Category Archives: Cool tools
Live-blogging from court – using CoveritLive – invites readers to interact with the news
Susan Spencer-Wendel (@SpenWen), courts reporter for The Palm Beach Post for more than a decade, has spent the past couple of years live-tweeting high-profile trials. (In 2009, she played a role in media-law history when, on her behalf, The Post … Continue reading
Filed under Community engagement, Cool tools, Online journalism, Social media
The future of social photography
This month, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, a gathering place to share information and ideas about web-development trends. I’ll recap information from SXSW in a series of blog posts and invite comments and brainstorming for … Continue reading
Filed under Cool tools, Social media
Gaming the news: Do ‘game mechanics’ have a place on news organizations’ websites?
This month, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, a gathering place to share information and ideas about web-development trends. I’ll recap information from SXSW in a series of blog posts and invite comments and brainstorming for … Continue reading
Filed under Cool tools, Online journalism
Bloggers’ Social Media Toolkit: Creating polls
Adding a poll to your blog post is an easy way to make it more interactive and appealing to readers. The Post’s editorial staff’s Opinion Zone blog and Andrew Abramson’s West Palm Beat regularly use PollDaddy, a free tool, to … Continue reading
Filed under Blogs, Cool tools, Social media
Social Media Toolkit: CoveritLive improves live chats, live blogging
Here’s a social media tool that’s not just for bloggers. There was a time not long ago that we used Twitter to send out constant, short bursts during ongoing news events. But while Twitter remains useful for many things, The … Continue reading
Filed under Cool tools, Social media, Twitter
Bloggers’ Social Media Toolkit: Handpicking a few tweets to display
Last week I wrote about using Twitter.com widgets, the first of a Bloggers’ Social Media Toolkit series. In that post, I explained how Twitter widgets stream a live feed of tweets into your blog post, according to your search terms. … Continue reading
Filed under Blogs, Cool tools, Social media, Twitter
Bloggers’ Social Media Toolkit: Twitter.com widgets
Twitter is like a digital version of the police scanners we have scattered around the newsroom: constantly chirping and sometimes with a lot of static, but sprinkled throughout with interesting and useful stuff. Bloggers, in particular, can take advantage of … Continue reading
Filed under Blogs, Cool tools, Social media, Twitter
Testing out Crowdmap for weather updates during Tropical Storm Nicole
Thanks to Post web producer Melissa “Showoff” Patterson, who first saw this free new crowdsourced map resource (and wrote a Lifehacker blog post about!), and a recent how-to blog post I saw linked from Twitter, I created our first Crowdmap … Continue reading
Filed under Cool tools
Using Google News’ archive search
As you probably already know, Google News has been uploading decades’ worth of newspapers’ microfilm archives and making them available for free (except in cases where the newspapers themselves charge to see the archives). For instance, let’s say you’re writing … Continue reading
Filed under Cool tools
