Tag Archives: Something for the weekend

Twickie: easily blog responses to a Twitter question (Something for the Weekend #14)

6 Replies
Twickie

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. Continue reading →

Twitter/mobile bookmarking with Tagthis (Something for the Weekend #13)

Leave a reply

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. Continue reading →

What are your most useful online tools? (Something for the Weekend #12)

15 Replies

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?

Get webpages emailed to you (Something for the Weekend #11)

1 Reply

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 →

Something for the Weekend #9: create a Facebook app (and widgets) with Dapper

9 Replies

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 →

Something for the Weekend #8: the easiest blogging platform in the world: Posterous

11 Replies

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 →

Something for the weekend #7: sharing documents on Scribd

5 Replies

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 →

Something for the weekend #6: Mashups with Yahoo! Pipes

6 Replies
Pipes tutorialImage 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 →

Something for the Weekend #5: Who needs to know Flash? Vuvox

4 Replies

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?

Something for the Weekend #4: scraping the web with iMacro

5 Replies

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 →