A few things didn't exactly make it into this morning's Online Publishing Update*, but are worth reading anyway, so here goes:

Facebook: What's In It For Journalists? (Poynter.org):  Pat Walters wrote, “Since Facebook opened itself to the public last September, it has grown a lot. The Internet market research company comScore announced at the beginning of July that the site had grown to 26.6 million unique visitors in May 2007, an 89 percent jump from the 14 million unique visitors the site was drawing a year earlier.

“But despite the growth and the hype, Bill [Mitchell] and I wondered: What's in it for journalists? For journalism? And for news organizations, at large?”

What follows in Walters’ piece is the story of the first week of his Facebook experiment.

The Problem with Web Measurement, Part I (MediaShift):  Yes, there are two parts to this MediaShift post, largely because there are a lot of challenges, changes and confusion in the Web metrics arena these days. MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser posted the first part this week, detailing the ongoing audits of Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore methodology, the challenges for marketers, advertisers, and the cookie deletion phenomenon. Glaser also offers some very good resources to help demystify things.

Earlier this summer, executives from comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings both gave very interesting presentations to NAA members. Here are the links:

Nielsen//NetRatings presentation

comScore presentation

* The Online Publishing Update is a 3x/week e-mail newsletter with items of particular interest to newspaper/online media types. If you'd like to get it, join the Digital Media Federation.