Mashable

So you've found a video on YouTube that you'd like to use on your Web site or you're interested in writing a story about. What are the ethical considerations and how do you decide if it's worth covering? What are your legal responsibilities from accepting video from a user? Leah Betancourt, the digital community manager at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, has all of those answers in this post.

So if you think the Twitter trend is overplayed or just "don't get it" when it comes to the microblogging service you're not alone. A Harris poll indicates 69% of adults don't know enough about Twitter to have an informed opinion about it. Mashable has the full report posted. If you're curious about Twitter, just click the Twitter tag under the Topics section on our Around the Web page for some Twitter info.

Leah Betancourt of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has some advice on Mashable for journalists on how to best use social media. Her piece summarizes several policies that have been set by major metros, but also offers some practical tips that might be useful for to community journalists.

Ann Handley has an great how-to about using journalistic writing skills on Twitter. "... news journalism works best when it’s simple and direct, at least in the story’s lead sentences. And simplicity (and other tenets of good journalism — like brevity, and clarity, and immediacy) are now cornerstones of how many businesses, brands and individuals communicate on Twitter," she writes.

The New York Times has hired a "social media editor" who is going to be connecting with users on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. The first link is a blog post from Mashable, a blog about social media trends. The second link is to the new social media editor's Twitter account.