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.

NewsCloud, which developed the Minnesota Daily Facebook application and HotDish, is offering the source code to other college papers interested in customizing it and managing it themselves. (Disclaimer: I was editor of the Daily when we launched the application.)

The application allows users to post links to articles that they find interesting and rewards them for doing so. Users also get points for engaging the content in other ways, such as sharing it with their friends, commenting on it, etc. The user is rewarded with points that add up to prizes that the news organization offers.