Static folders structure in Django 1.4?
STATIC_ROOT is just a file path where the staticfiles contrib app will collect and deposit all static files. It is a location to collect items, that's all. The key thing is that this location is temporary storage and is used mainly when packaging your app for deployment.
The staticfiles app searches for items to collect from any directory called static in any apps that are listed in INSTALLED_APPS and in addition any extra file path locations listed in STATICFILES_DIRS.
For my projects I create a deploy directory in which I create a www folder that I use for static files, and various other files used only when deploying.  This directory is at the top level of the project.
You can point the variable to any location to which your user has write permissions, it doesn't need to be in the project directory.
This is the new project structure (from the Django 1.4 release notes).

myproject
|-- manage.py
|-- myproject
|   |-- __init__.py
|   |-- settings.py
|   |-- urls.py
|   `-- wsgi.py
`-- polls
    |-- __init__.py
    |-- models.py
    |-- tests.py
    `-- views.py

What I am not sure about is whether I should point STATIC_ROOT to
myproject/myproject/static/ (together with settings.py, urls.py...)
OR
The top-level directory myproject/static (next to myproject, myapp1, myapp2)?