Demand Studios executive vice president Steven Kydd told Beet.TV executive producer Andy Plesser Demand Media, its creator of instructional online text and video content, has about 150,000 assignments on backlog for its network of 7,000 free-lance writers, adding that free-lancers being paid twice weekly and some qualifying for health insurance offsets the relatively low return per assignment -- as little as $30 for an original video clip.

To say it's been a rough week for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. president and chief operating officer Jim Lentz would be an understatement, but now, he has a way to Digg his way out of it.

Digg is holding a Digg Dialogg with Lentz, and users have until Monday at 8 a.m. PT to submit questions for the embattled automaker executive, who has been dealing with the fallout from Toyota's recalls of 5.3 million vehicles for floor-mat issues that may lead to unintended acceleration and 2.3 million vehicles for sticking gas pedals.

Chief strategy officer Mike Maser posted on the Digg Blog:

In light of the recent controversy around the Toyota vehicle recall, Digg is hosting an exclusive Digg Dialogg LIVE event just days before the car maker testifies before Congress. We know there are a lot of open questions about how Toyota is dealing with this situation, and we're giving Toyota's top U.S. executive, Jim Lentz, the opportunity to address them.

Digg is the only place you'll have the chance to pose questions directly to Toyota's top management and get the answers you're looking for. So, submit and Digg questions from now until Monday, Feb. 8 at 8 a.m. PT. Then come back later that afternoon, at 2 p.m. PT, to watch the live event.

Athletes competing in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, Feb. 12-28 can tweet to their hearts' content, according to a tweet from the International Olympic Committee, sent Friday, CNET reported.

The tweet contained a link to the IOC's four pages of rules covering bloggers, but was much more light-handed toward Twitterers, reading:

Athletes go ahead and Tweet as long as it is about your own personal experience at the Games. http://bit.ly/bc6PlO #olympics #twitter

U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman Bob Condron told CNET in an email interview:

(The move should let) both the athletes and the readers enjoy the Olympics at a new level. This might be the Twitter Olympics. It'll be interesting to see where it all goes. Our brain waves are now operating in a 140-character mode.

continued...

ABC News president David Westin sent a staff email noting the record January by ABCNEWS.com and the addition of fare from ABC News to Hulu.

Westin's email:

Our colleagues in digital have just had another great month. In January, ABCNEWS.com beat all its previous records in unique visitors, reaching 27.4 million different people, some 24 percent more than a year ago. Our site had 218 million page views, and video views increased 26 percent from December 2009. In addition, ABC News Mobile properties had the highest page views on record for the second month in a row, increasing 52 percent in page views versus 2009.

Many sections on ABCNEWS.com had double-digit traffic growth over 2009, including Good Morning America (54 percent), World News with Diane Sawyer (62 percent), Nightline (51 percent), and the Blotter (86 percent). 20/20 (186 percent) and Primetime (148 percent) had triple-digit growth.

This week we also announced that ABC News programming will be featured on Hulu. The new ABC News channel will feature short-form news content and long-form programming from morning to night, including GMA, World News with Diane Sawyer, Nightline, This Week, 20/20, and Primetime limited series.

Congratulations to the entire digital team on the great results from all of their hard work. And I know they'd be the first to acknowledge that none of it would have been possible without the strong support they receive every day from people throughout all of ABC News.

Third-party Twitter client Seesmic announced the addition of support for multiple accounts on its Seesmic for Android mobile application.

In a post on the Seesmic Blog, the company also detailed other new features for the app, including the ability to remember scroll position.

Highlights of the post, including a video:

The necessity to add multiple accounts to mobile devices has become one of the most significant elements of Seesmic Android. You can now add multiple Twitter accounts in the application, and cross-post messages at the same time. This means you can easily navigate through multiple Twitter communication channels and stay in touch with all of your followers simultaneously. Moreover, the notifications you will be receiving will announce the online activity of your default Twitter user.

We've implemented a convenient feature where new tweets are now loaded on the top of the current ones and your position in the timeline is remembered. There is also the option to turn off this feature and always remain on top.

continued...

One of the biggest issues with using Twitter as a news source is dealing with the sheer clutter of tweets and retweets. That's where Feedtrace comes in.

Rather than dealing with the entire Twitter stream, Feedtrace users view the sidebar, which contains their ranked lists and functions as an overlay for Twitter, according to ReadWriteWeb.

Feedtrace also uses a ranking system that takes into consideration how recently a tweet was posted, the "credibility" of the user according to their following/follower ratio, and the number of tweets and retweets, ReadWriteWeb reported. It also collects tweeted links by overall popularity.

The app can be set to deliver only tweets from accounts followed by users, or even just from a single Website, and its Buzz tab allows users to see all tweets related to the current page and interact with other users, enabling users to retweet, favorite, and reply from directly within the sidebar, according to ReadWriteWeb.

A Social Media Week 2010 panel titled Unleashing Social Media on the Sports World, hosted by The New York Times at its New York headquarters, brought together moderator Gary Vaynerchuk, partner and co-founder of VaynerMedia; National Hockey League director of social media and business communications Michael DiLorenzo; MetsBlog.com founder Matthew Cerrone; Tyler Kepner, national baseball writer for the Times; and SB Nation chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff.

The panelists weren't overly concerned about athletes getting themselves into trouble with thoughts they share via social-networking sites, a hot-button topic of late, with Vaynerchuk saying, "We prefer them to say something crazy. All publicity is good publicity. Everybody wants to control the stupid stuff."

In terms of use of social media by management, sportswriters, bloggers and the like, Kepner chimed in:

As soon as it passed your own test for what I would put in the paper, then put it out there. Everything you tweet, people are going to take seriously. You've got to make sure you stand behind what you say. If you poke fun at someone, people are going to take that as your definitive take on them.

