Many handymen have a favorite wrench or drill they adore and always keep with them. Well, journo-geeks are no exception.
Below is a shortlist of more than 25 of my favorite (and mostly free) multimedia tools. I put together this list for a session on new media tools that I led Saturday at a multimedia workshop hosted by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors.
Hate my picks? Love em? I’d love to hear your favorites, so please share in the comments!
Here’s a peek at some of my personal favorites:
VIDEO
UStream.TV – http://www.ustream.tv
Streams live video from your laptop and camera and creates an embeddable player with chats.
Mogulus – http://www.mogulus.com
A live streaming service similar to Ustream.TV that allows you to have multiple producers at a time creating a live show.
Qik – http://qik.com
A service that allows you to easily stream live from many video-enabled cell phones. Hook up an external microphone or audio pool feed to it, and you’ll have reporters recording live video like a rock star.
SOCIAL NETWORKING/BOOKMARKING
Twitter – http://twitter.com
A constant conversation and a great place to build audience. Use Twitter Grader to find who are the top Twitterers in your area.
(I’m at twitter.com/dannysanchez)
Twhirl and Tweetdeck – http://www.twhirl.org http://www.tweetdeck.com
Desktop applications that let you manage Twitter much more easily (I prefer Twhirl).
Facebook and MySpace- http://www.facebook.com and http://www.myspace.com
Centers around personal details and friends. Features groups where you can share content.
Becoming a power user on some of these social bookmarking sites can bring big traffic to your content if it strikes a chord with your “friends” on these sites. These are just some of the top services:
Digg – http://digg.com/
StumbleUpon (Make sure to try the toolbar!) – http://www.stumbleupon.com/
Reddit – http://www.reddit.com/
NewsVine – http://www.newsvine.com/
Delicious (Try the Firefox plugin) – http://delicious.com/
Tailrank – http://tailrank.com/
TIMELINES/SLIDESHOWS
VuVox – http://www.vuvox.com
Creates stunning multimedia timelines that let you embed slideshows, video and more.
Dipity – http://www.dipity.com
An embeddable timeline app that is great for timelines with a lot of points and detail.
Soundslides – http://soundslides.com
A great and inexpensive tool for creating impressive audio slideshows.
PHOTO EDITING
Picnik – http://www.picnik.com
A free, simple web-based photo editor that is perfect for turning your whole newsroom into web producers without dropping $200 for Photoshop Elements. Has a nice Firefox plugin and syncs up to Flickr.
Pixlr – http://www.pixlr.com
A web-based photo editor that is extremely robust and similar to Photoshop.
Photoshop Express – https://www.photoshop.com/express
Provides many of Photoshop’s features in a free web-based editing tool.
More great image editors reviewed here: http://sixrevisions.com/tools/web-based-image-editors
Flickr – http://www.flickr.com
Not just a great place to share and promote your photo work, it’s also my top source for Creative Commons photos used on this blog.
WEB DESIGN
Firefox Web Developer Toolbar – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
Has a pixel ruler (how wide is that box?), element inspector, CSS editor and much more.
Firebug – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
A Firefox plugin that can pick apart a Web site and let you edit HTML/CSS on the fly to fiddle with a design. Try with Yslow.
FireFTP – http://fireftp.mozdev.org/
An easy and free FTP client that works right inside Firefox.
You have noticed all this stuff is for the Firefox web browser, right? Just making sure!
Notepad++ (For PCs) – http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net
A much better text editor for working with HTML/CSS and virtually any kind of code such as PHP, Python, Ruby and more. Adds colors to your code and features tabs and macros. I refuse to use crash-prone, resource-hoggin’ Dreamweaver to write any code!
OTHER
PollDaddy and MicroPoll – http://polldaddy.com and http://www.micropoll.com
Create embeddable polls for your site with no hassle.
(Plus: Shelley Acoca of the Miami Herald recommends Vizu for polls)
WordPress – http://wordpress.org
IMHO, the best blogging platform out there (used here on Journalistopia). It’s free and has thousands of great plugins built by a large network of developers.
Tableizer! – http://tableizer.journalistopia.com
Quickly turns spreadsheets into HTML tables you can put online. Built by yours truly!
Wordle – http://www.wordle.net
Create beautiful “tag clouds” out of a block of text.
Cover It Live – http://www.coveritlive.com
Provide liveblogging updates and host web chats with an embeddable widget. Lets multiple producers help with a chat.
Bloglines Beta and Google Reader – http://beta.bloglines.com and http://www.google.com/reader
Don’t hop from site to site. Use an RSS reader to bring the news to you. I’m a Bloglines Beta user, but Google Reader is also an excellent choice.
Audacity – http://audacity.sourceforge.net
A powerful, free audio-editing suite used by many multimedia producers.
Media-Convert – http://media-convert.com
Converts an enormous array of files. Perfect for mysterious video or audio formats.
Joomla and Drupal –
Two of the top free, open-source content-management sytems available to creators who want more than just a blog. Some major sites are using these tools. You can tweak them as much as you like, or use them right out of the box, depending on your needs.
(PLUS: Bill Mitchell of Poynter Online convinced me Saturday that a defined framework for making ethical decisions is as important a “tool” as any web app. Hence, I give you the Poynter Ethics Tool and Ethics Hotline, which is like having your personal, on-call anti-stupid-decision counselor.)
By Kyle Jameson December 15, 2008 - 10:51 pm
Thanks, Danny! These are great. I just bookmarked them all.
By Notes from a Teacher - Tuesday squibs December 17, 2008 - 2:35 am
[…] 25+ of Danny’s Favorite Multimedia Tools. Danny Sanchez has a solid list of multimedia/social reporting tools. If you are one of my students, you might as well go bookmark this now. […]
By links for 2008-12-17 « Reportr.net December 17, 2008 - 8:35 pm
[…] Journalistopia » 25+ of Danny’s Favorite Multimedia Tools | Danny Sanchez A great list of more than 25 of favorite (and mostly free) multimedia tools (tags: journalism multimedia blog tools reference video webdesign newmedia) No Comments Leave a Commenttrackback addressThere was an error with your comment, please try again. name (required)email (will not be published) (required)url […]
By Lauren December 22, 2008 - 1:19 am
http://www.xtimeline.com is another great multimedia timeline tool — you don’t even need to figure out how far to zoom to see the timeline. it’s all done for you.
By Shelley Acoca December 25, 2008 - 9:02 pm
Thanks for the props Danny. These are terrific. I’d also add Garageband for easy audio edits and podcasts. Happiest holidays.
By Journalistopia’s 25+ Multimedia Tools for 2008 « The University of Vermont J-Blog December 28, 2008 - 12:57 pm
[…] Journalistopia » 25+ of Danny’s Favorite Multimedia Tools | Danny Sanchez. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Grammar Girl!What you need to succeed in online journalismFailure is an option […]
By Arun December 29, 2008 - 5:02 am
You forgot SlideShare. You should definitely check it out if you haven’t.
By Chris Amico January 5, 2009 - 8:30 pm
One more addition (if I can pimp my own project a bit), a box to put them in: http://bit.ly/newstools
I’d love to add some of these here to the Tools for News database, or you can register and add them.
Great list, btw.
By 10 new media blogs I love | Chris Snider January 6, 2009 - 7:28 pm
[…] 25 of Danny’s favorite multimedia tools […]
By 10 Things Online Editors Should Know « Practicumpioneers’s Blog February 6, 2009 - 12:44 pm
[…] Experiment with some of the 25+ tools on this list and try using a few for an upcoming […]
By John February 21, 2010 - 2:45 am
Thanks, Danny! for the great list. Arun slideshare is cool too