Tag Archives: Something for the weekend

Something for the weekend #3: email meets RSS (9cays)

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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:

  • You could carry out an email interview with a public figure – or a number of public figures – and allow people to subscribe directly to the correspondence.
  • Or you could display the feed on your news site.
  • You could aggregate a number of feeds from different conversations on the same topic
  • Likewise you could use it to display correspondence with readers by cc’ing the 9cays conversation email address in your replies (this would however, sign them up to future emails).
  • You could ask readers to cc the address in their correspondence with public figures (warning: issues around privacy and ethics here)
  • If you don’t have a comments RSS feed you could set up your CMS to forward comments to the 9cays address to create one.
  • Alternatively, you could set up your email account to filter comments from your blog and forward them to different 9cays addresses for different feeds (probably too much effort, but an idea nonetheless)
The fact that it’s email makes this particularly accessible for non-web-savvy readers, too. Your ideas?

Something for the weekend: Comiqs

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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?

Something for the weekend #1: Tag cloud generator

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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

(similar services available).

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.