The 164-year-old AP has added 42 entries focused on social media terms. Among them are app, blogs, click-throughs, crowdsourcing, curate, e-reader, friend and unfriend, hashtag, metadata, RSS, search engine optimization, smart phone, trending, widget and wiki.

Mallory Jean Tenore, writing in Poynter Online, remarked that "AP Stylebook finally" actually became a trending topic in Twitter in April when the organization moved from "Web site" to "website."

Something those not conversant with professional journalism might keep in mind is that these changes are not an imprimatur, nor a statement of strategic engagement with social media on the part of AP (though they do have a Twitter account and solicited user feedback on what to include). This new section is a judgment on how to use relatively new elements of speech and aspects of content in a standardized fashion so that they will read across all publications and platforms.

It is, after all, as easy to misread journalism from a social media vantage point as it is to misinterpret the significance of social media from the standpoint of traditional media. This should go some ways toward translating two different ways of doing what amounts to the same thing an awful lot of the time.

Learn more about social media managment from experts -- check out the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It highlights the hottest issues in online community management (Download a free sample of the document here), and you get access to a password protected online aggregator that automatically serves up the most-talked about blog posts concerning community management each day -- a great resource for ongoing professional development.

Finally, this former journalist won't feel guilty for writing website instead of Web site.