E-Media Tidbits

Days after Twitter Lists were introduced to the public, the shootings at Fort Hood on Thursday showed the power of this feature to cover a major news event in real-time.

News organizations quickly created a trusted set of Twitter Lists to follow developments out of Texas. Lists from The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times were among the first. Others were not far behind curating their own lists, like CNN, the Dallas Morning News and The Washington Post.

Lists proved a new way to follow breaking news on Twitter, with filtered groupings of local news outlets, military accounts, and local citizens. But perhaps lost in the shuffle was an honorable journalistic effort on Twitter not involving lists at all, though it quickly made its way onto lists -- an account called @FtHoodShootings. The local feed was established by The Austin American-Statesman and chronicled developments of this event in real-time through various sources.

Read more for a Q&A with social media editors from The Statesman and The New York Times about their different Twitter strategies for covering this story.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit that calls into question the legal protections available to independent Web sites that cover news.

The case involves mortgage lender Implode-Explode, a Las Vegas-based site launched in 2007 that publishes stories about the meltdown of the mortgage industry. The court did not make a final decision on the case Wednesday, but one of its options could be to send the case back to the lower court for further review and litigation on specific points of law.

The dispute began in November 2008 when The Mortgage Specialists Inc (MSI) won a temporary injunction requesting that a confidential document, "2007 Loan Chart," be removed from Implode-Explode's site, ml-implode.com. MSI also requested the identity of the source and of a commenter, "Brianbattersby," who they allege made defamatory comments about the company and its president. ...

Journalists and publishers are exploring ways to use the emerging technology known as Augmented Reality in their work.

Augmented Reality, or AR, is "layering digital information onto the physical world," in the words of New York Times Creative Technologist Michael Young. The most common AR apps today live on "smart" handheld devices like the iPhone or ones using Google's Android platform.

Someone will, say, point their smartphone's camera toward a big office building and see what restaurants and shops are available in the lobby, or point down a street to see what subway stations are available in that direction and how far away they are. The apps rely on the phones' built-in GPS locators and compasses, as well as their ability to layer graphics and text onto what the camera is showing on the devices' screens, while receiving data that changes and updates the graphics.

Young and his team of technologists at the Times have been looking into AR to help with such location-based journalism as restaurant reviews (point your phone at the restaurant and get its details and ratings), real estate (see how many apartments are available and what floor they're on in a given building), and even historical data overlain on weekly architecture articles by Christopher Gray....

Just in time for the holidays, Google has announced some potentially valuable new additions to its free Web metrics suite, Google Analytics.

Among the highlights: better metrics from mobile devices, more flexible goal setting and tracking, automated and custom metric alerts and more precise tracking of individual visitor behavior.

The new tools build on what the company describes as its "enterprise-class" features that were first introduced late last year and include: advanced segmentation, custom reports, site search analytics and motion charts. ...