(Everyone calls me Lol / Wikimedia Commons)

Poynter covered a South by Southwest panel of media gurus who discussed how social media has affected the way we write and speak. The panelists included Fast Company’s Neal Ungerleider; McKinney’s Gail Marie; Digitaria’s Kristina Eastham; and Sean Carton, director for digital communication commerce and culture at the University of Baltimore.

They said that journalistic use of social media actually encourages writers to proofread because they are being read immediately by a large audience who will point out errors. The social media sphere also offers journalists the chance to become the cream of the crop with their writing: with so many people delegating themselves to a wonky shorthand, a well-constructed sentence will catch the smart reader’s eye.

In addition to advancing our lexicon with terms like “friended” and “liked,” social media reminds us that changes in language don’t necessarily reflect degeneration, but more likely a shift we must embrace and try to preempt. It should make us excited that diction and syntax is so malleable.

And online media has taught us to value short storytelling, which can often be more interesting because it forces the writer to fill the post with meaning. “Shorter is better–if you can do it well,” Gail Marie said at the panel. “It takes some level of skill.”

Twitter logo (Jessekoeckhoven/Wikimedia Commons)

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study tracking the best ways to increase one’s Twitter following, according to Poynter. The researchers studied over 500 active Twitter accounts. They found that tweeting negative statements proves to be an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot. You’ll also alienate more people if you tweet a lot about yourself and less about “information.” “Informational content attracts followers with an effect that is roughly thirty times higher than the effect of [personal] ‘meformer’ content, which deters growth,” they wrote. “We think this is due to the prevalence of weak ties on Twitter.”

Poynter lists 14 points the study concluded, ruling on what’s good and bad. For example: A detailed profile description or “bio” (good); cramming too many useless hashtags into your tweets (bad).

Credit: Mindy McAdams (macloo/Flickr)

Columbia Journalism Review has coverage of a talk at Columbia Journalism School’s Social Media Weekend, where two editors/producers from ProPublica talked about how their reporters have incorporated social media into their investigative process. Investigative reporters are indeed skittish about giving up their motives before formulating their projects, but ProPublica has no shame about using Facebook groups to gather sources for an ongoing report they’re doing on medical error.

By contacting potential victims of medical error on message boards and inviting them to join their Facebook group, ProPublica’s reporters (including award-winning investigative reporter Marshall Allen) can see how prevalent their issue remains and who to talk with further. They actively monitor and comment on their group to create a lively but controlled environment where no one gets hurt prematurely (doctors don’t get named, etc.).

“This will never replace reporting tools,” said senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora, “but it will augment them.”

Credit: Los Angeles Police Department

In the midst of what seems to be the end of the Christopher Dorner manhunt Tuesday evening, San Bernardino County authorities asked reporters to stop tweeting about the showdown between police and Dorner at a cabin outside of Big Bear. The sheriff’s office said the tweets were “hindering officer safety,” after an afternoon where one more police officer was killed and another seriously wounded while tracking down Dorner.

CBS stations complied with the sheriff’s request, alerting their followers they wouldn’t tweet any more updates. Meanwhile, the network’s television stations and sister stations continued to broadcast live feeds of the situation from helicopter view. They even alerted followers to turn on their TVs to watch instead of following the feeds.

Firstpost.com took a moment to meditate on Facebook’s ninth birthday, how the social media website has the numbers on its side at this point. Linking to a study by Global Web Index, they show that Facebook is still smoking the online competition in active usage, with Google+ coming in a distant second. As we know, Facebook has evolved quite a bit since its onset (i.e. Timeline, Likes and such).

In January, the website launched Graph Search, which enables users to search Facebook for photos, places, likes and other people’s profiles. Soon to come, too, is a more complex status updating system, which will let users share activities. (In short, it’ll be more customized expression, less in our own words.)  Facebook has stuck around, proving wrong the MySpace model of decline and dominating public discourse. Since Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com on February 4th, 2004, it’s become a common denominator in journalism. No publication goes without having a page.

A more public form of oral history, sure, but JFK found his roots in ancient forms. (Flickr Creative Commons: State Library and Archives of Florida)

We know the tumultuous start that the Twitter video app Vine had with their infusion of porn. With the Internet, journalists have infinite opportunities for trial and error in creating apps and programs for expanding their abilities to tell stories. Perhaps the most ancient and ingrained human form of storytelling is oral history. Many books have adapted this strategy to capturing the essence of an era or situation.

Now, Knight News Challenge winner TKOH wants to create an app to apply to this ancient form. Like Vine, TKOH’s app will benefit citizen storytellers as well as so-called “professional journalists,” those who will be dedicating themselves to such a stature in the future.

“It’s a need we all have,” Kacie Kinzer, of TKOH, told Justin Ellis of the Nieman Lab. “There’s someone we know, a friend, a family member, who has incredible stories that must be kept in some way.”

The app will be for mobile devices.  TKOH, a design studio in New York, won $330,000 from the Knight Foundation.

(Screenshot: USA Today article / Michael Juliani)

The Twitter app Vine offered journalists (professional and citizen alike) a tool for sharing six-second video clips on their feeds. In early demos, Vine CEOs and eager journalists practiced by showing six seconds of the process of making steak tartare and throwing away their coffee cups. But overwhelmingly, users have taken to Vine to post porn on Twitter, according to USA Today.

Tags like #sex and #porn began appearing on the app, and The Verge reported that one porn clip somehow made it as one of Twitter’s Editor’s Picks. (The clip was removed, labeled as a “human error.”)

ALSO SEE: Apple has a porn problem, and it’s about to get worse

As we know, the tools becoming available for citizen journalism are only expanding. While it seems easy to discount Vine for its early rush of X-rated content, perhaps it’s better to say “So what?” After all, journalism will be journalism, and porn will be porn (except if it becomes an Editor’s Pick).

