I noticed Twitter’s new Blackbird Pie feature today for the first time.

Have you ever come across a great tweet and wanted to share it with your blog readers? I have. And until today I had to take a screengrab of said tweet to post to my blog.

Not anymore. Twitters Blackbird Pie allows me to embed someone’s tweet, with all of the links intact.

I see a few good uses for media companies related to this:

• In sports coverage, if you want to show what athletes on your beat are tweeting about.
• If you cover a concert or event, and you want to show what others who attended were saying.
• In breaking news situations, you can show what others (especially eye witnesses) are sharing about the news.

Here’s what the embedded tweets look like:

The Sunday paper is still a money-maker. With all those circulars and real estate ads, it’s clear why newspapers are putting most of their promotional efforts into increasing circulation of the Sunday product.

More and more, papers are now using their web sites to promote the Sunday print product. Some (see the Indianapolis Star image above) are going so far as to withhold stories from the online edition of the paper in an effort to get people to go buy a copy of the Sunday paper.

I’m not a fan of withholding information from digital readers for a few reasons: (1) Not all of our readers live in an area where they can go buy a copy of the paper. (2) You lose the ability for your content to go viral. (3) You give someone else the opportunity to own discussion around that topic online. (4) You lose out on online ad revenue by having less content online.

But I do think there is merit in better digital promotion of the Sunday paper. So I’ve created a worksheet/checklist to help you better promote your Sunday products to your digital readers. The worksheet is intended to help you promote your best Sunday work during the week (Friday) and again on Sunday. I hope you find it to have value.

You may also like:

• Online breaking news checklist.
• Covering breaking weather news online.

I sat in on a Poynter webinar on multimedia tools for journalists – from point-and-shoot cameras to $21,000 3-D video cameras.

While I don’t see the Des Moines Register springing for the 3-D camera anytime soon, I did find some equipment that would suit us just fine. Here’s a list of the items that caught my eye:

I’m honored to once again be teaching journalists about new media tools on Feb. 13 at Drake University.

I’m even more excited about who will be joining me for the workshop. Nathan Wright will be teaching and answering your questions about how journalists can use social media. And Pete Jones will talk about how he built a strong following for his blog, desmoinesisnotboring.com.

If you attend, I promise you’ll learn these things:

• How to create your own blog.
• How twitter, facebook and linkedin can make you a better journalist (or to find a job).
• 20+ tools to make you a more efficient journalist.
• Hands-on with using RSS feeds.
• Hands-on with live chats using CoverItLive.
• How to find and edit photos for your blog.
• How to broadcast live video from your computer.

Cost is $100. To register: Contact Shari Tenney in the Drake School of Journalism and Mass communication, shari.tenney@drake.edu or 271-3194.

For more information: Contact Patricia Prijatel, E.T. Meredith Distinguished Professor Emeritus, patricia.prijatel@drake.edu

More info about the workshop here.

1. This tweet from @TracyGardner pretty much sums up what I’ve been trying to teach my Online Entrepreneurial Journalism class this semester as they try to find their niche in the digital media world.

2. Chris Brogan shares his advice for businesses getting started on social media. Read more about what he’s saying here.

Chris Brogan Shares Social Media Tips from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

3. If your blog needs a redesign (I’m starting to think that mine does), here are some great WordPress themes via Smashing Magazine.

4. Like new tools but hate spending money? Check out these free alternatives to some common multimedia tools.

It’s difficult to remember every possible tool you can use when news breaks, which is why we have a breaking new checklist to follow at DesMoinesRegister.com.

We don’t do everything on the list in every situation, but it’s a good reminder of the many tools that are available, both to promote the news and to enhance the reader experience around the news.

Here’s a list to help you start your own breaking news checklist Download as PDF.:

Promote the news

• Post to Twitter (and have staffers post to their Twitter accounts)
• Post to Facebook
• Send breaking news text alert
• Send breaking news e-mail alert
• Send a message to MySpace friends
• Create a widget so others can add news to their site
• Buy keywords on Google/Yahoo/Facebook
• Send to Drudge, Reddit, Digg, Fark
• Send info to bloggers/sites who cover that topic
• Post info in forums related to that topic
• Put together a print promotion plan

