This Week's Paper: Burlington's Library Becomes a Haven for the Homeless; Use Your Smartphone to Fight Illegal Dumping

Here's the newsy stuff in this week's commemorative 12/12/12 edition of Seven Days...

• Librarians at Burlington's Fletcher Free Library are adapting to a changing job — which includes responding to the many homeless people that hang out in the library every day.
• With an app called SeeClickFix, the city of Burlington is taking a new approach to fighting curbside litter with the public's help.
• Meet Liz Miller, the former Department of Public Service head who now faces a tall task as Gov. Peter Shumlin's incoming chief of staff.
• In Fair Game: If Green Mountain Power execs didn't want journalists arrested on Lowell Mountain last year, what took so long to exonerate Barton Chronicle publisher Chris Braithwaite?
  
  And while the governor and two mayors visit a Florida air base to hear the F-35, learn about why a nearby, conservative-minded city is lukewarm towards the new jet.

Library photo by Matthew Thorsen

UPDATED: Bloomberg TV Barges In on Burlington's #BTV Hashtag, Twitter Chaos Ensues

UPDATED BELOW

Savvy Burlington-area residents have long used the hashtag #BTV to consolidate local content on Twitter, from the mundane (sunset pictures and lunch updates) to the serious (emergency management during storms). But #BTV is a simple hashtag that could stand for many things, and it's come under threat before — chiefly from users talking smack about state-run TV stations in Bahrain, Botswana and other B countries. (See "Burlington Meets Bahrain: When Twitter Hashtags Collide" from 2011 for more about that.)

But today, hashtag-jacking reached new heights when Bloomberg TV barged in. This did not go over well with Burlingtonians.

The news network had tried to use #BTV before, notably to collect Hurricane Sandy photos last month. But those tweets never caught enough traction to overwhelm Burlington content — until today, when the network pledged to use #BTV-tagged tweets in its iPad app while it aired a lunch-hour interview with President Barack Obama. Unfortunately for Vermonters, Obamarama trumped the Queen City, at least for a little while.

(Quick side note if you're new to Twitter and/or hashtaggery: No one "owns" a hashtag, so it's not like Burlington residents can complain to Twitter about having their hashtag swiped. A hashtag is really little more than a search archive of the tweets that include it. That's why Burlington locals were worried that their content would be utterly overwhelmed by Bloomberg TV's 105,000+ followers.)

The only way to fight back when someone jacks your hashtag? Flood it with your own content. This inspired a lovely round of trolling from Burlington Tweeters — which, in full disclosure, was egged on by this professional Twitter jockey. Below is a Storify showing the chronology of the great #BTV hashtag war of 2012, with political tweets on one side and gratuitous Lake Champlain photos on the other.

Hurricane Sandy Roundup: Vermont Avoids Storm's Worst

Vermonters prepped for the worst with Hurricane Sandy approaching, but it looks like the state largely escaped the storm's wrath.

Sandy's wind wasn't as devastating as feared. According to the National Weather Service, gusts in Vermont topped out at 72 miles per hour atop Mount Mansfield, 61 mph near Lyndon Center and 60 mph in Underhill. At its worst point more than 16,000 Vermonters lost power, though that number is now below 10,000 as of this writing, primarily in Rutland, Windham, Windsor and Bennington counties. About six million people in total on the East Coast lost power due to Sandy. As expected, rainfall was not an issue in this storm — most Vermont locations got well below an inch of rain.

What If the NFL's Replacement Referees Ran Google? A Local Developer Tries to Find Out

Football fans have spent September crowing about "replacement refs" — temporary referees the NFL is employing while it's embroiled in a contract dispute with the union that represents the league's usual officials. After just three weeks, the scabs have already gained a reputation of laughable incompetence, coming to a head last weekend when they potentially screwed the New England Patriots out of a victory and definitely screwed the Green Bay Packers.

What would happen if utterly unprepared "replacements" took over other stuff? Well, our Google searches wouldn't be very useful, as Replacement Google shows us. Type whatever you want to search for into Replacement Google — for example, "Vermont" — and watch as it returns a stream of results that's completely useless (for example, "A DVD of Cool Runnings.")