Vaynerchuk added:

If you break news wrong three times in a row, you will be stunned at how quickly your brand is dead. If you do enough things wrong, you're done.

"Good journalism is critical to start the conversation," Bankoff said. "It always will be."

And DiLorenzo discussed an early mistake that he has since corrected:

I was using Twitter as a one-way communications device and quickly learned the mistake I was making. It's not a speaking at or listening device -- it's talking to our fans.

The panelists had varied opinions on the type of control sports leagues and individual teams should have over athletes' social-media interactions.

Speaking of NHL clubs, DiLorenzo said:

My preference would be to let the organizations figure out if it's appropriate for them or not. I sincerely hope that they get religion around this and figure out a sensible way to allow their players and their managers to get involved.

Vaynerchuk said:

I don't think there's anything wrong with having rules. This can't be complete chaos. You want to make them as soft as possible.

Speaking of one particular client's attempt to regulate tweets and status updates, he added, "It's not a 'to say' list. It's a 'do not say' list.

Saying that players today come from a younger generation that grew up with Facebook and Twitter, Cerrone added:

The guys getting drafted, that are in high school, that are coming through, all have Facebook pages and have since they were 13 or 14. They all know what Twitter is.

One team has to do it and make it work, and then they're all going to go in that direction. I'd like to see the Mets be more a team of the people and adopt that.

Touting leagues' greater acceptance of blogs, Bankoff said:

We have five people credentialed for the Super Bowl. The NFL wouldn't have dreamed about having five bloggers credentialed for the Super Bowl, even last year.

continued...

To Twitter users who are seeing exponentially high tweet counts on their home pages: You are not alone, according to Mashable, which reports that quite a few users are experiencing the issue.

Mahendra Palsule, whose Twitter handle is @ScepticGeek, told Mashable the tweet-count issue has been an ongoing problem, and Twitter replied to a bug request on its support forum: "This bug is a low-priority issue because it does not prevent users from fully using Twitter. We do not expect to have this issue fixed in the immediate future for this reason."

How much is a behind-the-scenes tour of Twitter led by co-founder Biz Stone worth? What about if a case of wine signed by Stone and the other two Twitter co-founders, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, was included?

According to Silicon Valley Insider, the answer is $6,500. Why $6,500? That was the winning bid at a charity auction during the American Heart Association's Celebrate with Heart 2010 event, held at The Four Seasons in San Francisco Thursday night.

Tucker Carlson's news site, The Daily Caller, updated the bizarre story of Jim Treacher (his real name is Sean Medlock), host of blog The DC Trawler with Jim Treacher, being struck by an SUV in Washington, D.C., Wednesday night. More details were offered both on the site's main page and in The DC Trawler.

It turns out that despite early speculation that the vehicle belonged to the Secret Service, it was actually a U.S. Diplomatic Security Service vehicle. And not only did an agent who exited the SUV not identify himself as an agent or apologize, but adding insult to injury, Medlock was served with a citation for jaywalking as he laid in his hospital bed awaiting treatment for a broken knee. Medlock claims that he was crossing the street legally.

And according to The Daily Caller, the State Department and Mike McGuinn, the agent involved in the incident, have been less than cooperative, to say the least.

McGuinn told The Daily Caller, "I'm a federal agent, and I'm not allowed to talk to the media," citing "liability," declining to identify the agency he worked for, and adding, "You can refer to the [D.C.] police department report." McGuinn was actually the person who phoned the offices of The Daily Caller at the scene of the accident, as reported Thursday.

From The Daily Caller:

At the hospital, D.C. police officer John Muniz arrived to issue Medlock a $20 jaywalking ticket. Medlock was lying sedated on a gurney, so Muniz delivered the ticket to a Daily Caller colleague, who was at the hospital with Medlock. He looked embarrassed as he did so. Behind him stood a man dressed in a dark suit who identified himself as a "special agent." He said nothing but wrote in a notebook.

Curiously, the ticket says that Medlock was struck at an intersection four blocks from where the accident actually took place. And it claims that Medlock was walking diagonally across the intersection at the time. In one of his strikingly short conversations with The Daily Caller, agent Mike McGuinn acknowledged that Medlock was not jaywalking at all, but walking "outside the crosswalk when the incident occurred."

continued...

Maybe if every single one of Newsday.com's 35 paying subscribers buys and sells a house…

Newsday and parent Cablevision Systems relaunched the Optimum Homes classified ad portal, which is actually part of the newspaper site's public content, paidContent reported.

Optimum Homes will also be featured on the cable operator's iO TV Channel and in the print edition of Newsday, paidContent reported.

The iPad is more important than the State of the Union address, at least among Twitter users, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's New Media Index for the week of Jan. 25-29.

The new Apple tablet didn't fare as well in the blogosphere, coming in as the No. 5 topic, well behind the winner, which was the British Broadcasting Corp.'s airing of the first-ever film shot by chimpanzees (also, apparently, more important than the State of the Union).

According to the New Media Index, the iPad was the No. 1 topic on Twitter, representing 18 percent of new links for the week. It was followed by: stories about the economy, including a CNN poll finding that three out of four Americans believe much of the federal stimulus money has been wasted, at 16 percent; the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti at 13 percent; President Barack Obama's call to end the ban on gays in the military at 8 percent; and the State of the Union speech, also at 8 percent.

The BBC's The Chimpcam Project dominated blogs at 23 percent, followed by: a Jan. 24 column in The Washington Post by Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, offering suggestions to Congress Democrats for the upcoming midterm elections, at 11 percent; the death of author J.D. Salinger at 9 percent; a BBC News report about a French parliamentary committee recommending a partial ban on women wearing Islamic veils in certain public spaces at 8 percent; and the iPad at 7 percent.

continued...