Tools to use on your site

• Use an alternative home page design
• Create a poll
• Start a breaking news blog
• Should any of your staff bloggers promote on their blog?
• Are there community members who can blog about this topic?
• Link to blogs outside your site
• Start a discussion forum
• Ask readers to submit photos
• Create a live chat
• Create a hastag for Twitter/Flickr/etc.
• Ask readers for YouTube videos
• Ask readers what questions they have/what info they know
• Add a Google locator map
• Create a Google map that allows readers to add content
• Create a searchable database
• Q&A with reporter or editor or source
• Ask Twitter followers for feedback or help
• Add links to more coverage elsewhere on the web
• Create a site that captures social media conversation on the topic
• Aggregate content from other sites onto our site
• Create an RSS feed for continuing content
• Allow readers to subscribe to that RSS via e-mail
• Post large photos online (in a blog or story)
• Offer print pages for sale
• Highlight the best comments from readers

Don’t forget

• Take screengrabs
• Alert advertising department so they can sell ads around the news/content

Download this list as a PDF document.

What other tools should be on this list? Please share them in the comments area.

Photo credit: hyperscholar on Flickr

Have you been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for someone to grab your hand and pull you into the new digital world of journalism? Well, wait no more. Here are 15 ways you can jump in right now.

1. Read Chris Brogan’s blog.

2. Read this one post by Rob Curley.

3. Read Mashable. You don’t have to read every post, but skim the headlines and see if anything catches your eye.

4. Stop talking about why you’re not going to join Twitter. And join Twitter.

5. Go to WordPress or Blogger and start a blog. About anything – your family, your love of puppies, how much you hate blogs (just make sure you are passionate about the topic).

6. Start using an RSS reader. Here are feeds from Chris Brogan, Rob Curley and Mashable to get you started.

7. Start clicking around the SND toolkit page. Any of those seem useful?

8. Buy a URL (try GoDaddy or FatCow). Use the free sitebuilding tools to get your site up and running. Or better yet, use a program such as Dreamweaver or iWeb to create your site.

9. Start doing these tutorials.

10. Shoot a movie with your digital camera, edit it in whatever free movie editing program came with your computer (iMovie or Movie Maker, perhaps), and post to YouTube.

11. Go through this HTML tutorial.

12. Start following these new media blogs:

• Old Media New Tricks
• BeatBlogging
• Poynter E-media tidbits
• Journalistopia
• OJR

13. Set up a Google alert so that you are e-mailed anytime someone posts your name (or your companys name) online.

14. Create a Google map of everywhere you ever lived (click on “My Maps” and “Create new map.”)

15. Create a delicious account and start saving interesting stories you find online. Start following other feeds as well. (Here’s mine.)

Photo by the_tahoe_guy on Flickr.

I tuned into my first journchat last Monday night in-between helping my Drake students with their final web projects – and I was impressed for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I love the concept: “The mission of #journchat is to keep an ongoing, open dialogue between journalists, bloggers and public relations professionals.”

If anything, it might even be a little too broad. I’d love to have a similar chat for journalists to talk about how we can use social media tools in our everyday jobs.

I also enjoyed the format of hosting a chat on Twitter. I never really considered Twitter a great live chat tool until I saw what you can do using Twitter and Tweetgrid (just type in #journchat on Tweetgrid to see what I mean). You can follow multiple conversations and monitor multiple keywords at a time.

See what #journchat is all about 7-10 p.m (central time) tonight.

Follow @journchat or @PRsarahevans on Twitter for more information.

We can’t add more hours to the day, but we can work more efficiently. Here are some tools that could help reporters be more productive.

1. Google Reader
Don’t waste your time going to dozens (or hundreds) of web sites every day. Use the RSS feeds from those sites and just check one web site for all the latest information.

2. Google alerts
Want to know anytime someone posts a video, news story or blog about your beat? Sign up for Google Alerts or Yahoo Alerts and you’ll get an email with all the latest info.

3. Jott
Need to send a quick note to yourself from the road? Call Jott. Speak your message. And Jott will email you the text of what you said. (You get unlimited 15-second calls for free).

4. Mezzoman
Need to meet a source somewhere between your location and their location? Mezzoman suggests a halfway point.

5. Wikirage
Shows the pages on Wikipedia that are receiving the most edits over various periods in time – which roughly translates to what’s popular in that given timespan.

6. Google trends
Similar to Wikirage, this shows topics that are suddenly being searched an unusual amount of times on Google.

7. Alerts.com
Do you forget things, like meetings? Or birthdays? Get a text alert to remind you. Or set up a wake-up call. Or just check out all of their alert options.

