In-Class Links

This is a list of links I’ve been compiling over the years. It is continually updated. Credit goes to a number of sources, including Amy Webb of Webbmedia Group and Katy Culver of University of Wisconsin-Madison and so many others.

COOL STUFF

• Live Blogging: Newsrooms love CoverItLive to live blog events or discussions with readers.
• Online Guestbooks: This allows people to share memories or document their presence during tragedy. A great service to help build community.
• Games
• Learning in New Formats
• Earning Badges:
• i-Report: CNN’s sharing site.
• i-Report in Second Life
• Pew Report: This is where I get all my cool stats.
• The article is breaking up
• Is Twitter text or speech?
• What I learned in Joplin
• Washington Post’s Social Media Rules
• Madison.com Interactives
• NYT Graphic

Organizing and Storage Tools

• Ping: Allows you to update your various social media status from one app.
• DropBox: Great place to put documents etc that you’d like to share with people. Also a good way to backup your stuff on the cloud. Course you have to remember to actually upload the file.
• SugarSync: Like DropBox, this allows you to upload files to the cloud. You can share them too. You do have to pay to upgrade.
• Evernote: Kind of like Delicious but on a much grander scale. Allows you to capture actual web pages, video, everything and stores it both locally and on the cloud; has apps that help you organize. Quite nifty.
• Delicious: Allows you to capture links and organize them like a clipping file
• Selective Tweets: Updates your Facebook with only the Tweets you choose

Reporting Online (Finding Information, Networking)

• Helioid.com: Search engine that does data visualization around the keyword. In beta.
• Greplin.com allows you to go back in time and and find that URL you wanted to write down but never did. Let’s you search all of your own files in DropBox. It is a personalized search engine basically.
• Quora: Crowd-sourced questions and answers.
• Viewdle: A social camera (for Android; in beta); Imagine being in a crowded meeting and being able to identify that source speaking by pointing your phone camera at them and having your phone tell you who they are.
• Emotional Surveying! Check out what the Guardian has been doing with gauging emotional environment for people.
• Precognition reporting (in other words: what’s the future?): Terminator Vision app (created during a hackathon) and Recorded Future to keep you up on future trends etc. Cool, cool stuff.
• Social proximity networks: These sites go beyond Foursquare and gowalla to target very specific social circles — Shortlist (conference networking; in beta), Sonar (uses Foursquare to identify who is next to you), Street Spark, and Nerd Nearby.

Multimedia Concepts, Programs, Examples

• Storyboarding:Everything you wanted to know about storyboarding from the Knight Digital Media Center.
• Hungry: Maisie Crow, Independent: A wonderful example of a multimedia slideshow, with a bit of video thrown in. Great storytelling, fabulous imagery and wonderful use of sound. For more information about the piece, check out what Crow said on this site.
• PhotoSynth: From Microsoft, this program uses your photos and creates a 3D image from them.
• Denise McGill’s Autism Photos (EXAMPLE): This is work by a freelance photographer.
• Rule of Thirds: An instructional video from Metacafe. Useful and short.
• Resolution: A fun graphic about pixels.
• 9/11 Memorial Photo (EXAMPLES): This a collection of photos from the New York Times from the 9/11 anniversary. Great work with framing, aesthetics, and crowd focusing!
• Home Delivery: A great idea for a slideshow by Roanoke.com.
• Dying days of cockfighting in America: A Washington Post slideshow. Wonderful audio in there! I do wonder what people think about the particular pairings of the photos with the audio though: does it work?
• Windshields: This is just an Amazon link to what a windshield looks like and costs. Cheap and sooooo worth it! You can get them in different sizes, for a lav or whatever you happen to have!
• Audacity tutorial: From the Knight Digital Media Center
• Soundslides tutorial: From the Knight Digital Media Center
• Troubleshooting Wiki for Audacity, iMovie, SoundSlides
• JQuery: EASY timeline!! 
• Automatic Video Editing with Magisto

