Arguably Twitter's most famous adopter, Winfrey hasn't posted to the service in more than a month. Her Twitter run lasted less than two months, but who can blame her? With a daytime talk show and magazine to run, a close connection to the White House and access to Broadway and Hollywood premiers and celebs, why bother with the banality of 140-character status updates?

Winfrey did just have a 10-day birthday cruise around the Mediterranean, but hardly explains her 33-day Twitter absence. It's possible a long summer break could explain musician Dave Matthews' 24-day Twitter absence, but what's the point of a vacation if you can't rub your friends' virtual faces in all the fun you're having, via Twitter?

At least Oprah and Matthews still have their accounts; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outright deleted hers sometime after October, when she was still on the celebrity Twitter lists. Like Vice President Joe Biden, who hasn't posted to his personal account since August, Clinton is now tracked by a mysterious, impersonal "UNOFFICIAL TWITTER."

But of course, being on Twitter isn't any of these people's jobs. Not so with Jennifer Preston, the New York Times' Social Media Editor., who was called out this morning (by new-media zealot Jeff Jarvis, naturally) for going a full month without tweeting. Well, we kinda should have figured: Preston only recently unlocked her tweets, then promptly declared she's be "listening more than tweeting," while figuring out how to clamp down on tweeting by others.

But you can't even pay some people to tweet, is the point!

(Top pic via)

A reader tipped us off that Google Maps now showed a clear overhead image of One Observatory Circle (below), the address which has served as the home of the vice president since 1974. It's the first glimpse Google users have gotten of the place. Kate Hurowitz, a Google spokeswoman, explained in an email:

Google Earth and Maps are regularly updated as new imagery becomes available. Our most recent update, which went live last week, included updated imagery of the Washington D.C. area from several providers. The imagery of the Naval Observatory comes from Digital Globe.

The changeover happened on January 18 in Google Earth, the search engine's 3D mapping service, and on Thursday in Google Maps. In other words, the vice president's house was revealed on Google the same week Cheney moved out and Joe Biden moved in.

For the past four years, since Google first began introducing high-resolution satellite imagery into Google Earth and Google Maps, people have noticed that Cheney's house remained obscured (top photo), even as the White House itself could be seen clearly. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in 2005:

The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.

Questioned about the blurring at the time, Google flacks said that the map images were displayed unaltered from the source — in this case, the U.S. Geological Survey.

The new, detailed images of the Naval Observatory grounds are still not quite as crisp as their surroundings, a difference Google's Hurowitz attributes to the difference in quality between aerial and satellite images, not any deliberate alteration of the map, as was the case when Dowd noted Cheney's willful obscurantism.

Could there be a better visual metaphor for the change of administration? The old one hid behind blurry pixels. The new one welcomes a close look.

Zimmermann wrote to complain that a long, detailed critique of Biden's record on privacy and copyright issues, by CNET house libertarian Declan McCullagh, might have given some readers the impression that Zimmermann was a Republican or something:

In his 23 August opinion piece in CNet, Declan McCullagh wrote on Joe Biden's suitability as the Democratic VP nominee, Declan quotes me, creating the impression I criticized Biden for some legislation that Biden introduced in 1991. Declan's quote from me is out of context because it does not make it clear that I never mentioned Biden in my original quote at all when I wrote about Senate Bill 266. Second, Declan's quote is drawn from remarks I wrote in 1999. Declan seems to be trying to draft me in his opposition to Biden, and, by extension, makes it seem as if I am against the Democratic ticket. I take issue with this.

When someone serves in the Senate for 30 years, we have to judge them by their whole body of work. Much has happened since 1991. I don't know what Biden's position would be today on the issue of encryption, but I would imagine it has changed, because I can't think of any politicians today who would try to roll back our hard-won gains in our right to use strong crypto. In fact, considering the disastrous erosion in our privacy and civil liberties under the current administration, I feel positively nostalgic about Biden's quaint little non-binding resolution of 1991.

Declan's article seems to imply that I would prefer McCain over the Democratic ticket. But McCain's stated policies on wiretapping, the Patriot Act and other policies that undermine privacy and civil liberties are a seamless continuation on the current administration's policies.

McCullagh correctly reports that had Biden's legislation passed, Federal agents would today have free access to all encrypted Internet traffic and stored computer data. Also, a 2002 bill by Biden would have made it a Federal crime to, say, build a Windows Media player clone for Linux that replicated the former's copyright-protection mechanism. None of Biden's "pro-RIAA, pro-FBI" legislation, as McCullagh dubbed it, ever passed. That at least makes Biden the less effective of two evils.

• Biden this year "proposed a $1 billion program to monitor P2P networks for “illegal activity” and a version made it through Judiciary."
• Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA bill designed to limit the recording and playback of individual songs from Satellite and Internet radio stations.
• Biden "urged the Justice Department to prosecute individuals who allowed mass-copying intentionally through P2P."