Today the beta version of DC-based journalism startup NewsiT is launching its first major news assignment, and is seeking volunteers to sign up and help them prove that it is possible and viable to create ‘crowd-sourced’ news of quality and impact using community contributions. NewsiT is a mobile social network for people who want to create and share news that’s meaningful, trustworthy and riveting.

“NewsiT believes people want their news portable, personalized and participatory. Our mission is to ‘reinvent’ news content creation by engaging citizens as mobile reporters all collaborating via social networks to produce multimedia coverage of relevance, quality and value.”

Author, Speaker, and Twist Image President Mitch Joel, the so-called “Rock Star of Digital Marketing”, gave the keynote at Radian6′s Social Media 2011 Conference in Boston, MA. You can watch the full 50 minute Ustream keynote here, but below I have taken some notes from it that I found particularly interesting.

“I believe whats presently happening in business and social media and how people are connecting is fundamentally changing everything we know about business.”

We are regularly asked for assistance and advice on social media related topics, so when the opportunity presented itself to give back to our local business community, we jumped at the chance. In cooperation with the Severna Park Chamber of Commerce, we will be hosting several short, intense, small-class size seminars on Social Media geared toward small business owners and their employees.

Static asset bundling in Ruby on Rails is super easy with assemblage.

SSL is important when dealing with user data. The rails 3 router makes it easy to mark specific sections of your application secure using the :constraints option within a scope block.