This fun diversion is the brainchild of Winooski developer and sports fan Erik Johnson. Johnson's also the man behind Just Enjoy!, an online travel site that organizes trips to big sporting events (we wrote about it in its previous incarnation as Vermont Baseball Tours in the sidebar here). The site went viral within hours — it's been spotlighted by BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Deadspin, just to name a few, and Johnson says it attracted 104,329 unique visitors just yesterday. Not bad for an hour's worth of work. 

And now that we've seen the dark side of a world with broken search, let us hope that Google doesn't lock out its algorithms.

Photo © Cory Thoman | Dreamstime.com

Howard Dean Livetweets Traffic Troubles in Connecticut

Updated 9/19/12

When we last checked in with former governor Howard Dean's Twitter adventures, he was rocking out to the String Cheese Incident and Jack Johnson. Last night Dean went on another tweetin' spree, this time updating the internet on the traffic situation in Connecticut. Here we go:

Stuck in bumper to bumper traffic at 111 at night on I 95 in Conn. Happens every time. Really grateful I live it Vermont.

— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) September 18, 2012

Assuming he meant 11:11, as the tweet was sent at 11:11 p.m. Damn those typos!

This is truly a nightmare. All construction with little apparent work being done. Now 11:30. How do the people who live here stand it?

— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) September 18, 2012

 No work being done? What a waste of taxpayer resources!

The Most Interesting Man in the World to Host Obama Fundraiser in Burlington

He keeps a catamount as his house cat. He knows how to get there from here. Tractors get stuck in traffic behind him. 

He is... the Most Interesting Man in the World. And he doesn't always host Obama fundraisers, but when he does, they're in Vermont.

Actor Jonathan Goldsmith, who plays the cosmopolitan, impossibly accomplished character in a series of TV ads for Dos Equis beer, is hosting the fundraiser to support Barack Obama's reelection campaign at Nectar's next Tuesday, September 18 from 6 to 8 p.m. Proceeds go to Gen44, the Obama campaign program dedicated to fundraising from the under-40 crowd. Humble little Burlington might seem an odd spot for a pop culture hero like Goldsmith to make an appearance, but the Most Interesting Man in the World is, appropriately, a Vermonter — he lives down in Manchester and was spotted in Burlington when Obama spoke at the University of Vermont earlier this year.

Former Governor Howard Dean is Now on Twitter — And He Loves String Cheese Incident

Can anyone hear your Dean scream on Twitter?

Howard Dean has joined Madeleine Kunin (but not Jim Douglas) on the list of former Vermont governors on Twitter with username @GovHowardDean. He started tweeting back in June, but it's only in the last couple of weeks that he's found his stride. At the moment, Dean seems particularly enamored of the retweet button but when the former governor speaks for himself in his tweets, it's as good as you'd expect. 

Dean started his Twitter life with a scream joke. So self-aware.

 

Excited to launch the #50StateStrategy on twitter! Not only will we win in #NH, we’re going to #SC, #OK, #AZ, #ND, #NM, #CA, #TX … #nn12

— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) June 9, 2012

 

Vermont is the Most Liberal State in the Union — When It Comes to Reading

That Vermont is among the most liberal places in the United States is not exactly a revelation. But a fun little project from Amazon.com reveals a new slice of political leanings in the Green Mountains.

With the helpful disclaimer "Just remember, books aren't votes," the Internet's leading purveyor of books and other stuff created its own red state-blue state map, based on the books its customers bought in the past 30 days (e.g. Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope is a "blue" book, while Mitt Romney's memoir Turnaround is a "red" book). Crunching the numbers, Amazon found that 58 percent of book purchases in Vermont come down on the liberal side. That's the highest percentage of any state in America, although Washington DC beats Vermont — a whopping 67 percent of the books purchased there are considered "blue."

Vermont is in pretty rare company as a "blue" state on this map. Just four states plus the District of Columbia purchase more liberal books than conservative ones on Amazon, while 45 states prefer right-leaning books. (California comes down smack in the middle with a 50-50 split.) Overall, 57 percent of political books sold on Amazon are considered conservative.

Another fun stat: the most conservative state, Mississippi, is more "red" than Vermont or D.C. are "blue" — there, 73 percent of the books sold lean right. Bet Bill McKibben won't pay a visit there on his next book tour.

After the jump, find out what Amazon says are Vermont's top-selling "blue" and "red" books.