It’s about time we catch up with some tools we’ve written about in the past as the companies continue to grow and change. Here are a few recent highlights.

Wavii’s iPhone app

Remember Wavii? It’s the instant news feed for any topic, letting you follow issues and people from news sources around the world. Newsroom use cases include reporters on a beat or a homepage producer wanted to stay up-to-date on the latest trending news. The company has just debuted its newest 2.0 app for iOS devices.

From Wavii’s announcement, new features of the app:

• Smoother navigation, commenting and social sharing: The new app has a streamlined look and feel, it also includes a new social bar that lets you see what stories your friends have interacted with and enables you to easily share your thoughts too. You can also quickly share stories via email, or over to Facebook and Twitter.
•  More updates for any topic: A wider range of the world’s events as short, simple status updates in your newsfeed.
•  Quick and easy discovery of new topics to follow: Provides quick access to category feeds like “Popular,” “Tech,” and “Entertainment”, making it easier to discover new and interesting topics that you can follow to personalize your experience.
•  More ways to get started: You can now use Twitter or an email address to sign up, in addition to Facebook.

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Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up is a ranking of top social media management software; an analysis of global  participation in social interactivity; the value of using roundtables for discussion; a look at the profile of a “change agent”; a look at how well brands measured social media ROI in 2011; and a discussion about readiness when launching an online community.

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This is the time of year news organizations pump out end-of-year “Best Of” lists highlighting the top stories from readers or editors. I wanted to pass on a few of my favorite end-of-year best lists related to journalism and news. Please submit your favorites I missed in the comments, so we can all enjoy it.

The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists

This list from NPR made me physically LOL when I first read it. It’s spot on when it comes to the reaction you see in the comments sections of many stories, not just the year-end lot. It’s appropriate fodder to start with as you wade into other year-end lists.

Top 10 Longreads

The Longreads founder pulls together his team’s favorite of the longform stories and articles this year. Bonus: Readers submitted their own best of 2011 lists as well. These should keep you busy until next year’s list comes out.

The year in media errors and corrections features Osama/Obama, Giffords

Regret The Error is always one of my personal favorite end-of-year roundups. It makes me feel better about any errors I may have let slip when I see the truly colossal oopsies that made the air or print. This year’s listing — including never-to-be-lived-down classics like “Obama Bin Laden is dead” — doesn’t disappoint.

The 50 Funniest Headlines Of 2011

From a “horse herpes outbreak” to “meatball sandwich horseplay” Buzzfeed’s roundup is amusing even if it’s impossible to be all-inclusive. It’s probably not surprising that a surprising number of these have to do with food or animals, is it?

The Ten Worst Media Disasters of 2011

In case you’re more a fan of the worst lists than the bests, here’s a round-up of media moments some important people would like to put behind them as they head into a new year. Read it and resolve not to make this list next year.

Top Ten Comedic News Stories of 2011

If you enjoy CSPAN and CNN as much as the not-news shows on that other C-channel — Comedy Central — then this list will make you grin. It’s the top 10 funny stories this year from “political comedian” Will Durst.

The Year in News 2011

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism says the economy topped the 2011 news cycle, taking up some 20 percent of the news hole — up from 14 percent in 2010. Mideast unrest came in a distant second, followed by the 2012 Presidential election. Read the full study to see what else rounded out the top stories of the year based on coverage.

Finally, if you haven’t had enough, Fast Company made an amazing mashup of 2011 best and worst lists. It’s a bit overwhelming but more than a bit worth grazing.

Newspapers are good at throwing share buttons and sidebars and embedded widgets and image carousels and lists of related items into their story pages online. News design isn’t pretty, and the consumption experience online is often distracting and disjointed if you’re not using an RSS reader.

Now there’s a new tool that wants to fix that by “de-templatizing” news design. It’s called Scroll, and its brought to us by familiar faces Kate Ray and Cody Brown, who also created Nerd Collider and Kommons. Read more

To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, news organizations across the world have poured efforts into anniversary content, reflective analysis, special videos, profiles, galleries, interactives and much more. This is a collection of more than 45 homepage screenshots from print publications, TV, blogs and other online news/media organizations across the web. To see what top news websites looked like 10 years ago, see this roundup by Mashable.

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