There's one large repercussion of online journalism on journalists themselves that hasn't really been disucessed in any great detail. Online news is becoming more and more about the individual reporter. They must maintain blogs and twitter updates and keep the website up to date with the latest news (which now has the most miniscule of turn around times). The stress on a person of maintaing all this is incredible.

But the main point I was to make is that, in a tradtional newsroom, it was very easy for a journalist to take holiday time and he/she would be covered by another staffer. This si not the case anymore, the highly demanding twitter followers and readers of their blogs will not wait for a journalist to rest for a week or two like they themselves would expect to be able to do. This new breed of news consumers are demanding and if a journalist neglects them, even for their own well-being, they will migrate.

I think too much is being expected of journalists today. Convergence is all well and good, but the benefit of convergence is that a journalist can report in the most appropriate medium, not report in all media, all the time. There will come a stage where media employers are just expecting far too much of their employees. A worker of any kind can only take so much, that time has not yet come, but it will!

Bebo was Ireland's first foray into the world of social networking on a truly global scale. The announcement by AOL that it's decided to cut its losses comes as no surprise though. The site has been haemorrhaging users in the last few years and never really secured a proper hold in the UK market.

Bebo will probably come to be seen as a development stage of social networking sites. One of the main reasons for its demise was probably the fact that it was not as instant as its main rival facebook. Disseminating news was laborious in that if you wanted to let you friends know something you either had to leave them a message on their page or message all friends. The latter option was usually seen as an annoyance to the receiver and is akin to the group messages recevied by most users on facebook now.

Bebo's framework was one of the first tries at social networking and facilitated that very well. Where Bebo failed was it did not see news dissemination becoming an important part social networking and even when it arrived Bebo failed to change accordingly.

The news that the BBC is telling its staff to embrace social networking sites in news gathering is the last sign that news sources are fundamentally changing. Peter Horrocks, director of Global news said: "If you don't like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn't right for me, then go and do something else, because it's going to happen. You're not going to be able to stop it."

If the BBC are to use social networking to improve their news output they must not just throw caution to the wind, It must be embraced with a certain level of intelligence and sobriety, if not caution. The old journalistic values must still be held firm by newsrooms. Facts must still be checked and verified, sources must be reliable. Twitter and facebook are reliable, but they also pose dangers with regards to news gathering. It is incredibly easy for romours, hearsay and conjecture.

It is undeniable that social networking will become an invaluable news source for newsrooms the world over, but the profession must not throw caution to the wind when embracing this relatively new phenomenon.