Screencastle puts software-free screen recording in your browser — Screencasts can be a great teaching tool, and many newsrooms have begun creating internal screencasts to help teach employees about Web and new media technologies.

The one problem with screencasts is that there is a barrier to entry for producing them. The software costs money (usually at least $79), and screencasts aren’t that intuitive to create. They require editing and knowledge of video codecs.

Screencastle is Web-based, free and easier to get started with. For journalists and news orgs that want to get their feet wet with some simple screencasts, Screencastle is a good option. There is no editing or fussing with video codecs; it’s pretty bare bones.

Since it is free with no software to install, there is very little risk with Screencastle. If you like the results, great, you can keep on making screencasts or even upgrade to a more expensive software-based system. Or, if things don’t go well, you won’t have lost much by going with Screencastle.

Facebook: From 100 to 200 Million Users in 8 Months — If you’re not on Facebook, what would you say you’re doing? I would at least see what all the fuss is about. Facebook has been a good tool for beatbloggers, especially education beatbloggers. Don’t let a good tool pass you by.

It’s a safe bet that Facebook’s growth will continue. We should see at least 300 million users this year, if not 400 million:

Facebook hit its 100 million user milestone back in August 2008. Can you believe it went from 100 million to 200 million in less than 8 months? When you have hundreds of thousands of users, 100 percent growth in such a short period is impressive. But when you have a hundred million users, it’s nothing short of amazing.

TweetDeck Plugs Memory Leak; Launches Facebook Integration for All — This is a big update and makes TweetDeck even better. First, for those of you who don’t know what a memory leak, it’s when software consumers ever more memory over time due to a flaw in its programming. This causes your computer to get gradually slower, until it is often almost unusable.

The memory leak has been fixed (or so they tell us), and that’s big news. If you weren’t running a new machine with a lot of ram, TweetDeck could really slow things down. I can report that I have yet to see memory issues with TweetDeck. This means that TweetDeck is safe to keep open for long periods of time. This makes the software a lot more usable, as TweetDeck is a great listening device.

The Facebook integration is also very welcome. Now you can send updates to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time. You can also monitor your Facebook friends’ status updates. If you’re a journalist that uses both social networks for work, TweetDeck is certainly worth a long look.