There was a time when all you needed was a good record review in Rolling Stone or a stellar book review in the New York Times to get a boost in sales and popularity. But as those old gatekeepers lose their cachet in the digital age, a new set of gatekeepers has sprung up and they don’t have bylines. These are the editors who pick featured artists and apps at the Apple (AAPL) iTunes store, who choose videos to spotlight on YouTube (GOOG), and who highlight Suggested Users on Twitter.

The most recent hubbub over the gatekeeping function started when Twitter began listing Suggested Users a couple months ago for newbies who weren’t following anyone and didn’t get how the service worked. By highlighting popular Twitter feeds from news organizations such as the New York Times and celebrities such as Britney Spears, Twitter hoped to hook new users. The problem? There was no explanation of how anyone made it onto such a list, and all the featured users started racking up huge numbers of followers.

Video host and blogger Veronica Belmont said her growth rate of followers shot up to a few thousand new ones per day–now hitting around 275,000.

“At the time that I was featured, I already had a pretty successful following on the site, at around 50,000 readers,” Belmont told me. “Maybe Twitter thought that if those people enjoyed my Tweets, then new people would as well. I tend to write about things in the technology world, but I intersperse it with funny or cool links I find throughout the day.”

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Journalists are obsessed with Twitter. Obsessed. They use it, talk about it, analyze it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, love it, hate it, capitalize on it, become experts on it, monetize it, argue about it, and become micro-famous on it. They are mesmerized with what it is and they are as giddy as Tom Cruise on Oprah just thinking about what it could be.

Last Wednesday, MediaBistro held a panel discussion titled, “Journalists and Social Media: Sources, Skills, and the Writer.” The panelists included NYU professor and PressThink author Jay Rosen, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin, BusinessWeek.com community editor Shirley Brady, and Daily Beast columnist Rachel Sklar. The four journalists discussed which social networks they liked best, their top concerns for the industry, and what they saw as the future of journalism. The main topic of conversation, however, was (of course) Twitter.

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You’ve probably heard how much the microblogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social-networking site Facebook can boost your company’s profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these start-ups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren’t familiar with their Terms of Service.

In terms of growth, both Twitter and Facebook are booming, with Twitter growing by 600 percent and Facebook nearly tripling in users in the past year. Both companies rely on venture funding to survive. Facebook has been bringing in revenues from advertising; Twitter hasn’t yet clarified how it will bring in money.

The brand value of both companies is rising, as you could see on TV during the inauguration when stations such as CNN were touting Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. But as more newbies pour their time and attention into these online services, can they be certain that the services will survive in the long haul?

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Last summer, the British cellphone carrier Vodafone announced it would be offering a new filtering service for its Czech customers. “Child pornography and promotion of racism [are] such socially dangerous content that we have access to it automatically blocked for all of our customers,” said Philip Premysl, senior manager of corporate social responsibility of Vodafone in the press release.

But six months later, that filter also blocked pages on tech blogs, a chat server and a transportation site all based in the Czech Republic. Tech bloggers Radim Hasalik and David Biksadsky started a Facebook group called Stop Internet Censorship (in the Czech language) to protest the poor filtering by the cell carrier.

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It happens several times a day now. Ever since I opened my Twitter account approximately three months ago, the follow alerts have been gradually increasing in frequency to the point that they clutter up my email inbox if I don’t clean them out often enough. “Jessica Kositz (jkositz) is now following your updates on Twitter” my latest alert tells me, and I dutifully click the provided link so that I can peruse Jessica’s profile to determine whether she meets whatever unspoken criteria that would result in my following her back.

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The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads. So many people are watching online videos, but so few advertisers are trying to reach them.

So what gives? The problem for marketers is that the most popular video site, YouTube, is filled with user-generated content that is too edgy or unprofessional for brand advertising. Many online videos are too short for people to sit through “pre-roll” video ads that play before the content, and people don’t like “overlay ads” that run during videos because they are intrusive. Another barrier for marketers is having to format ads differently for different video-sharing and media sites–not to mention the challenge of gauging how effective the ads actually are.

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The state of investigative journalism in America is in its five-alarm fire phase, with newspaper staffs being severely pared down, and TV news going for flash and celebrity. But Charles Lewis, the godfather of nonprofit investigative journalism as founder and former director of the Center for Public Integrity, would rather put out the fire than simply yell “fire!”

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The younger generation will be our future leaders. We hear that a lot in politics, but it also applies to media companies wondering who will be leading them into a digital future. National Public Radio has two programs–Next Generation Radio and Intern Edition–aimed at training young folks to do quality radio reporting the NPR way. Not surprisingly, those twentysomethings have also pushed NPR further into the digital realm, creating an eye-catching blog and using Public Radio Exchange, an online marketplace for radio reports, to get wider distribution for their work.

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In a world of social-network widgets, videoblogs and Web 2.0 gewgaws, sometimes it’s the simple things that work best. That’s the lesson of Web 1.0 start-up The Smoking Gun, a simply designed site that relies on public documents and criminal mugshots to bring in boatloads of traffic.

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Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled “Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!,” in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources. … Much to Foremski’s great surprise, PR pros actually listened.

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We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there’s a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get to know our neighbors? Front Porch Forum (FPF) is making a valiant effort to do just that, offering up closed email forums that are strictly limited to people living within each physical neighborhood in Chittenden County, Vermont.

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Elizabeth Gotsdiner got Joe Biden’s errant spittle in her mouth. Shantel Middleton got to ride on a Ron Paul blimp. Mayhill Fowler was following Barack Obama canvassers and ended up helping them carry brochures for the candidate.

Each of these folks represents a new class of semi-pro journalist tasked with covering the U.S. presidential election in innovative, more personal ways.

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I struggle nearly every week with an identity problem: Am I a blogger or a journalist? Most times, I can take the easy way out and think of myself as the nouveau blogger/journalist or journalist/blogger–but which one comes first? Nags my inner pigeon-holer.

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The time-worn debate of bloggers vs. journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention: Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.

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There was a time not so long ago when home computers sat on desks away from the main action in households. People used them for basic productivity tasks such as word processing and spreadsheets. Now, things have changed to the point where our home computers have become a center of our entertainment universe, offering up music, videos and photos.

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