Every link shared via Twitter will start with http://t.co by the end of this year. That was the gist of one part of an email from Twitter last night. The most important thing for businesses to note is that, with that change, Twitter will start tracking every time a tweeted link is clicked — no matter what shortener, web site, app or client is used to write or read the tweet. Twitter will finally have an accurate way to measure …

• CLICKS: Using a traditional web analytics program to count the number of times Twitter.com sends traffic to a site, is a gross underestimate of Twitter referrals, because so many people click on tweeted links from applications and web sites other than the official Twitter site. Twitter will process and wrap every link — even links that have already been shortened — within it’s t.co shortener, so they can count every time a link is clicked.
• IMPRESSIONS: All Twitter applications use the Twitter API, so Twitter knows every time a tweet (and the links within a tweet) is requested. They can’t verify that each request  ends up in the tweet being displayed, but this is the best estimation of impressions, the number of times a tweet is shown.
• CTR! Since Twitter will have a the number of impressions and the number clicks, they can dived and deliver a fairly accurate clickthrough rate. CTR is used to measure the success of many online ad campaigns.

That kind of information can help shape and measure the return on investment for companies using social media to drive traffic. This is unique information that, if used wisely, can boost an organization’s bottom line. That sounds like the kind of online content for which the Wall Street Journal is able to charge.

What do you think?

Will Twitter start providing these numbers for free, or are they creating the foundation for a new stream of revenue?

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Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) has a great Twitter list of Top Journalism Linkers. I asked some of the people on that list to share their top sources for journalism news. Here are their replies.

1. 
   ksablan Question for @ckanal @jeffjarvis @mediatwit @mediagazer @cressman @mathewi: What’s your top source for journalism news? 08 Jul 2010 from UberTwitter
2. 
   Megan @ksablan @AlexMurashko Mediagazer publishes our source leaderboard: http://mediagazer.com/lb 08 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck
3. 
   ckanal @ksablan That’s a tough one. I have this list & check them all frequently @ckanal/media-analysis. Really like @rww & @mashable. 09 Jul 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
4. 
   mediatwit @ksablan No top source for j-news. Romenesko, MediaShift, Nieman Lab, Mediabistro, Poynter, ReadWriteWeb all good. 09 Jul 2010 from web
5. 
   mediatwit @ksablan Also: Howard Kurtz, IWantMedia, Mediagazer, BuzzMachine, On the Media, NewTeeVee and others. 09 Jul 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
6. 
   mathewi @ksablan: increasingly, I get my media news from @mediagazer — but also my list of media sources on Twitter 09 Jul 2010 from Twitter for iPhone in reply to ksablan
7. 
   cressman Weirdly,it’s becoming Twitter. RT @ksablan: What’s your top source for journalism news? 09 Jul 2010 from Echofon

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Somehow, I made it into Rosen’s list, so here is where I get most of my information about journalism:

• My “J” Twitter List: I suggest following each person, not just the list. That way, tweets from each person on the list will show up in your main Twitter stream.
• Google Reader: Feel free to download  my list of subscriptions. Google has instructions to import that list into Google Reader. Watch out, it’s gigantic. Focus on the Journalism folder/tag.
• My Delicious network: In particular, I pay attention to pages that members of my network have tagged as ‘journalism’.
• My Meehive: I get a daily email of top stories from here.

Share your sources

Where do you get news about news and journalism? Please share in the comments below and help other readers and me to stay current with the changing world of journalism.

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Like is definitely not the new link. A few months after Facebook rolled out its now-ubiquitous Like Button and the idea that “social links” might replace links, I have an answer to the question “Did Like Just Replace The Link?”

A recent New York Times blog post about Twitter’s @earlybird account includes a few links. The words around those links (context) tell readers and search engines what they can expect:

• More about Twitter
• A post about Twitter considering e-commerce last year
• The Twitter page/account for @earlybird Exclusive Offers
• More about Amazon.com
• A post about Dell attributing millions of dollars of revenue to Twitter
• A post from Twitter about offering deals
• A post about the Twitter annotations feature rolling out soon
• A ReadWriteWeb post that reported the @earlybird news

Contrast that to the information you can gather ff a reader “likes” that same blog post:

• The reader likes the blog post or
• The reader likes Twitter or
• The reader likes e-commerce or
• The reader likes Twitter’s new @earlybird account or
• The reader likes Twitter’s advertising or
• The reader likes blogger Claire Cain Miller or
• You get the picture

The big question/challenge with Facebook’s current like button is that you have to ask “what does ‘like’ mean, anyway?”

