Today a tweet appeared on the Austin American-Statesman Twitter account that read:

Mention this tweet for Buy 1 Get 1 tix to area’s #1 haunted house - offer ends Sept 30. http://www.mansionofterror.com (Ad).

My immediate gut reaction was to recoil at the sight of advertisements on my newspaper’s twitter account. It’s journalism, dammit! The lines shouldn’t blur. But that’s also the idealistic part of me that doesn’t always realize news sometimes has to make money (not that it always does - rimshot!)

The Stateman’s advertising plan was laid out in this article. The ads have to be tailored and offer something — a specific discount — to the viewers. They can only be for food, drink, or local entertainment, and they’ll only run twice a day. I was most impressed that it had to be a service, hopefully so that followers will feel like their being offered an additional service instead of spammed.

The Statesman’s social media head, Robert Quigley, said these factors were very important to him when picking an ad.

“I really care about the Twitter community, and I know the community well. I won’t jeopardize that, and that’s why we are strictly limiting this to two tweets a day per account,” Quigley said.

Full disclosure: I know Rob and consider him a friend, and I can believe him when he says this stuff. I think that the Statesman has picked the best way they could to run this experiment.

That said, I’m not sure I would ever consider doing it on a news account. I feel that news accounts can deliver much more light-hearted feel on Twitter while still being informative, but you’re still providing a service and gaining your follower’s trust. I don’t want to feel like they are being mislead or being offered something they may not actually want. I even have problems retweeting things on my personal account if I feel it wouldn’t best serve my followers (or annoy them). And trust me, while I love my PR friends, this happens a lot. It’s up to each account owner to run their account as honestly as possible.

The Statesman has over 13,000 followers, and the Mansion of Terror paid $150 to reach them for Thursday. It’s not a bad deal, and from what Quigley says, he’s gotten a lot of questions, but mostly positive feedback.

“It has been mostly positive. People seem to understand that we’re a business and that we’re trying innovative things to remain strong,” he said.

I’ll be trying to get updated numbers on how well the ad worked from the Mansion of Terror, so stay tuned.

I finally had the chance to sit down with Fast Flip, the newest news reader creation by Google, and my feeling after 30 minutes of use was: why? But after another 30 minutes, it turned to: Ooooh, hey!

Google is trying valiantly to release software that will help the news industry, and I have to respect them for such a noble pursuit, but I can exactly understand how Fast Flip does that.

I started browsing on the general view, and ended up skipping over half the articles. That’s easy enough, but I don’t know how you’d keep people’s interest with that view. So I switched to just the view by publication, which was a lot cooler in theory, until I wanted to read more than two paragraphs of an article. I don’t mind being redirected, but why wouldn’t I just read the publication’s website? And if I’m using the mobile version, redirecting is a pain that I think would annoy some users (especially since Safari is one of the iPhone’s worst features).

Browsing by topic is again, nifty, and I suppose it offers me more of a preview of an article than Google news would, but what’s allure of not using Google News? I can hypothesize that you’ll get a wider variety of topics than Google News, which sometimes can narrow our worldview by only showing the top stories. It can also feature enterprise stories that magazine has worked on that will fly under the radar of top story aggregators.

It also has the ability to search on random topics. Some of my suggested topics included “Seattle”, “Japan”, “Beatles”, and “Politics”. It was kind of a different mix.

So overall, it’s mildly cool. The problem with tools like this is they need to be applied correctly in order to flourish. Hopefully Google will expand the number of publications using Fast Flip, and publications will figure out how to promote their Fast Flip presence, or better yet, figure out to make a similar technology for mobile apps of their own. That’d be swell.