Twitter confirms paid pro accounts on the way — The details have not been released, but this is something to watch for news orgs. If Twitter holds true to its promise, all the existing features will remain free, but newer, power-user oriented features will emerge. If this is true, Twitter could become an even more valuable tool for journalists and journalism organizations.

Twitter has brought a lot of companies a lot of value. Co-founder Biz Stone offers some insight into their thinking:

What can Twitter offer for a fee that will improve the experience? Will it be account verification? Will it be lightweight analytics? Will there be opportunities for introducing customers to businesses on Twitter.

So many questions. But the key is to understand that Twitter will remain free for all to use—individuals and companies alike. We are thinking about simple business products that enhance and encourage what is already happening.

Google adds drawing to Docs — Google Docs are one of our favorite collaborative tools and they just got better. Docs now allow for vector-based drawing. This is a little handy tool that should help make Docs more useful and should make Docs a better collaborative tool.

We use Google Docs a lot at BeatBlogging.Org to share information, collaboratively work on documents, for spreadsheets and for wikis. It’s an indispensable tool for us, especially since we don’t have a newsroom. Even news organizations like CNET that have nice digs, have found Google Docs to be an immensely useful collaborative tool.

And if you’re not working collaboratively today, you’re not working smartly. I would strongly recommend Google Docs to all news organizations and journalists. I’d also strongly recommend all news organizations check out Basecamp and Zoho.

A note: Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera do a better job of handling these new drawing features.

Do branded communities really work? — According to Powered the answer is yes:

A new report from Powered, a social marketing company, has released its findings that support these claims. Conducted along with Next Century Media Global, the annual report shows that the return on investment for social marketing online delivers an average of $60 for every $1 invested. That’s a 10% increase from 2006.

That’s pretty impressive. It should be noted that this report only covers companies back by Powered. But it does underscore how social marketing can be cost effective and intelligent for companies. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Ning, etc are still free. It doeesn’t cost that much for a news org to dedicate one person to social media and social marketing.

Good social marketing isn’t as brazen as standard marketing. One could argue that our very own @MsBeat is in the social marketing business. No, she isn’t selling anything, and, yes, most of her tweets are links to other people’s interesting content.

But @MsBeat still serves the purpose of getting people to think about BeatBlogging.Org. Her main purpose is editorial, but in offering good content and answering questions, she is also an effective marketing tool. Journalists will increasingly be asked to think of themselves as more than just editorial.

Opera, now with geolocation — The iPhone has popularized geolocation by allowing applications to know where a user is. This is extremely helpful for an application like Yelp! The iPhone can tell which street you’re on, and narrow down Yelp! restaurant reviews to just that area.

Geolocation is becoming pretty standard on smartphones and is set to explode on the computers and other mobile devices too. Geolocation will allow people to automatically tag the location of a photo, for instance. Some social networks, like Brightkite, are based around the concept of geolocation.

As more people get smartphones and other devices that support geolocation, news organizations will need to develop platforms and services that take advantage of geolocation. This seemingly simple feature can add lots of functionality to existing content.