Image courtesy of James Allenspach via Flickr

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Last week, The Orange County Register hosted the fourth biggest Social Media Day gathering in the world. I work for the Register, but this is my personal blog. As such, the “we” in the title of this post does not to refer to the Register. Instead, this is a roundup of how “we” the people covered last week’s event.

SMDayOC

We asked people to use the #smdayoc hashtag whenever posting anything related to the Orange County Social Media Day event. According to What the Hashtag, 281 people have included #smdayoc in a tweet within the last seven days. According to my calculations, during one hour of the event, a tweet containing #smdayoc was published every 14 seconds.

Pictures

• Attendees used various photo tweeting services to share many images from the event.
• Caroline (@thevixy) used the new iPhone 4 and Sony DSC-W55 to snap 47 pictures and 3 videos in an #smdayoc Flickr gallery.
• Avante Gardens (@AvanteGardens) provide flowers for the event and then posted pictures of those arrangements on floristblogs.com.

Blogs

• Meredith Simonds (@MeredithSimonds) wrote a wonderful blog post that touched on the Register’s social media efforts and a tour of the pressroom.
• Longboards Ice Cream (@longboards) posted a blog entry full of pictures.
• At the bottom of her blog post, Daniela Bolzmann (@DanielaBolzmann) did a great job listing and linking to many other #smdayoc blog posts and other coverage of the event.

Audio

• The L.A.-based Tech by Southwest (@techsxw) podcast interviewed me for their story of how the Register created the fourth largest #smday event in the world.
• In an interview with speaker Ted Nguyen (@TedNguyen), local historian Stan Oftelie explained the name of the auditorium where #smdayoc speakers spoke.
• Nguyen also recorded an audio preview of the event.

Video

• Ted Nguyen also shot a video preview that he posted to CNN’s iReport.
• Robert Watson (@TopBrokerOC), another speaker at Wednesday’s event, shared video of Register Publisher Terry Horne opening up #smdayoc.
• @BodyByB used YouTube to share her reflections from Social Media Day.
• When Zpizza in Tustin (@zpizza_tustin) provided free food for #smdayoc events, they recorded and shared video testimonials.
• Eric Bryant (@TheRECoach) shot tons of video before, during and after the event and created a #smdayoc YouTube playlist with more than 30 clips. If you don’t get a chance to visit that list, please watch Bryant’s interview (below) with 91-year-old attendee John Vrba.

Share more

Were you at the event? Did you post anything related to the event? Have you come across other coverage. Share in the comments below, and don’t forget to save those #smdayoc pages on Delicious.

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I recently ran across a shortened bit.ly URL that was customized to read “leaveFB,” as in “leave Facebook.” After reading that post, I decided to dig up some other URLs that express how some people feel about Facebook.

• bit.ly/likefacebook (has been clicked 371 times): Privacy concerns started surfacing immediately after Facebook’s announcements at their f8 conference, as implied in the title of this Wall Street Journal article: “Facebook Wants to Know More Than Just Who Your Friends Are.”
• bit.ly/ilovefacebook (301 clicks): Heather Hopkins at Hitwise found that Facebook users return to news sites more than visitors from Google News.
• bit.ly/leaveFB (226 clicks): Ted Nguyen (@TedNguyen) asks why social media experts are quitting Facebook, after he interviews Adriel Hampton (@AdrielHampton) of Gov 2.0 Radio. Hampton explains why he recently closed his Facebook account.
• bit.ly/hatefacebook (198 clicks): A few expletives are sprinkled throughout this video, in which rapper and popular YouTuber Timothy DeLaGhetto (@traphik) declares his hatred for Facebook, affection for MySpace … and somehow ties it to Subway and Quiznos sandwiches.
• bit.ly/hatefb (26 clicks): Last year, blogger Joe Spaghettio’s Facebook account was closed because the network didn’t believe he was using his real identity. This is his blog post about that experience.
• bit.ly/fuckfb (15 clicks): An April blog post explains how Facebook forced users to choose to connect their profile information to Facebook pages or opt for completely blank sections of their profiles.
• bit.ly/leavefb (9 clicks): On this PledgeBank page, Free Press‘ online campaign manager Josh Levy (@levjoy) promises to delete his Facebook account if 10,000 other users do the same. Read more on Levy’s blog post.

