I have seen it used many times before, but have never implemented it myself. I know the concept behind CoveritLive, a free and easy to use service that allows you to integrate a live chat onto your site or blog.

It also allows you to do much more, such as aggregating tweets. Greg Linch, an online intern @Dallas_News and new media brainchild for journalism, used it today to aggregate tweets from the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 in his blog. I figured I would give it a try by testing the service my self and aggregating the same feed (sorry if I stole the idea, Greg, but I needed something timely).

Excerpt from my post from Mashable.com today.

With news organizations beginning to create special positions to manage the use of social media tools, such as the recently appointed social editor at The New York Times, journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula.

That doesn’t mean having a class on Facebook or Twitter, which many college students already know inside and out, but instead means that professors are delving into how these tools can be applied to enrich the craft of reporting and producing the news and ultimately telling the story in the best possible way.

And though many professors are still experimenting and learning how these tools can be used, here are are the 10 ways journalism schools are currently teaching students to use social media. Please share in the comments others that you have found to be important and effective as well.

Read my full post on Mashable.com.

Today, I attended the New Economic Models for News Conference that was put on by the Minnesota Journalism Center. I was excited to gain new insights from professionals in the industry and hear about what’s working and what’s not. I mostly heard about the same old and much about any “new” models.

For the most part many of the speakers, some of whom were publishers and traditional newspaper folks, complained about Google stealing ad revenue as well as other such aggregators - though Joel Kramer, the founder of Minnpost.com, pointed out that 30 percent of their traffic comes from Google. I know that some websites are likely even more than that.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that in a lot of ways Twitter works well because it is simple. In fact, I think that it likely stole a lot of users from Facebook, who were getting too overwhelmed with all the new features but wanted something simple. That was me. I liked the simplicity, but at the same time immediacy, of the microblogging service.

However, it’s always about the progress and the new. And keeping users of social media, which is used like a toy by many people (I know I have fun with it), entertained and interested. But more importantly, serving their needs, which for now has been largely done by outside third-party Twitter apps and desktop management platforms like TweetDeck, which by the way is still labeled as Beta - a bit surprising, but that’s a whole other topic.

The Daily Show takes a stab at The New York Times and the dying newspaper industry on its recent tour of its offices. The Daily Show’s Jason Jones interviews Executive Editor Bill Keller and Asst. Managing Editor Rick Berke about the dying industry with some funny questions and in some cases even funnier responses.

I was able to take a tour of the newsroom during my visit to New York City for an open house at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in April. I got to sit down and talk to some of their investigative reporters, and I think the best journalism is still coming out of the New York Times. Despite the cracks in this video, I think it is still the place where most journalists, traditional or new media, strive to work.

With a slump of 5 percent in online advertising in the first quarter in comparison to last year’s numbers, news sites seem to be trying new forms on the Web to increase revenue. One of the things I have noticed is more sites incorporating in-text ads that appear as links and expand when a reader hovers over them. But does this form of advertising ruin the reader’s experience? Moreover, does it cross ethical boundaries?

There was a lot of fuss about Compete.com’s numbers on Twitter.com visits slowing, as reported by Mashable. I decided to use Compete.com to check on some of the local news sites and see how they are doing. If the site’s stats are accurate, it means that StarTribune.com’s unique and overall visits have been slipping since January. The overall visits have also been declining from 5.5 million in March to 4.6 million in May.

Though it publicly debuted in September and boasts 1 million users, I recently stumbled across Dropbox through a friend on Facebook. Dropbox, whose slogan is “secure backup, sync and sharing made easy,” is doing just that. Making your life easier in backing up files and being able to access them from anywhere through the Web.

It is like a 2G flash drive (2G is the free amount of space that it comes with, additional space can be bought or obtained through referrals of friends) that you don’t have to carry around or worry about losing or connecting to your computer. It also works with Windows, Macs and Linux. The Web account also shows you all your recent activity, allows you to access all your content and download it. But what I want to talk about is how journalists and newsrooms can use this as a tool.

The average online video length has been under 3 minutes for quite sometime, mostly due to the short attention spans of users surfing the Web. People don’t watch Web video like they do the T.V. Or do they?

Hulu.com, a video site that displays TV shows and movies, is changing the way viewers watch Web video and is likely the reason behind the increase of average video length online, according to comScore’s most recent report, which showed that the average length of video in April was 3.5 minutes in comparison to 2.7 minutes a year ago and 2.9 last July.

Most media, marketing and web professionals have multiple social media connections. In fact, you don’t even have to be in the above industries to be connected through various streams on the web. Organizing your Facebook profile, Twitter feed, LinkedIn, etc., can be quite challenging at times, especially when trying to share all of them simultaneously via your e-mail signature.

Do you include all of the links? Usernames? What is the best practice? Some marketing and PR folks include only their Twitter profile name because that is what they use most often. Not a bad idea. But what about providing a way to connect with people that use other social media more regularly or don’t use Twitter at all. Well, you get the point.