I’m sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning monitoring three Twitter accounts, a Facebook page and a MySpace page (all via Tweetdeck) as well as two Google Waves. Combined, they reach a total of between 4,000-5,000 social media users, mostly in Stockton and San Joaquin County.

It’s gotten me thinking about the effective use of social media in the news industry (as well as my crazed obsession with the Internet, but that’s a different post for a different time.) We in the online media world like to jump on the latest, coolest social media technologies and try to put them to work at our news organizations. Our theory is that social media will play an important role in the future of communication, and we in the online world need to be progressive when it comes to using new technology.

I don’t disagree, but given the number of social media sites out there, and the still relatively small audience for social media in some markets, I’ve been wondering how we can organize our limited schedules and resources to best take advantage of those technologies. Is it worthwhile to spend hours Tweeting when there are less than 500 Tweeps in your community? Should we focus on providing new content to lure users in, or should we be doing more to look for new marketing tactics to let users know we’re available online? Does social media’s success at targeting niche markets mean we should be moving away from providing general news coverage online?

I’ve become rather bored with journalism industry news and blogs lately. There’s really nothing new out there, just more paywall this, mobile that, blah blah blah. It’s led me to take a brief hiatus from this blog to work on some other projects.

My biggest undertaking was Recordnet.com’s interactive snowglobe, which launched two weeks ago and can be found at www.recordnet.com/snowglobe. The project allowed me to utilize the Flint Particle System snow example in a fun, user-friendly way. I also learned more about Tweens, masks and the addChild function in Actionscript 3.0.

Twitter users are providing interesting perspective on and coverage of the FTC’s Journalism and the Internet Age workshop today in Washington, D.C. using the hashtag #ftcnews. The chat below aggregates the Tweets – check them out.