Twitter, the wildly popular microblogging service, has spawned Yet Another Tech Acronym. I know, I know, YATA YATA YATA.

Stay with me. RT is to FWD as 2008 is to 1998, except on a larger stage. The Internet has grown a tad since the late 90s, after all. Just as your mom might once have forwarded you a link to the Hamsterdance, now she may RT a link to her a dynamite turkey gravy recipe. (I say ‘your’ mom because I’m still working on getting mine to read my work online instead of printing it out.)

In of itself, the addition of retweet to the list of online conventions spawned by Twitter might not inspire an avalanche of commentary.

Many netizens already simply refer to one another with “@username,” dropping a domain name, surnames and other non-essential clutter. Usage usually drives meaning in language. When you have only 140 characters to work in, however, concision drives usage.

Similarly, if you “@username” someone on a discussion board or comment section on a blog, you’re replying specifically to them. Websites that chronicle and translate the lingo on Twitter are springing up everywhere, like the Twitter Glossary, Twittonary and the Twictionary.

Retweet, however, is worth another look. The word garnered special mention over the past weekend by some of the most influential social media pundits around in the blogosphere, including Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang, who posted Retweet: The Infectious Power of the Word Of Mouth, and Shel Israel, who wrote that ‘retweeting is the most powerful single aspect of Twitter.’

So what is it?

To retweet is to repost the tweet of another Twitter user using your own account.

Most users shorten “retweet” to RT and add it at the beginning of the tweet. RT is followed by the @username of the user being retweeted and then the body of the tweet, including links.

A tweet, if you missed it, is the tongue-in-beak name for a single post to your microblog.

Why is RT important? If you’re trying to understand social media, influence marketing and Internet culture, go back and read those posts from Shel and Jeremiah.

When you RT someone’s message, you’re endorsing the idea, link, question or answer to your network of subscribers, along with anyone monitoring Twitter for hashtags or brands that you might mention. They in turn can RT your message, quickly spreading the message globally. In a time where breaking news often shows up on Twitter hours before it hits the broadcast networks, the power of the RT is substantial.

Intellectual property law and editorial standards around the retweet are, like the term itself, still to be defined. Should you add in your own comments and, if so, how? [Brackets, for example. -Ed.]

Should you always attribute the original tweet or only the most recent retweeter?

If a Twitter account has a dollar value or is a corporate entitity, should there be affiliate advertising dollars if your users click on a link?

Should enterprise microblogging platforms have an automatic RT function?

Some answers are already cropping up in the blogosphere. For instance:

• Mike Templeton was thinking about similar issues when he asked ‘Is there a format for retweeting?‘ on Microblink.

• AJ Vaynerchuk described the art and science of retweeting for Twitteraholics.

• David Risley wondered whether assigning a dollar value to a twitter account is just wrong.

As I’ve written before, every age has its own language and lingo that reflects the industry and conventions of the time. The information economy is no exception. The Internet has spawned any number of subdialects, as l33tspeak, marketing, PR spin, consulting boilerplate and engineering shorthand, blending together into a global conversation.

Increasingly, we’re being asked to translate language like “OMG! Did you see that comment from a spambot on your blog? LMAO. Stop tweeting and mod the trolls!” into something that approaches normal language. If you need a handy reference, BTW, make sure to bookmark and use our list of chat, text messaging and IM abbrevations.

Grammarians may be dismayed at the neologisms being spawned but usually end up accepting ‘cyberspeak’ like blog, podcast and wiki into general usage. Even “Meh” has been accepted into the dictionary. We’ll see if ‘retweet’ shows up soon, though I expect they’ll have to define ‘tweet’ first.

Now, go do me a favor and RT this post. In the meantime, I need to print it out for Mom to read over Thanksgiving.

Criminals haven’t exactly earned high marks in the intelligence department over the years, as both the Darwin Awards and local police blotters attest. Cybercriminals tend to be of a higher order, no doubt partly due to the literacy requirements imparted by computer operation, though phishing toolkits and cut-and-pasting script kiddies might indicate otherwise.

There are exceptions. One of the best known havens for scammers, fraudsters and Net ne’er-do-wells is Craigslist, the ubiquitous online marketplace that offers free classified advertising. Searchers can find an apartment, a job, used goods, professional services and more.