If you’re looking to customize a shortened URL for your Facebook linking, these bit.ly options are still available: bit.ly/admirefb, bit.ly/adorefb, bit.ly/enjoyfb, bit.ly/fbrules, bit.ly/ihatefb, bit.ly/ilikefb, bit.ly/ilovefb<

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This morning, Twitter’s Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) shared a “hack” that takes the web address of a specific tweet and spits out HTML code to present that tweet on a web page. The name of the tool is Blackbird Pie and you can find it at media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie. Let’s give it a quick try.

First here is a snapshot of my original tweet:

Here is a snapshot of the  preview provided by Blackbird Pie.

Finally, here is the tweet coded by Blackbird pie.

For comparison, here is that same tweet coded by QuoteURL. It’s a great tool, but designed for more than one tweet.

1. 
   kessler Tomorrow @Twitter will allow you to add any tweet to your site with a snippet of code. Example: – http://bit.ly/9csalG 03 May 2010 from Echofon
2. 
   ksablan Let’s see how Blackbird Pie turns a twitter URL into a tweet in a WordPress blog. 05 May 2010 from web

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

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If you don’t like that strip of social tools that appears when you click on http://ow.ly links, then you’ll be happy to know that Hootsuite, the Twitter client that produces those URLs, has removed its “social bar” from ow.ly links.

Why was that social bar included in the first place? Hootsuite says that it provides “easy Re-Tweets, instant links ratings, and quick access to submit links to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook, etc.” If those features are important to you , Hootsuite still provides that social bar with its new http://ht.ly shortening service.

For more information, you can read Hootsuite’s blog post without the bar at http://ow.ly/1DCSw, or with the bar at http://ht.ly/1DCTs.

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Based on Facebook’s big announcements at yesterday’s F8 conference, I’ve decided to add a few of Facebook’s social plugins to Almighty Link. In particular, you can now “recommend” any post using the button at the bottom of the post, and you can see the “activity feed” of your Facebook friends who may have liked other items on Almighty Link.

In my opinion, this is a good example of an independent blogger with very limited development resource and very little time just hacking together a rudimentary implementation.

So poke around and see if this thing works for you. Tell your friends to come and recommend some posts. See how that shows up on posts and in the activity stream. Let me know if this is a good or bad idea.

Oh, I have to thank Andreas Jacob (@Cordobo) for a timely post that showed how to add Facebook’s “like” button into WordPress posts.

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Paper.li examines links that you share on Twitter, and links shared by people you follow, to produce what it calls a “daily newspaper.” The results are mixed but promising for a service that is in its “alpha” stage.

This service is very similar to Twitter Times, which I looked at last year.

Trends

You don’t have to be the owner of a Twitter account to create a newspaper, so I decided to make a paper for @tweetmeme, which tracks popular links on Twitter. Here is what Paper.li deduced from links shared by Tweetmeme and the 5,512 users it follows.

You might want to check out newspapers from these other Twitter trend trackers: Twitscoop Trends, Trending Topics and Twitturly.

Journalism

Contrast trendy papers to a newspaper culled from the links shared by CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) and the people he follows.

Here are daily newspapers from other forward-thinking news people: Clay Shirky (NYU), Mathew Ingram (GigaOM) and Patrick LaForge (New York Times).

Wants

Here are some features I would love to see in the next version of Paper.li:

• Ranking: Stories/posts should be ordered according to the number of my friends who are sharing each link.
• Lists: Create sections of my paper based on the Twitter lists that I’ve created.
• Clicks: Watch what I click on. If you see that I frequently click on links shared by a certain user, give that person’s links more weight in the rankings. Maybe create a scoring system.
• Strike: Let me remove items that don’t interest me. When I remove an item, decrease the score of my friends who shared that link.
• Edit: I want to modify some of those funky headlines.
• Timeliness: Since Paper.li is billed as a daily newspaper, you can file this under unreasonable. Still, I would love to see a service that looks at my current stream and presents it in a similar fashion to Paper.li and Twitter Times.

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To the question “Is the Ash Cloud dangerous to flights?” Charlie Beckett writes that the honest answer is “I don’t know.” Journalism, tasked with sifting through complexity to find answers, is sometimes presented with a situation so chaotic that it defies the possiblity of deriving a correct answer. Beckett points to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano as a perfect example of this type of event. But, buried in that chaotic ash, Beckett finds light in the “space of online.”

One of the positive aspects of digital journalism is that it allows the media to acknowledge this complexity. The space of online allows newsrooms to give a greater diversity of fact and opinion and more depth in analysis – if only by linking to sources.

Make sure to read Beckett’s full post, Complexity and the Media: Clegg and the Ash on the Polis Director’s Blog.

Image courtesy of Óli Jón via Flickr.

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