Twelve people have been killed and 31 wounded in a shooting spree at a Texas military post in a murderous rampage that officials believe was carried out by an Army psychiatrist.

The suspected gunman was identified by ABC News as Major Nadal Malik Hasan. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, told Fox News that military sources informed her that the gunman was about to be deployed to Iraq. Sources tell ABC News that this would have been his first deployment.

Twitter has become a central focus for communication, link sharing, information dissemination, and on the ground reporting during breaking news stories, so tech bloggers are looking at how Twitter is being used tonight. MG Siegler at TechCrunch speculates about how Twitter is influencing its Trending Topics feature to bring breaking news stories to the forefront immediately. “And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand,” Siegler writes.

And Adam Ostrow at Mashable discusses how Twitter’s new Lists feature is already getting high profile use focused on this story by such outlets as The New York Times, The Today Show, and The Huffington Post. 

Meanwhile, on the political and current events side of the blogosphere, updates are being discussed and hashed over as new information arises. Talking Points Memo titles a post very succinctly: This is Going to Get Very Dark.

(this piece originally appeared on Technorati)

The Twitter status blog has announced that when "one of the folks you follow has tweeted since you loaded your homepage, you’ll get a little notice saying “1 new tweet” that, when clicked, will display the new content."

That's the "small" kind of feature add that really pleases a longtime user such as myself. Twitter search uses this kind of functionality to alert users when new search results are available. And the nice thing is that it allows you to refresh the page whenever you're ready, instead of simply auto-loading new updates, which can be annoying to some. MG Siegler at TechCrunch notes that Twitter used to do the auto-update thing, until the explosion in the microblogging platform's popularity forced them to kill it off.

And credit Mashable for grabbing a screenshot of the new feature seen in the "wild."

(this piece was first published on Technorati)

Here’s the link to the interview on Technorati, which is part of the continuing State of the Blogosphere series.

And as an aside, Wetoku is a hot video conferencing product that makes interviewing people via webcam a snap.

The last few months have seen a lot of exciting developments, not least of which is that I’m the blogging channel editor at Technorati these days. So not only am I reunited with my old crew at Blogcritics (I joined Blogcritics in ‘04, became Executive Producer and co-owner until I left in the fall of ‘07, and Blogcritics was acquired by Technorati the following year, making this an achingly long and perhaps award-winning in-parentheses addendum!), I’m also amped to be working with the Technorati crew, who are all very very cool as well.

The timing was lucky in that I got to participate in the annual State of the Blogosphere report by doing a bunch of interviews with bloggy experts and influencers, and have been writing a good bit, editing, and strategizing on social media promotion. It’s been a fun time, and am very excited to see how far we can take our new original content effort.

I was going to link to a bunch of the pieces I’ve written over there but instead I’ll just highlight interviews with Steve Rubel and Penelope Trunk for SOTB, and a few “blog focus” columns that I’ve run, such as on the Twitter Lists widget, malware scam that scammed Gawker Media, and the Cheezburger Network Empire.

Here’s my profile page if you’d like to check out more. I’ll try to repost things over here as time allows, and fire up my Posterous operation again, which has gone into the weeds of late I’m afraid.

If you’d like to write for Technorati, check this out.

Something seems deeply strange and wrong to me, seeing Betty Draper (January Jones) in a pic with John McCain.

Pretty interesting stats about entrepreneurs from a report called The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur.

Sports geeks are well familiar with the concept of “power rankings,” which ranks teams relative to one another each week.

Tim Goodman’s Bastard Machine has long been one of my favorite TV blogs. It has earned even more respect from me by rolling out its own version of TV power rankings. Geeks of TV land, oh ye rejoice!

And of course Mad Men takes the top slot. There is nothing on TV that can touch AMC’s powerhouse drama of 1960s ad firm mayhem.

You just knew that somehow, someway, the Kanye “I’m really happy for you…” meme was going to get mixed up in the all time classic Xzibit “Yo dawg…” meme.

And finally… it has.

You may now commence with the celebrations.

Good thoughts from Tim O’Reilly backstage at TechCrunch50 — particularly like his take on getting behind companies that are situating themselves where technology is headed, as opposed to doing “me too” or derivative plays.

Google’s logo has morphed into crop circles today… pretty cool!