For its part, Twitter released this statement in response:

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the user that posted the video may be terminated.

Tumblr’s GIFs entered the 2012 political conversation. (Flickr Creative Commons: elephantonadiet)

The 2012 debates were definitely important for momentum in the campaign.  But in covering them, we know that one or two moments make for the lasting impressions (Romney’s Big Bird; Biden’s malarkey).  Tumblr has made GIFs and memes so popular that they have become part of the political conversation–and the website hasn’t stopped there.

They’ve hired people to blog about the election, and in doing so have furthered the notion of social media’s primacy in the future of journalism.

YouTube has an election channel, and Yahoo provides extensive news coverage to go with its email services.

While everyone’s still feeling out the best way to use digital tools for journalism, we need to be watching for successful prototypes of what may be successful soon.  Since the 2008 election, social media has earned the respect it’s always deserved.  Now what’s next?

That’s part of the fun of events like this – discovering interesting and useful sites you hadn’t heard of before. If you’ve been on the Web for a while, you might remember sites like the NCSA Top Five of the Day and the GNN Select, which delivered a fresh supply of quirky and cool sites to early Web surfers. But in recent years, many of us have settled in with a predictable collection of sites that we check on a regular basis. I know I have, and I suspect many other web surfers have done the same.

• Related: Two Cities, Two Gatherings for Two Kinds of Content Creators, by Staci D. Kramer

So I welcomed this chance to inject some fresh choices into my bookmark list. Here are some sites I gleaned from the ONA conference:

OpenCroquet.org: Looking for an open source operating system with a 3-D user interface and built on peer-to-peer architecture that will help enable team collaboration on a variety of projects?

OK, if that sentence made your eyes glaze over, let’s try this: Are you a geek? Do you aspire to become one? Then click over to this project, brought to you by some of the folks who developed computing’s first graphical user interfaces. (And, no, that wasn’t Bill Gates … )

Even if you aren’t a geek and don’t want to become one, you might at least concede that geeks build fun stuff that makes great stories. The open source software movement is developing many fascinating tools like Open Croquet, and better yet, the people developing them are willing to talk. Open source program code means none of the nasty non-disclosure agreements proprietary software developers often insist that journalists sign to get access to sources. You can find an extensive list of current open-source software projects on Wikipedia.

Lynda.com: Need to learn Flash, Photoshop or some other computer tool and you don’t have the time or budget to fly to events like ONA? Lynda.com will hook you up with all the instructional videos you want, served online in QuickTime-format, for 25 bucks a month. Heck, the last ColdFusion book I bought set me back 50 bucks. And that covered just one program.

Five Steps to Multimedia Reporting: Whoa! Not ready to start learning new software yet? Looking for a basic introduction to this whole “online journalism” thing? Then let Jane Stevens at UC Berkeley walk you through storyboarding, fieldwork, editing and assembling your first online package. Even if you’re an online veteran, click through for a welcome refresher course.

Eyetrack III: If you haven’t looked yet at the latest finding from this annual research project, do yourself and your site a favor and click over to the Poynter Institute’s website.

Researchers recorded the eye movements of several readers as they browsed news websites. They then combined those results with the various pages’ layouts to create “heat maps” showing how well page elements drew the attention of readers’ eyes. Researchers tested several layouts for navigation, advertisements and story copy and described each option’s effectiveness. If you are thinking about a redesign, Eyetrack III provides some real-world data that can help you avoid design mistakes. And even if you are not planning a redesign, a visit to the Eyetrack site might convince you to start thinking about one.

The Northwest Voice: The Bakersfield Californian has assembled one of the more sophisticated attempts at community-developed news content in the industry. Sure, other websites have been publishing news and information from their readers for years. But Mary Lou Fulton’s team also publishes the Northwest Voice as a print publication, freely delivering copies of readers’ news and photos throughout the community every other week.

Flickr.com: The site provides a hassle-free solution for managing digital photos. No, big sites with custom editorial systems won’t need this. But little guys and bloggers looking for a quick way to get their images online might want to give it a look.

Flickr accepts photo uploads from email and camera phones and allows users to publish photos publicly or only to selected users or groups. The site also generates HTML code that users can cut and paste onto their website or blog. Or you can distribute your photos via RSS. The site imposes a 10 MB upload limit on free accounts but allows you to upload more photos for a monthly fee.

LiveJournal.com: Ana Marie Cox’s lunchtime speech on Saturday illuminated the rift that persists between online writers with traditional news media backgrounds and independents who got their start on the Web.

As OJR’s Staci Kramer wrote last week, blogging is both a publishing tool and a social culture. If you don’t blog but are looking to find an example of blogging as culture, visit LiveJournal.com and click on the “Latest Posts” link. That will take you to a page displaying the most recent entries published from the various writers using LiveJournal’s blogging tool. Prepare yourself for a random collection of thoughts, opinions, personal experiences and sometimes … insight.

Balance LiveJournal’s collection of posts with a visit to Technorati to see its list of the 100 most linked-to blogs on the Web. Technorati’s list, which updates constantly, often includes some of the more popular journalist bloggers, including Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan and 2004 Online Journalism Award winner Dan Gillmor.

Which brings me to… the complete list of 2004 Online Journalism Award winners. The BBC once again captured the top award, but the complete list of finalists in all categories includes many great story ideas, reporting techniques and multimedia tricks that any dedicated web publisher could rip off … er, find inspiration from.

Coming Thursday: More from the ONA conference, with columns from OJR’s Staci Kramer and 2004 Online Journalism Awards Finalist Mark Glaser.