Excerpt from my post on Onlinejournalismblog.com:

The question is no longer just a hypothetical one. With increasing convergence between social media and traditional content, what is known as a traditional news website might not exist in the coming years.

Perhaps a revealing example is the creation of Facebook applications by a Seattle-based aggregator, NewsCloud, which received a grant from the Knight Foundation to study how young people receive their news through social networks.

With developer Jeff Reifman leading the way, NewsCloud has developed three applications (Hot Dish, Minnesota Daily and Seattle In:Site) that engage users in news content through linking to stories by providing a headline, photo and blurb. The applications also allow them to blog, post links themselves and much more – all while getting points for completing “challenges” that can be redeemed for prizes, which works as an incentive to stay engaged. Prizes include everything from t-shirts to tickets to a baseball game to a MacBook. Some of these challenges are online ones (sharing a story, commenting on content, blogging, etc.) and others are offline challenges (attend a marketing event, write a letter to the editor).

Read the full post here. It is a follow-up to a previous post on the Facebook applications.

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.

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 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.

You may have come across Twitter sites that grade Twitter profiles for their value, such as TwitterValue, which gives users the value of their account based on followers, RTs and more.

Grader.com provides a rank and grade for twits at twitter.grader.com. The site uses an algorithm that ranks twits and provides them with a grade. The algorithm is based on various factors like followers, updates, recency of updates and more. You can also view ranks by location.

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.