New Interactive Platforms, Tools

• Mobile LIVE video streaming: Definitely something to think about when you are thinking about covering an event!
• Tablets and iPads: As an up and coming platform for news publishing, we must consider how content will play on mobile devices like the iPad.
• Tumblr: A blogging platform that is more conducive to crowdsourcing and conversation. Becoming more popular among journalists.
• Jaiku: A Twitter-like platform that allows you to have a single thread of conversation
• Storyful: Aggregates curated material for news organizations and others from throughout the social-media sphere.
• Augmented Reality is coming!
• Linking: Wonderful blog post by Jeff Jarvis (and the many commenters) about the value of linking.
• The neutral tweet debate: How can a journalist retweet without it seeming as if he or she endorses the content in the original tweet?
• New York Times Developer
• Congress Speaks: A feature using NYT Developer data
• Tweecious: A Firefox add-on that will aggregate your twitter feed for you into your delicious account
• Yahoo Pipes: Basically a powerful search engine that crawls the web and captures specific content and then lets you aggregate it and work with it, mashing it up.
• Twitter trending topics. These are good to follow so you can keep up with certain aspects of your beat, find sources and utilize crowdsourcing techniques.
• Google hot trends. These are good to follow so you can keep up with certain aspects of your beat, find sources and utilize crowdsourcing techniques. They also come in handy when you think about headers, keywords and tagging.
• Google Fusion Tables: These are great for any kind of data visualization. This link brings you to a slideshow about how to do the tables. Here are Fusion tutorials.  Mapping the Storm Clean-up uses Fusion tables to crowd-source a NY snowstorm (via texts). Here is another good tutorial.
• Flickr Clock: Just a new way of thinking about organizing content.
• Data Visualization via Computers: Check out what Radiohead did with their video for House of Cards. In Google Code, you can start thinking about your own kind of data visualization.
• MediaCloud is a way to track news as it filters through the blogosphere. You can see what topics are trending. Here is the video I showed in class as well.
• Dipity: Dipity is an online (free!) timeline tool.
• VuVox: This is a strange little program that people love because it allows you to play out a story with text, photos and video embedded. It’s also super easy to use, if somewhat buggy.
• Storify: A curating tool, which is a way to aggregate tweets on a specific topic and a new kind of storytelling.
• Jing: Jing is a free program that lets you capture and record what is happening on your own monitor. It’s a great way to explain a complex image using your pointer and a voice-over, for example.
• Google Circles and Journalists
• Facebook and Journalism
•  EXAMPLE: Covering the Riots
• CLASS EXAMPLE: State Street Redevelopment Plan
• EXAMPLE: Damage in Haiti (Wall Street Journal, 2010)
• EXAMPLE: What happened: Death of Jean Charles de Menezes  (BBC, 2007)
• EXAMPLE: Scenes from a Ruined Boulevard (NYT, 2010)
• EXAMPLE: Sarah Karon’s Vuvox project

Finding, Building Audiences Online

• Building Audiences
• Search Engine Optimization article: To learn more about SEO, check out this longish-but-free beginner’s guide to SEO
• Keyword help: Google Adwords (free), WordTracker (paid), and Keyword Discovery (paid).
• To find a place for your long reads: Check out Byliner and Longreads.

Detecting BS Online

• RegretThe Error
• How Long Have You Been Tweeting? Check how long the twitter account has been around.
• Klout: Everyone who has been active in social media has garnered a “score” of 1-100. The higher the score, the more active and influential they are.
• Identify (Firefox) and HoverMe (Chrome): A way to identify someone online; shows you their combined social-media profile.
• Exif: data embedded on photos. Accessing the data via any number of programs can show you, among other things, date and time the photo was taken.
• Image Error Level Analysis: This helps you determine if an image has been manipulated.
• WhoisNet: Allows you to look up the history of a domain name.
• PRChecker: Check’s Google’s page ranking of any site.