Craigslist was central to a recent heist in which the robber used a clever technique straight out of the Thomas Crown Affair. A robber used Craigslist to hire decoys for an armed truck robbery (Hat tip: Gizmodo). He duped a dozen men to show up at the site of the robbery with offers of $28.50/hour work, including the instruction to wear ‘ yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask and a blue shirt.” Dressed in the same garb, the robber doused the guard with pepper spray, grabbed a bag of cash and escaped in an inner tube down a nearby stream, leaving his unwitting accomplices to act as decoys.

Craigslist now operates in more than 450 cities worldwide, serving over 9 billion page views a month. In amongst the posts selling or offering cars, jobs, extra bedrooms and dates, there’s a vast dark underbelly of Craigslist criminal activity. In other words, the “and more” is where the story gets interesting. The dire warnings that Craigslist administrators make about scams and frauds, especially on pages offering items for sale, reflect the risks inherent in anonymous listings. The danger is real, unfortunately, as this story about a Craigslist rapist attests.

Thieves selling stolen merchandise, dealers offering illegal drugs and prostitutes proffering their own particular brand of goods and services can be found on any day of the week. Here’s a selection of some publicized incidents of Craigslist criminality, courtesy of the Wikipedia entry for Craigslist:

• On September 12, 2007, A woman from Minneapolis pled guilty in federal court to running an underage prostitution ring through Craigslist. [ 24 ]
• On February 8, 2008, a Michigan woman was charged with using Craigslist to hire a contract killer to murder a romantic rival. [ 25 ] [ 26 ]
• In April 2008, a couple was charged with placing an ad on Craigslist inviting the public to take anything from a man’s home in Oregon, leading to the loss of his possessions. The couple had placed this ad to cover up their own burglary of his house [ 27 ] .
• May 27, 2008: In Vancouver, British Columbia, a police report that a Vancouver couple attempted to sell their week-old baby on the site; the couple claims that the posting was just a joke. [ 28 ]

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster is well aware of the issues. In a statement quoted in a recent Ars Technica story, Craigslist puts a dimmer on its red-light district, he noted that:

“The incidence of crime on Craigslist is actually exceedingly low, considering the tens of millions of legitimate ads posted each month by well-intentioned users. “But no amount of criminal activity is acceptable, and as Craigslist has grown, we have become aware of instances where our free services were being misused to facilitate illegal activities. We are unequivocally committed to stamping out misuse of the site and to improving safety for Craigslist users, through preventative measures such as the ones we are announcing as part of the Joint Statement.”

The statement he refers to was a release detailing an agreement with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Attorney General’s offices in 40 US states to implement features that will reduce spam, prostitution and other criminal activity. Specifically, Craigslist is using a phone verification system for listings in the “erotic services” section that requires those creating ads to submit a real number that will be called before the posting goes live and including a fee to post in the erotic services section. The addition of the phone number is designed to reduce automatic posts from spambots. As Jacqui Cheng notes in the Ars article, however, ‘the reduction of spam postings may actually make it easier for those people to operate business through Craigslist, since customers won’t have to sift through as many fake ads before getting to the real thing.’

Buckmaster is no doubt getting ahead of some of the legal issues that Craigslist could face if it doesn’t take substantial steps to hinder Craigslist criminals. Craigslist may be the modern criminal’s best friend, as Lindsay Bass writes in the NC Journal of Law & Technology. Newspapers and magazines are liable for posting discriminatory housing ads. Pimps and madames are liable for facilitating the delivery of sexual services in exchange for money.

Craigslist however, is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 . As Bass writes, this has ‘kept operators of Internet services from being held liable for the content of third parties who used the operators’ services.’

Regardless of the law and Craigslist’s technical safeguards, if you use the site, be careful. Follow Craigslist’s safety tips and consult GetSafeOnline.org and WiredSafety.org for more advice on keeping clear of online criminals.

Besides giving us a new President, last week’s election gave America’s television networks a whole lot of new tech toys.The biggest buzz has been about CNN’s holograms. Were they actually holograms or were they tomograms, the technology used in CAT scans? Did the technology add anything to the coverage or was it just silly and expensive? Is it true that CNN actually tweaked the hologram to make it glow and look less polished and more grainy? How did the CNN technology work?

