So you have a small news site, but no technical resources to do all the exciting web 2.0 stuff? Here are five great tools any news site can use to add interactivity to your content. And I promise: No programming required!
Opportunities are endless in modern journalism. If you have the resources, that is. Take The New York Times, for instance, with 13 full-time staffers in the R & D Lab alone. Then it should be no problem adding all kinds of features, should it?
That may be so. However, today there are numerous tools which help web masters add exciting functionalities. And many of the don’t even require a single line of code. All you need to learn is to “embed”. It is so simple that any journalist can do it (and that means simple, folks!)
I have mentioned a couple of these before. But here are five tools which can give you great results with small resources.
1. UMapper: Make interesting and engaging maps
Maps are engaging and visually attractive. But how to make them? There are numerous tools for this, some of them mentioned in this blog post from 10.000 Words (a blog I recommend). In my opinion UMapper is one of the best of these services. You can make maps very simply, yet they give meaningful information. Spend a couple of hours and you have a map with great journalistic potential. After you are done you just embed it into your article page.
Please note the GeoGame option, in which you can make a geography trivia game in a very short time. You may for instance check out the game I made for my other site, Asia Observer (find it on the bottom of the front page). This one took less than one hour to make.
Geography quizes like this can prove very popular, and it is very easy to make your own local version. Also note the top score option, which allows you to run competitions.
Here is an example of how a geography quiz made by this tool might look:
2. Twitter – embed a search feed
Twitter is a great tool for journalism, and I have earlier described four different ways of using Twitter for news rooms.
Recently Twitter added some simple, but great, widgets to its service. For instance you will see my own Twitter feed in the right column of all pages of BetaTales using this widget.
When big news break Twitter users will often gather around a specific hashtag. The result is a Twitter feed with a lot of activity. Often it might be useful to include this Twitter feed in your articles. And it is actually very simple to do. Just go to Twitter’s widget page and follow the instructions for a search widget. In a few minutes you will have a real-time Twitter feed included on your site, aggregating all the public engagement around your topic as a useful and engaging supplement to your own editorial content. In some cases you may want to ask your readers to use a specific hashtag.
3. Flickr – for including photos from users
For user photos and videos you can either have them uploaded directly to your own site or use external services like Flickr.com and Youtube.com.
Having readers upload to your own site usually takes a lot of work on your part, either because you have to develop the functionalities to do so or because you need to manually go through hundreds of mails with photo attachments. A much easier way is to use external sites and then embed it into your own site.
I love the photo sharing service Flickr. It is extremely easy to upload and share photos. And once you and others have shared them, it is quick to embed the results into a normal news page.
For a small news site the easiest is to start your own group on Flickr. Then invite users to contribute to the photo group. Flickr allows you to set your own conditions for joining the group, such as giving you the right to republish any photos that are posted there.
Photos from the group can then be republished on your own site, for instance as a slideshow. Flickr even has some great tools for doing this. Check the bottom of this page on my site Asia Observer for an example. Alternatively you can pick the best photos manually and then publish them in an article on your site. Either way you get away with all the technical trouble with setting up a system of photo uploads and instead let Flickr worry about this.
You can do exactly the same with Youtube and many other sites.
4. IntenseDebate – for a more attractive commenting
Don’t you even have a way users can comment on the great article you write? Don’t worry – there are solutions. One of them is Intense Debate – a ready-made system for article commenting and the one we use here on BetaTales. Intense Debate gives you a lot of functionalities out of the box, such as comment-threading and tools for moderation, and it is very easy to install.
A similar and much used product, which I have no experience with myself, is Disqus.
So you realize you must have some video on your site, but have no idea where to start? Check out Qik.com. It is a video service connected to your mobile phone. Once you have it installed on your mobile, videos can be streamed live on the web and you can easily embed them into an article, like what I have done in the example below.
Qik works best with short videos or for live streaming. Install it on your reporters’ mobile phones and they are ready to stream live video from any news event in just a few seconds. It doesn’t get much easier.
I could have mentioned many other tools – and will later. In the meantime: Why don’t you share the tools you use yourself on your site? What are your best suggestions for simple tools to add interactivity on small sites without needing to ask programmers for help?
Please share!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Rather than, or perhaps in addition to, Qik, I would recommend getting a Flip-style HD video camera and using YouTube or Google Video for hosting video. It allows fast-and-nasty video to be uploaded easily using the USB connector while still allowing for higher resolution and tripod use (_very_ important for non-motion-sickness-inducing video) when warranted.
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Does the Flip style provide instant viewing (one-second delay)??
thanx
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To the best of my knowledge, it does not. (Full disclosure: I don’t actually own one of these. I have asked Cisco–which now owns Flip’s manufacturer–for a review product to test. We’ll see if they can spare one.) And that’s one big advantage of Qik (or a broadcast setup) over a Flip (or a regular video camera), you can stream live action.
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