At least 45 New Yorkers already are amassing campaign war chests to run for council seats and many more are expected to enter races in the coming months. One political consultant who is advising council candidates says he has identified more than 300 candidates he expects to run in 2009.

The early start to council campaigning and fund-raising efforts mirrors the early start to this year’s presidential race, with local candidates saying they want to put fund raising behind them so they can focus on campaigning as the city election nears.

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A race to replace Council Member Alan Gerson in Lower Manhattan is providing political junkies with an early dose of campaign intrigue, with a fight over Internet domain names under way between a likely candidate who is chairwoman of Community Board 1, Julie Menin, and a retired firefighter and former police officer running for the open seat, Peter Gleason.

Mr. Gleason purchased the domain names juliemenin.com, juliemenin.net, and juliemenin.org and plans to post information about his anticipated opponent on them, prompting Ms. Menin to hire an attorney to help her get control of the sites. The dispute was first reported in the Villager newspaper.

“These kinds of things shouldn’t happen,” Ms. Menin said in an interview with The New York Sun. “It’s just not an honest way to do things.”

. . .

The new system, a software package developed with $30 million from the city and roughly $30 million from the state and federal governments, would let doctors do much more than is possible with paper charts by integrating a patient’s medical history, lab results and current medications into one electronic interface.

Among its important advances, city officials said, the system will give up-to-date information to doctors through a series of alerts, like overdue dates on prescriptions or cholesterol checks. It will share data with other doctors and provide information about the current best practices for treating illnesses. City officials hope that the system will help reduce overall costs by eliminating expensive and repetitive tests.

Two hundred doctors with 200,000 patients have committed to use the system, and the city hopes to have 1,000 doctors with one million patients using it by the end of the year, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the New York City health commissioner.

Dr. Frieden said the system would provide more finely tuned information to doctors quickly than anything now available.

Does anybody really speak that way anymore? Did anyone ever, really? In the New York of 2008, where small shops and whole blocks meet the wrecking ball at every turn, is the New York accent on the way out, too, shamed into obsolescence as each generation adopts a kind of speech Ralph Kramden wouldn’t recognize?

You can take that concern and just fuggedaboudit.

The New York accent is very much alive, linguists will happily tell you, but like all dialects — and that’s what our accent is — it’s changing. To be sure, it’s been a long time since anyone called a toilet a “terlet.” But many of us still drink “cawfee” and call our “fathas” on Father’s Day. What’s also true is that fewer of us, especially younger New Yorkers, are speaking this way in our increasingly mobile and diverse city. That said, you’d be mistaken to conclude that means New York talk is going the way of the Third Avenue El.

. . .

The New York accent is part of a broader East Coast way of speech, with major distinctions in places such as Boston and Philadelphia. Our accent fits like a glove in between these two geographic zones, and the forces buffeting it include immigration waves, the city’s transient young population and New Yorkers’ tendency to clean up their speech. So it should come as no surprise that if indeed any part of the city is sounding less like New York, it’s Manhattan.

“New York more than a great many other places is subject to homogenization,” Jochnowitz said, “And I think that has already happened in Manhattan, where kids growing up in most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan don’t have New York accents anymore.”

What they’re hanging on to in Manhattan, Jochnowitz said, are certain pronunciation distinctions he feels are worth preserving.