8. Simplynoise.com
Does it get loud in your newsroom? A little white noise will drain that out.

9. iGoogle or Pageflakes
Create a custom home page and get all the info you need in one place (photos, weather, news, twitter, e-mail, calendar, facebook, music).

10. Technorati
Find out what the blogosphere is talking about – either in general, or in a particular area.

11. People finders
Trying to find out more about a person, but only know their name or e-mail address? Try Pipl, Wink and YoName.

12. Qipit
E-mail a photo to copy@qipit.com (even from your phone) and it sends back a PDF. Great for sharing notes written on a white board.

13. ask500people
Got a question that you need others’ opinions on? Ask 500 people.

14. Google docs
Do you work on multiple computers? Create and write all of your documents and spreadsheets online – so you can always access them from any computer.

15. Tweet Grid
Want to know what people on Twitter are saying about any given topic at any given time? Tweet Grid lets you follow multiple Twitter searches at once.

Who says you need a staff of developers and tons of time to make a great web site? These tools are easy to use and easy to add to your site.

1. Coveritlive.com
CoverItLive allows you to blog live from an event (you can even do it from your iPhone). It’s also a great tool for hosting live chats on your site.

2. Blip.tv
There are a lot of tools that can embed video on your site (YouTube.com Vimeo.com, qik.com), but I’m starting to be a big fan of blip.tv. It create a nice-looking index of your videos and make it easy to offer your videos as an iTunes podcast.

3. Mogulus.com
With just a video camera and an internet connection, Mogulus lets you broadcast live video. Also try justin.tv and ustream.tv.

4. Animoto.com
Don’t just post photo galleries. Turn your best photos into a music video.

5. Vuvox.com
Create slideshows, timelines and more that include photos, music and videos. See an example here (below the scroll).

6. Soundslides.com
Easy-to-use tool for adding slideshows with audio to your site.

7. Slideshowpro.net
Another great tool for creating slideshows and embedding on your site. Indystar.com uses this to let reader embed slideshows on their sites.

8. Google maps
We all understand the value of maps and map mash-ups. That doesn’t mean we all have the skills to create them. Fortunately there are some tools that help. Such as umapper.com, mapalist.com, mapbuilder.net, quikmaps.com and fmatlas.com.

9. Polldaddy.com
Creates polls that you embed on your site. I also just discovered Polls Boutique.

10. Response-o-matic
Creates a quick online contact form, or use it to make surveys and multiple-question polls. Also check out surveymonkey.com.

11. Mypodcast.com and gabcast.com
Think podcasting is hard? Think again. Mypodcast records your podcast directly to the web. Gabcast turns a phone call into a podcast.

12. Flickr.com groups
Your readers are already posting photos to Flickr. Why not start a group and embed those photos on your site?

13. YouTube reader videos
Your readers are already uploading videos to YouTube. Create a custom player to put those videos on your site.

14. Slideshare.net
You’re a wiz with Powerpoint and/or Keynote. Don’t you wish you could add those presentations to your site? You can.

15. Wordle.net
Text can be boring. Turn speeches into word clouds.

16. Issuu.com
Want to replicate the “print experience” online? Issuu helps your put your publications actual pages online so readers can flip through them.

17. DocStoc.com
Don’t make your readers download documents and PDFs. Let them read them directly from your site with embed codes from docstoc.

18. 4info.net
Send text alerts to your readers’ phones – and make money for doing it.

19. Feedburner.com
Sure, you’ve got RSS feeds. But can you track how often they are used? Or allow readers to subscribe via e-mail? Or put ads on your feeds? Feedburner can.

20. Widgetbox.com
Create a widget from your RSS feeds and encourage others to add your content to their sites.

21. Sproutbuilder.com
Creates even cooler widgets than widgetbox. Cool enough that you will want to put them on your site, too.

22. Sharethis.com
Make it easy for readers to share your content across social media platforms (see example at the bottom of this post).

23. Mofuse.com
Create a mobile version and an iPhone version of your web site in minutes using RSS feeds. See previous post on mofuse here. Also check out wirenode.com and mippin.com.

24. Odiogo.com
Reading is hard. Listening is easy. Odiogo turns your text into audio.

If you’re the kind of person who emails a lot of screen grabs (or always wished you were that person), then there’s a pretty cool new program you should check out called Skitch.

