What's that blue grackle?

It's not really a blue grackle, but a symbol for Twitter.com.  Twitter is a social media networking site ... in somewhat the same sense as MySpace and Facebook.  But a key difference with Twitter is that each "tweet" is limited to 140 characters or less.  Some refer to this as "microblogging."  You can connect to ... er, "follow" ... people or organizations of interest to you.  Because it's a medium of short bursts of information, it's a very good fit for staying in the information flow coming from your family, friends, co-workers, businesses and groups of people with similar interests.

Both the City of Arlington (cityofarlington) and the Arlington Public Library (arlingtontxlib) have Twitter feeds.  When you start to experiment with Twitter, make us among the first feeds you follow.  After you get used to playing with the Twitter site, step up and follow some new people/ideas.

After you get a little practice, you might want to start using a program like Tweetdeck or, if you're a business, an online service like HootSuite.  These tools make updating and tracking easier than Twitter's website. Both are free as of this writing, although I'd expect each to be priced somewhat modestly when they change to a "for pay" model.