Five developments at the intersection of social media, technology and journalism

Google this: How to be everywhere

It has been an interesting year for Google as it relates to the media, and print publications in particular. As the fortunes of many print publications took a dip, some took aim at Google as a traffic/revenue thief. Rupert Murdoch now famously has threatened to delist his publications from Google. With all the tension, publishers would be smart not to ignore the bright ideas coming out of Google.

Jeff Jarvis does a great job rounding up the latest from Google, including the recent reports that it might buy Yelp (something a publisher should have done already, in my opinion). As Jarvis points out, buying Yelp, combined with the distribution of QR codes to 190,000 businesses, shows the search engine giant is poised to make a huge push into mobile. The QR codes, which are funky-looking bar codes that customers can scan using their mobile cameras, send the users to pre-determined URLs. The advertising potential for this is huge, and publishers probably should be taking notes, not taking sides.

Newspapers tweeting it right

The media moved relatively quickly to experiment on Twitter, and more than a year after Twitter really took off in popularity, many newspapers are doing a great job using the tool to not only push links out but also to interact with their communities (the "social" part of social media). This report breaks down what U.S. newspapers are doing with Twitter by analyzing 300 Twitter accounts at 100 of the top newspapers. Some of the interesting findings:

• About 70 percent of newspaper accounts were hand managed instead of automatic feeds.

• Newspaper accounts averaged more than 17,000 followers each, though that number was skewed by a couple of accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers.

The raw data is included in the report. Bivings tried to assign an "IQ" to the accounts, which is a bit puzzling to figure out, but interesting nonetheless (The Baltimore Sun has the top IQ among newspapers analyzed).

So, is there a way to make money off tweets?

The Huffington Post is going to try to make some money off its Twitter efforts and its story comments. Advertisers will be able to buy ads that will show up along with reader comments and in the Huffington Post's Twitter stream (though none have signed up yet). It's unclear exactly how the ads will look or be used, and the Huffington Post has not revealed the cost to advertisers yet. An interesting tidbit in the Advertising Age piece: about 80 percent of the Huffington Post's page views come from content that has little to do with politics (something that has brought it criticism).

No lack of ideas on the future of journalism

The annual Knight News Challenge contest drew almost 2,500 proposals (slightly more than last year). Despite it being a down year for establishment journalism overall, innovation continues. Mac Slocum of the Nieman Journalism Lab blog writes that he "was struck by the number of data-driven projects. It wasn’t so long ago that words like “database,” “feeds” and “aggregation” seemed novel in a journalism context. That’s no longer the case. The line between editorial and programming gets blurrier every year." Helping pull in so many nominations is the possibility for a decent grant (there's a total of $5 million to be doled out). We'll find out who wins grants in six months.

What is "above the fold" on a Web site?

Google has an idea of the most important parts of a Web site, and is sharing the information. If you want to reach maximum visitors, put the important stuff top left of your site. Google says it increased downloads of Google Earth by moving the download button by only 100 pixels upward. What this means: If you have something on your news Web site that you want people to use, don't store it where people have to scroll to find it. Incidentally, the Miami Herald has started asking readers to donate to the newspaper if they want to support journalism. Maybe they should move that donation button up the pages a little? Steve Outing thinks so (he makes some great points in analyzing the Herald's effort).