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: Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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). Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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:
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?
This week’s Something for the Weekend is a little different, as it’s a tool for newsgathering rather than publishing. But what a tool.
iMacro is a plugin for Firefox, with paid versions for Internet Explorer or standalone use.
There’s a lot of corporate/technical jargon on the website (“create solutions for web automation”), because, like some of the best web tools (e.g. Twitter), this can be used for so many things it’s hard to describe in a single sentence. But here are some of the headlines: Continue reading
This week’s Something for the Weekend is email tool 9cays. At a basic level it’s a tool to help you improve group email conversations – like a mailing list with bells on. The service makes it easier to copy (cc) in people, and creates a permanent webpage so people can catch up on previous emails if they’ve just joined. But what makes 9cays interesting to me is that it also provides an RSS feed.
Having an RSS feed opens up a number of journalistic possibilities. Here are just some:
Last week I introduced the ‘Something for the weekend’ feature where I post a link to an online tool which has potential journalistic applications.
This week’s tool is Comiqs,
“a service that lets our users create and share their comic-style stories with the community. We aim to provide our users with easy to use tools that transforms their most cherished and most memorable photographs into something fun. We also aim to build to build a fun and light-hearted community where people can hang out to have a laugh or two.”
Now there’s a rich history of comic strips and graphics in newspapers. Satirical cartoons are an obvious application of this.
Could Comiqs introduce a user generated element to that too?
The site already has a News and Politics section, while ‘People and Personalities‘ also has potential for satirical content. But the other categories bear looking at too. Life story and How to and tutorials have clear magazine equivalents.
There’s a lot of crap as always with UGC, but categories like ‘top rated’, ‘most viewed/discussed’ etc. should help filter through.
The site could also act as a platform for a news site’s readers – give them an image to download and point them to Comiqs to create the caption.
Some obvious problems: no RSS feeds; no way of knowing what language something is in before you click or search.
But lots of potential. Any ideas?
This post marks the start of what I hope will become a regular feature for the Online Journalism Blog. Every Friday afternoon I will (try to) post a link to an online tool which has potential journalistic applications.
The thing is, I’m not assuming I’ll be the one to spot them.
I’ll write what I can see, what I think and what I’ve done – but for the most part, it’s over to you: if you find the tool intriguing or it solves some problem you have, I’d like you to share your thoughts.
Hence: ‘Something for the weekend’ – something to play around with on a slow Friday afternoon or Sunday night clickfest.
I’ve decided to start with a tool that I find fascinating, and ticks a lot of boxes for me, but whose application I can’t quite yet see. It’s a solution in search of a problem:
The Tag Cloud Generator will generate a tag cloud for any webpage based on links or just most-used words. The tags will link to Wikipedia or Delicious based on your choice. You can customise appearance and delete irrelevant tags.
Now I’m a big fan of tags – and I recommend anyone to read Everything is Miscellaneous to find out why. They allow you to see patterns and relationships that otherwise might not be apparent.
So. The first application I thought of for this – and actually the reason why I searched for it – was this:
I was writing an album review for a music magazine, and the particular artist has a set of cliches around him. I wanted to be able to put a bunch of reviews through a tag cloud generator to see the most frequent words.
I did it with one review and it kinda worked. To do it with more than one would have been a cut, paste, and upload job that I didn’t have time for – but really that’s what you need to do.
I then tried doing it with the Wikipedia entry for the Gulf War. Dates figure heavily. Places, people and things (e.g. submarines) too.
But that’s just two applications. I’m hoping you can come up with more ideas.