Which social media tools are most useful to journalists? October 16, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentDigital strategist Amy Webb in the Knight Foundation newsletter:
"… I challenge anyone to prove that the future of journalism won't somehow involve mobile technology. My company is currently researching a number of mobile tools that would use GPS and other location-based services to target information that can be used on the fly. Yes, it's great to know what crime is happening in my neighborhood or which local bar is renewing its liquor license. But what if I'm in someone else's neighborhood? What if there's a fire burning nearby? A bad traffic accident up the road?
[…] what if my mobile phone had an application that pinpointed exactly where I was on a map, and then delivered the most recent news on subjects that I preferenced? It would be a hyper-sensitive aggregator of everything that I cared about that could dynamically update and change, based on my location. This would be useful to journalists… news organizations …and to consumers who want to be more civically engaged."
Two delicious tools: improved search, and an online portfolio October 16, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Online, Personalised learning environments (PLE), Social networking , add a commentFirst, del.izzy, which addresses one limitation of the standard delicious search, enabling you to search all of the content of the pages you bookmarked. But they claim they need your password for this.
Second, a clever way of setting up an online portfolio on delicious. Michele Martin outlines how it works, using the optional tag description field to head the page with an introduction, and then tagging anything you wish to show up there.
A neat idea: not the most beautiful, but it works, and is easy to update. It has two other benefits, says Michele Martin:
- The del.icio.us feature that shows how many other people saved the item acts as a kind of “recommendation” system. […]
- If people sign up for the RSS feed to this tag, they can automatically be notified when I add new items to my portfolio.
And then of course there’s the RSS feed to do other things with, if you want to take it one step further and embed that somewhere, have it post automatically to a blog… etc
Why Journos Should Learn Yahoo Pipes – Poynter Online October 10, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentAmy Gahran offers a quick intro to Yahoo Pipes, having just created her first one:
"For any topic or event you might cover, all kinds of people will be posting all kinds of content about it in many places. Exploring such related content is useful not only to journalists who follow beats or stories, but also to their audiences and communities. The trick is to gather it all together into one place, and to filter it so that you only see what's truly relevant."