Read along, tweeple

Jeff Howe's 'One Book One Twitter' is a book club aimed at bringing together readers from across the globe.

Early this month, the media and cricket fans went into a tizzy when Sachin Tendulkar joined Twitter. While we were busy clocking Sachin's followers (over 2,76,000 now), there has been another wave riding on Twitter.

Avid readers, shattering geographic boundaries, came together to start reading chapters from Neil Gaiman's American Gods on One Book, One Twitter (@1b1t2010), a global reading and discussion club, mooted by Jeff Howe.

‘What if a zillion people read and talked about a single book?' thought Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing and contributing editor for technology at wired.com. Also a Nieman fellow at Harvard, Howe's idea stemmed from the One City, One Book project started in Seattle in 1998 by Nancy Pearl.

Full report here Hindu

India's top tweeter proves a twit

The irony is impossible to escape. On Sunday, April 18, India's best known user of the microblogging site Twitter, Shashi Tharoor, resigned from his post as the country's junior minister for foreign affairs, felled by a scandal that began less than a week earlier with a rival's tweet. Not surprisingly, a scandal that involves politics, cricket and the whiff of illicit romance has dominated local headlines. But in the end, the Tharoor affair is less important for its drama than for its potential impact on India's political culture.

Mr. Tharoor's detractors accuse him of using his influence to arrange a sweetheart deal for a close female friend, free equity valued at $15 million in a new cricket team in the lucrative Indian Premier League. The former minister admits to informally "mentoring" the group of investors who won the team in an auction in March, but denies any wrongdoing. He says his only interest in the outcome was to bring the popular IPL to his home state of Kerala, and that his friend—variously described in the Indian media as a beautician, spa-owner and former events manager—is a victim of sexist bias against professional women.

Full report here WSJ

Taslima finds her voice again on twitter

Controversial Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen has found a new outlet for her opinions - on the social networking web tool, Twitter.

She had opened her account in January, but had so far made only three tweets in the last three months. But, after the National Commission for Minorities chairman Mohd Shafi Qureshi had asked for her permission to stay in India to be revoked, Nasreen has become a regular on twitter from Wednesday. Nasreen had got her residence permit renewed last month but had to leave India, where she had been living for several years, after certain Muslim groups organised violent protests against her "anti-Islam" writings.

Reacting to the NCM chief's remarks, she tweeted "Can Muslims be liberal" on Wednesday.

Since then, she had been quite frequently on twitter, sending over 15 tweets in the last two days. "Without the right to offend, freedom of expression cannot exist. And without freedom of expression, democracy will not work," she tweeted. She also provided links to videos and essays on the subject of freedom of expression.

Full report here Sify