Following Malcolm Coles’ piece on how the Guardian, Times and FT are winning on Twitter, Sothisischristmas graphed the results:

PHP Freelancer

I discovered Google’s Fusionchart by accident.

One of our scientists, who left the company to form his own agrochemical patent-tracking subscription news using Blogspot, used this free javascript-based software to illustrate this rather turgid subject matter. I borrowed his idea and used Fusionchart to illustrate a life science story on Neogen, a diagnostics company.

Life science reporting, like technology reporting, employs unnecessary amount of jargons and uninspiring polysyllabic words, often in passive sentences. This is largely down to bad subbing, bad editing (alas, not many can retell the story of science as well as former Nature editor Pete Wrobel) – and bad story-telling skills.

So often, it is down to the web editors to make the content more palatable to the laymen, although we know more about technology than science.

Like the Yahoo! Finance badge, you can easily create your own charts or tables using Fusionchart. Step 1: Create whatever charts you want. Step 2: Generate the codes. Step 3: Imbed the codes in your web page.

Do save the codes in a separate document. Fushionchart does not automatically save any charts you create. If you refresh the Fusionchart page, your chart will disappear for good.

If you have a flair for javascript, and don’t mind tweaking the codes to customise the animation, you can download some of the free apps from the Fusionchart website. Eevn better, you can upgrade by buying some of its products.

A word of caution.

If, however, you are using a content management system, you must generate a page in “raw html”. Meaning that the page is NOT preformatted. If you have a programmer, ask him or her how to do this.

If you’re stuck with a Blogspot or the free version of WordPress cms, I am afraid you can’t imbed the codes in your page. You’d have more success imbedding the codes in a flat html page. The Fusionchart you see in this blog is a GIF photo. You have to see how it works here.

PHP Freelancer

My iPhone’s gmail is full of messages today.

PHP Freelancer

I hope the ‘lively debate’ is over by now.

PHP Freelancer

Currently, there is a debate going on the NUJ Newmedia email forum. I got inspired to do this Wordle chart. How do I make the word ‘Effing’ big’?

PHP Freelancer

After years writing for both print and web, I decided to express myself in a different way. I’ve done photojournalism for some time now, but I need another form of expression to convey humour in my narration. Photography is cool, but much too refined for lampoons (feel free to disagree with me). Paul pointed me to a few websites on infographics, and I thought: wow, this is cool.

I use Graphjam to teach myself, and the business writers, how to create charts to illustrate business stories. Prof Randy Pausch, that great 3D imaging engineer, said that if you want to teach someone a very difficult computer concept, use a ‘head fake’. Tell him to build a game, not a programming language, and the whole learning process will be a lot easier.

PHP Freelancer

Two stories from TechCrunch this week highlight how the internet has the potential to bring the dryest subject matter to life.

First off, AOL’s integration of financial news from Relegence, a company they acquired last year. The result, says TechCrunch, is

“a deep browsing engine for news related to the company you are viewing. Blogs, analyst reports, press releases, etc. can be added or removed to filter results. And users can also choose to have news included that merely mentions the company v. articles that really focus on that particular business, [while] Historical stock data, which goes back as far as 25 years, is on display via Flash graphs [that] can be easily manipulated to see different time frames. Other companies and indexes can be added to the chart for comparison purposes.”

The second story, while not about financial journalism per se, gives an indication of the oft-heralded but equally overlooked potential of games for journalism, as it reports on the eToro money trading service:

“There are four games to choose from:

• Forex Marathon – You pick the currency you think will go up and have it compete in a foot race against the currencies you think will go down.
• Dollar Trend – Race the US Dollar against other currencies, choosing whether it will rise or fall.
• Globe Trader – Manage your Forex trading portfolio by forging relations with other currencies on the map of the world.
• Forex Match – Choose the currency you think will go up and have it go one-on-one in a tug of rope against a currency you think will go down.
  

Rupert Murdoch take note: the Wall Street Journal may have to do more than go free to compete.

PHP Freelancer