Skitch, which is a program you download, allows you to make a screen grab from anything on your desktop, add text or draw on the image, and then easily share your creation online or via email.

Here’s my first one:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

And here’s a video that explains Skitch:

I checked out thepoint.com a few months ago. And while I thought it was a pretty good concept (individuals combine their influence and make things happen they can’t achieve alone), I didn’t see its full potential until I saw it in action this weekend.

Some pretty influential members of the newspaper design community were trying to raise $2,500 to save the portfolio web site newspagedesigner.com. So they turned to thepoint.com.

I learned about this from @mattmansfield via Twitter. Turns out the group was able to make its goal in less than a day.

I was impressed with the ease involved in donating to the cause at thepoint. And impressed by the ability to embed campaign promotion on other web sites.

Here’s the campaign widget (goal is met, but you can still donate until Dec. 15):

Another item of note: This campaign had a goal of $2,500. If you donated to the campaign, and it didn’t reach its goal, the your donation would not be processed.

It’s not all about raising money. Other campaigns include:

• Trying to get KFC to be less cruel to animals
• Trying to get “Two and a Half Men” off the air
• Getting womens’ magazines to stop airbrushing

We all want to boost our rankings in search engines. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there to help us achieve that goal.

Keyword suggestion tools (tell you how often people search for your keyword – and how often they search for similar keywords):

• Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool. Click on the little chart icon (after you do a search) to find out how many sites are optimized for that word or phrase – and how much traffic a No. 1 ranking generates.
• SEOBook’s keyword suggestion tools. Gives you a ton of info, including estimated search volumes on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
• Google’s traffic estimator tells you how your keywords will perform in Google search.

Tools to test your site’s SEO:

• Website Grader gives your site an overall SEO score.
• Term target helps determine how well targeted your site is for certain words.
• Keyword Density Analyzer shows how often keywords appear on your page – vs. how often they compare to your competitor’s page.

Want more info?

• Here’s a list of SEO blogs from alltop.
• Think you know all there is to know about SEO? Take this quiz.
• 21 ways to boost your SEO away from your site.
• Seomoz has a wealth of tools. So does seo.com.
• Maybe you’d rather watch a video.
• Oh, and compete.com has a lot of great tools.

Are there other SEO tools you find valuable?

Are you trying to go green but you don’t want to give up your magazine subscriptions? Zinio.com allows you to view the pages of hundreds of magazines right on your computer screen

And their current Read Green initiative lets you try out a subscription to one of those magazines for free.

I tried out Hawaii magazine, because I am planning a trip to Hawaii this winter. Here’s what the pages look like:

For a magazine like this, the ads are just as much content to me as the articles, so I appreciated being able to read the magazine in this format.

As we all strive to be more green and continue to offer more and more specialty publications, it might be worth looking at a partnership with Zinio.

The Chicago Cubs opened what I hope will be a long run in the 2008 baseball playoffs Wednesday night. Which gave me a chance to check out how a couple of my favorite newspapers handle big, live sporting events online.

Chicago Tribune

Live coverage: The core of the Trib’s live coverage was it’s From the Cubicle column (which has been around for at least a couple years now), offering entertaining play-by-play of the game. Photos from Trib photographers were posted during the game. And a live scoreboard was added to the home page.

Reader interaction: Readers could add their comments at the bottom of the Cubicle column.

My thoughts: The Tribune appeared to pretty much play this straight – offering the same experience it did for Cubs games all season long (but with a bigger splash on the home page). Maybe they’re waiting for the World Series, but it would have been nice to have at least seen some updates from Colonel Tribune on Twitter.

Chicago Sun-Times

Live coverage: They offered a live chat for readers using CoverItLive. They promoted blog updates and Twitter updates from the home page, but neither were being updated as the game was in progress (only saw one Tweet). There was a live scoreboard on the home page, but it stopped working halfway through the game and appeared to be replaced with an ad (see image below).

Reader interaction: The live chat allowed readers to chat, read what others had to say and vote on in-game polls.

My thoughts: Even though I am a big fan of CoverItLive, this chat didn’t work for me. It felt like there were too many people commenting, so it was difficult to follow along. Maybe having a sportswriter or columnist in the chat offering thoughts/analysis of the game would have helped (or maybe they had that and I missed it amid all the comments).

Maybe the Sun-Times felt the same way, because they didn’t leave the whole chat online, just some excerpts.

