Fran Lebowitz is so tight with editor/restaurateur Graydon Carter that she can walk into Monkey Bar (or the Waverly Inn) without a reservation and get a table a moment's notice. If she had to use the phone—or Monkey Bar's email reservations system—she'd be in serious trouble. WWD asked her if Lebowitz if she spent any time using Twitter or Facebook and this is what she had to say:More

David Patrick Columbia: Now Tweeting From the 10021 | Big news from David Patrick Columbia today: The society chronicler and proprietor of New York Social Diary reports that he's now using Facebook and Twitter! "Twitter. I couldn't think of what to write. I'm a person who is rarely without a thought or consideration in his head, no matter where I am, no matter where I go. Yet with that little dumb distraction of a cell phone screen before me, I couldn't think of a damned thing to Twitter. Or Tweet." So what did he come up with? "Having Skippy's creamy peanut butter on an English muffin." This is going to be big. So please follow him here and please do it now. [NYSD]

To check your Blackberry or not to check your Blackberry? That is the question, apparently. Two weeks after the New York State Senate devolved into a high school farce in part because Majority Leader Malcolm Smith couldn't resist checking his email during a budget meeting with political power broker Tom Golisano, the Times tries to codify smart phone etiquette today. The verdict: Despite being rude, distracting, and giving us all ADD, perusing your email at all times is becoming increasingly acceptable, because, really, no one wants to sit through that meeting.More

The Etiquette of Texting | The Times has tackled the perils of texting on two occasions this week. (See here and here.) Teenagers are so determined to communicate with their peers, they're going without sleep to do it! They're texting in the middle of class and now their grades are dropping! Millions of teenage thumbs are now in need of medical attention! It's "texting anarchy," reports Cindy Post Senning, Emily Post's great-granddaughter. But aren't there times when texting is okay? "What about if they are stuck sitting at a table with a bunch of strangers at a wedding dinner or charity event, and the person on the other end is their spouse, who is being hijacked by Jihadists, and possibly sending their last goodbyes?" Every once in awhile, there are some shades of gray! [The Feedbag]

Your baby daughter is wailing. You'd really like to quiet her down, but you don't want to have to actually interact with her to make it happen. What to do? Let your cell phone do the work, naturally! As one dad tells it, when his infant daughter starts to get "fussy" in the car or during a walk, he simply turns on the free iPhone app "White Noise Lite" and drops it into her carrier. "It immediately relaxes her," he explains, which is nice since that makes two of them.More

Going to prison is about to get a lot less boring. The federal prison system is introducing email to imprisoned inmates! "It's a way for inmates to still keep in touch with their families and still maintain community ties," says a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons. Officials say that the communications will be monitored to ensure that "no convicts are trying to scam from behind bars." But does this mean that Ruth Madoff will set up an AOL account— ruthiem212@aol.com appears to be available!—so she can shoot off messages of support to her husband behind bars? Will Raffaello Follieri begin sending sad love notes to Anne Hathaway? The possibilities boggle the mind. [NYP]

Mindfulness the Cure For Enslavement to the Web | Just in case the doomsday scenarios about Facebook and Twiitter had you worried, "stress-reduction expert" Soren Gordhamer has some Zen-based advice. While he believes that technology, especially the Web, is our biggest source of stress, he says avoiding it is not the solution: Instead, we should aim to be "'consciously' rather than 'constantly' connected," and "incorporate Eastern meditative practices to help ease the frantic anxiety produced by the high-speed techno-culture." Does sitting cross-legged at your computer count? [Reuters]

The Technological Revolution Embraces Peeping Toms | One more reason to be totally paranoid about opening strange emails or clicking on random links: You might be inviting someone to literally spy on you through your webcam, which comes standard on most computers nowadays and can be activated by malware that's "a total triviality" to write. Of course, teenage girls are the most likely target for pervy cyberpeepers, but if your stalker ex displays inexplicable knowledge of your nice new pajamas, you might want to cover your camlens with tape. Just to be on the safe side. [Slate]

News that will play merry havoc with the minds of those wondering why he/she never called back, even though it seemed like such a great date: More than 30 percent of voicemail messages go unlistened to for three or more days, reports the company that runs the system for Verizon and other wireless carriers, with more than 20 percent of people "rarely" dialing in to check their messages. Yup, voicemail is desperately unfashionable, having been upstaged by email, texting, and even Twittering, not least because the arduous process of calling a number, entering a password, and listening to someone ramble on takes way too long. More

In the past, when science fiction writers imagined how machines would be our faithful servants, they mostly envisioned robots performing useful tasks like making breakfast and doing laundry. They had no idea that in the post-millennial age, the finest technological minds would be working tirelessly to provide multiple solutions to a single issue of immeasurable import: How can insentient devices protect us from our embarrassing propensity to drunk dial/email/text? More

In the treacherous and cut-throat playground of modern sexual politics, it's easy to imagine how one's morals could get slightly compromised, even to the extent of engaging in some light stalking. But given the technologically-savvy, post-privacy age we live in, is there really such a big difference between monitoring someone's Facebook status and secretly implanting a tracking device or hidden video camera in order to catch them cheating on you? More

It's become an integral part of modern life: You experience a random physical symptom—a headache, say, or a muscle twitch, or a rash—and whereas in those prelapsarian days before the internet, it might have preoccupied you briefly then disappeared before you'd even gotten around to calling a doctor, now a quick Google search will diagnose it as the first sign of a devastating, and terminal, disease. Cyberchondria is epidemical, a new study reveals, which is not surprising given that web searches tend to offer the impression that rare, fatal illnesses are afflicting people like colds and flus. More

We're all used to having a phone provide every conceivable service, so naturally we've been wondering when it would start warning us we were about to get sick, too. The day has arrived! Well, kind of: A new program from cold-cure makers Zicam, currently on the T-Mobile G1 and coming to the iPhone, announces what percentage of people in any zip code have respiratory illnesses, and the symptoms they're suffering from. So on those days when you just sense it's a bad idea to leave the house and mix with other humans, your phone will not just be your companion, but your trusty enabler.

♦  Election returns may set TV viewing records tonight, assuming there's some "suspense." [AP]
♦  What's been on cable news channels all day? Mindless talk and speculation, for the most part. [TV Decoder]
♦  It's possible the networks will call the election before the polls close. [THR]
♦  Some of the high-tech wizardry in store tonight: CNN plans to feature 3D "holographic images" of the network's remote correspondents in its New York studio. [WSJ]
♦  More trouble for tabloid kingpin David Pecker: John Miller, AMI's chief operating officer, has resigned. [NYP]More