Contrast the immediacy of today’s social media messaging wars with the way news traveled a couple hundred years ago. Syndicated from Kottke: BREAKING: American Colonies Declare Independence — An interesting look at how news of the Declaration of Independence spread through the American colonies and around the world. Because trans-Atlantic journeys took awhile back when, the first European news of the Declaration was almost a month and a half after July 4. (And the first retweet took at least a week.)