Online Journalism Blog

Following on from the previous Something for the Weekend, Twickie, which allows you to collect responses to a question posted on Twitter, this tool allows you to present a conversation – with impressive control. 

QuoteURL allows you to drag and drop (or copy and paste) Twitter tweet URLs to reconstruct a conversation. [Read more]

Twickie

This week’s Something for the Weekend tool review continues the Twitter theme with a simple tool which helps bridge the Twitter-blog divide.

If you’ve ever posted a question on Twitter and followed it up with a blog post discussing the responses, you’ll have probably been frustrated by the inability to present those responses in the blog post – you either have to link to each one, or copy and paste them from Twitter Search (which means ugly table-based HTML and irrelevant messages, newest-first).

Twickie is a cute solution to that problem. You log on with your Twitter username and password, browse through your recent tweets to find the question you posted, and click on ‘Get @s‘ to see the replies ordered oldest- or newest-first. [Read more]

It’s been a while since I did a Something for the Weekend tool review, but Twitter bookmarking service TagThis is such a great tool it needed covering.

TagThis allows you to bookmark any URL you see on Twitter to your own account on Delicious or Magnolia. This is particularly useful if, like me, you use Twitter on a mobile phone or iPod, and often see useful links on Twitter that you’d like to come back to later or ‘file’ for reference. [Read more]

I’ve looked at a number of tools in this series, often very new with potential applications for journalism that haven’t been realised. This time I want to turn the spotlight onto tools that you’re using every day, which may not be flashy, but which do a simple job very well – for example:

• in managing or filtering information,
• identifying leads, ideas and contacts,
• producing news itself,
• distributing it,
• or allowing users to get involved.

What have been the most useful online tools you’ve used?

There are a number of services that allow you to receive web pages by e-mail. These include Web2Mail; PageGetter.com; and WebToMail

All you do is send an email to the address used by the service with the URL of the web page you want in the subject line. After a few minutes (they say) you receive the web page in HTML format in your email.

How is this useful? I can think of a number of ways: [Read more]

Every week I come across some web-based service that makes it possible to do in a few clicks what a year ago would have required anything from a day of fiddling to months of developer time. Today’s tool is one of a number offered by Dapper, a company which aims to “make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website.” The tool is the Facebook Appmaker. [Read more]

Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom Wordpress or Blogger are still too fiddly.

Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool – as well as a great tool for blogging on the move. [Read more]

This weekend’s plaything is Scribd, a document sharing website. If you have a PDF, Word doc, spreadsheet, powerpoint, image or open office doc – for example, annual reports, raw material, etc. – this is a good place to put it to make it both interactive and conversational.

A quick look at the tag cloud reveals some useful sources too, including the environmental protection agency, NASA, food and drug agency and so on (it is currently, as you’d expect, very US dominated). [Read more]

Image by Sid05 via Flickr

This weekend’s tool-to-play-with is Yahoo! Pipes. Chances are you’ve heard of Yahoo! Pipes (it’s been around for over a year and I’ve blogged about it before) but if you’ve not played with it yet, now is the time to have a go.

Pipes is essentially a mashup tool, particularly useful for doing things with RSS feeds. And at its basic levels it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming language. [Read more]

Vuvox is to Flash what Wordpress is to Dreamweaver. Vuvox is, effectively, a content management system for multimedia content – an easy way to create Flash interactives without having to know Flash.

I first explored it a few months ago, but still haven’t had the time to really see what it can do. But here’s some things:

• Photo gallery
• Image slideshows with hyperlinks
• Panoramas
• Audio slideshows – simply upload the audio and the images and it does the rest. These already have a tradition in online news, with Soundslides becoming something of an industry-standard tool.
• Interactive image maps (click on the speech bubbles)
• Integrated video galleries (or links to embedded media)

Vuvox also works with RSS feeds, Flickr, Buzznet and Picasa, so you can create dynamically updated content.

One problem: the resulting movie is hosted by Vuvox  (although you can embed it). If you want to get the movie to host yourself you’ll have to use an .swf ripper, which is probably breaking the terms and conditions of Vuvox.

Anyway, over to you – what uses can you think of?