In the first of a new weekly series, I’ll be sharing a collection of top news stories across the communications industry to keep you up to date at a glance. Of course, if you see any great news or stories throughout the week, feel free to email me with them (sc[at]glidetechnologies.com) and I’d be delighted to have a read.

In social media news, Twitter now plans to roll-out advertising on the channel to UK companies, following an established presence in the US. Brands can pay to have Tweets appear in users’ timelines and for their chosen topics to appear as trends. Meanwhile, Reuters this week reported that Facebook’s revenue for the first half of 2011 had doubled to $1.6 billion, although the revenue split between advertising and Facebook credits is unclear.

SEOmoz this week published a very comprehensive post on social media metrics and how to track KPIs, whilst Hubspot wrote about 5 ‘vanity’ metrics, which should not be measured, and offers some alternatives. On the subject of ‘vanity’ metrics… love ‘em or hate ‘em, Klout and PeerIndex continue to grow in popularity as they attempts to measure online ‘influence’, and this week the Ministry of Sound announced it is set to use the latter to help target a book launch.

Url shortening site bit.ly published a blog on the half-life of links, looking at how long people will pay attention to them, highlighting that Youtube links had a longer half-life than those on Twitter or Facebook.

Finally, Glide’s very own Alistair began a five-part blog series this week on the future of the corporate newsroom. You can read the first two parts here and here.