According to Chuck Hurley, the guy at CNN who managed the technology, the famed “CNN hologram” is really just beefed-up chroma-key technology.   And yes, they added the blue glow around the reporter so viewers would understand that they were seeing a projection and not a real person. It looked like a hologram, Wolf Blitzer called it a hologram, but it was really just a 3-D image taken with more than 30 high definition cameras and knitted together by over 20 computers in real time. That’s no simple task.

But perhaps  the most interesting tech to come out of this election is the popularization of Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall better known as CNN’s Magic Wall.  Not only because of the way CNN reporter John King was able to navigate the map with ninja dexterity, but also because it inspired one of the funniest SNL technology skits since the days when Jimmy Fallon played Nick Burns, your company’s computer guy.

If you haven’t seen Fred Armisen’s skit, here you go!

Have you heard? There’s an election here in the US tomorrow. After years of campaigning, votes have been pouring in over the last few days as early voters hit the polls and absentee ballots begin to be tallied. If all goes well, we’ll have a President-elect by the end of Election Day. Of course, if you remember the election of 2000, it isn’t always that quick or easy.

In fact, after the fiasco presented by butterfly ballots and hanging chads in Florida, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, creating minimum election administration standards for US states and budgeting nearly 3 billion dollars to help them upgrade voting machinery and clean up registration databases.

With that kind of cash and mandate out there, you might expect polling places to be full of gleaming new machines and carefully maintained lists of voters. In fact, the state of affairs is as complicated as ever, if not more so. According to 2008 National Voting Equipment Report from Election Data Services, “40% of registered voters will experience a new voting system since the last presidential election in 2004″ and more than half of the nation’s counties and over 68 of registered voters have seen changes to their voting system.”

Can you guess what type of voting equipment nearly 56% of Americans will use tomorrow?

It’s not the most common method of voting in use world-wide. That would be the hand-counted paper ballot and ballot boxes , still employed by 55 counties around the country, along with the absentee paper ballots submitted by U.S. mail in many counties.

It’s not mechanical pull lever voting machines, introduced last century to prevent fraud. Though 62 counties will be using them, pull lever machines have largely been phased out, due in no small part to transparency issues.

It’s not electronically-tabulated punch cards, either. There will be just 11 counties still knocking out those little chads tomorrow. Punch cards have been used for large-scaled data collection since the 19th century, when the government used it for the U.S. census, Herman Hollerith’s Electric Tabulating System, of course, is the ancestor to computers as we know them today.

It’s also not Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) counting machines from Premier Election Solutions (the company formerly known as Diebold). DREs are commonly referred to as touchscreens. 34% of counties nation-wide will be using touchscreen recording systems tomorrow. According to the Washington Post, however, Maryland is junking a $65 million investment in an electronic voting system in favor of paper. Virginia passed a law that bans DRE machines. After Princeton researchers released a 158-page report detailing the insecurities and inaccuracies of Sequoia’s DRE machine, many of these machines have come under increased scrutiny.

The answer is optical scanners, which combine a paper ballot with an electronic tabulating system and maintain a record of each vote cast. That record tends to be especially handy in the case of recounts. In fact, many counties have been switching touchscreen systems over optical scanners in recent years.

Vote flipping has become the election buzzword du jour. Vote flipping has been reported in Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

What’s going on? Touchscreen voting machines have been recorded choosing the wrong side of a ballot. Sometimes the result is purely for humorous effect, as when Homer Simpson experiences vote flipping:

In real life, of course, it isn’t, as evidenced by this video where a recalibrated touchscreen machine in WV appears to record a vote inaccurately.

Kim Zetter notes that the above video was heavily edited over at Wired’s 27bstroke6 Blog, though a followup post reports that evoting machines can be maliciously calibrated to favor specific candidates in the field. Computerworld reports that most vote flipping is a result of improper calibration as well. If your county uses DRE machines, make sure to consult the list of tips and reminders about how to use touchscreen voting machines posted by the Election Technology Council at ElectionTech.org).

There are widespread concerns about the security, vulnerability and reliability of e-voting systems in general. In Palm Beach, for instance, every time the votes are counted, a different vote count comes out.

So what’s the most desirable choice? According to Fortify Software, the humble hand-counted ballot is the most secure, reliable way to make sure your vote is recorded. Optical scanners rank third, after absentee ballots.

No matter which candidate you support, if you’re registered, make sure to vote!