My favorite thing was that they quickly wrote and posted a story about the fan who caught DeRosa’s home run ball.

—

For fun, I looked at boston.com and latimes.com to see what they were doing live for the late game. They weren’t doing much, but both have partnered with Jacked to offer live scoring of games. I had never head of Jacked, but I was impressed. I already have an email into them to talk about a partnership with DesMoinesRegister.com.

Today, we celebrate simple.

The web site Umbrella Today breaks your weather report down to one simple questions – do I need an umbrella today?

Type in your zip code, and you’ll get a giant NO (you don’t need an umbrella) or a YES (you do need an umbrella).

You can even sign up to receive a text message on days you do need an umbrella – so you don’t ever have to go back to the site again.

Before you drop $600 on a copy of Photoshop CS3 for that designer or copy editor on your staff, you might want to consider what you can do for free with the online photo editing site photoshop.com.

The site has been in beta testing for months now, but officially launched last week. Once you upload your photos, you can do some basic cropping and toning of photos. A couple more “Photoshoppy” features include being able to pop certain colors in a photo and being able to turn your photo into a sketch.

Some features:

• 2GB of online storage
• The ability to upgrade to more features and more storage
• Create online galleries to share your photos with friends
• Easily edit and upload your photos on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket

The site doesn’t come anywhere near offering the features of Photoshop CS3 (it’s more comparable to Photoshop Express), but if all you need is the ability to do some basic cropping and toning, this might get the job done.

The idea of online photo editing is nothing new. Other sites out there include Picnik, Splashup and Phixr.

I’ve been a Picnik.com user for about a year now – mainly for its ability to crop photos to the exact size I need for our online eyepieces (which, sadly, Photoshop.com can’t do). But it’s impossible to ignore a site with the name “Photoshop.”

Look for more features from this site in the future. If the trend is toward web-based applications, you can guarantee this one will be huge.

Last night, this blog went mobile. And it only took about five minutes to set up (I even threw in an iPhone version for good measure).

I already had an account with Mofuse, a free service that lets you create mobile sites using RSS feeds and manual links. You don’t have a whole lot of creative control, but you can choose a color palette and upload a logo for your blog. You can even pick your own little icon for your iPhone version.

If you think you’re going to get enough traffic, you can set up mobile ads using AdMob.

I’ve got a little experience with this site, having created a Des Moines-based iPhone site using whatever RSS feeds I could think to use.

Mofuse does have some pretty cool features:

• You can create an automatic redirect for anyone who comes to your normal URL from a mobile device
• You can create a widget that sends your mobile link to someone’s phone
• You can set up a QR Code
• You’re able to track traffic to your site (an upgrade to this is happening right now)

Overall, it’s a very simple, enjoyable experience. I’m not 100 percent pleased with how the site looks on a mobile device or iPhone, but it’s better than anything I could create on my own.

For a smaller newspaper or media company, it’s an easy way to get your site on mobile devices (and even make some money off of it).

For bigger sites, it’s a way to quickly create a site around an important topic (especially one that takes people away from their computers – like a hurricane). The Houston Chronicle created a mobile site during Hurricane Ike.

Animoto is a great little service that takes photos, adds the music of your choice, and turns them into a music video.

Here’s the company’s 50-word description:

Animoto is a web application that, with the click of a button, produces videos using images and music that a user selects. Using their patent-pending Artificial Intelligence developed to think like an actual editor & director, the resulting video has the emotional impact of a movie trailer and the visual energy of a music video.

Animoto says that it analyzes your photos, “feels” your music, and it creates a custom video.

How it works: You upload your photos, pick your music from dozens of songs in several different genres, then sit back and wait for the video to be created (this step can take awhile).

Where the music comes from: Animoto includes a large selection of music available under the Creative Commons license. You can use your own music, but obviously beware of copyright. In one of the videos below, we got permission to use music from a local band.

What it costs: You can create short, 30-second videos for free. You can pay $3 per video to make full-length videos, or you can pay $30 for unlimited full-length videos for a year.

To be honest, I wouldn’t even bother with the 30-second option – unless you’re just trying out the service. It’s way too short. At least pay for a couple $3 videos.

Does it work? Absolutely. Videos are easy to make, easy to embed on your site (or blog, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). You can even buy a DVD quality video for $5.

Here are a couple examples we have created for DesMoinesRegister.com and dmJuice.com:

Shawn Johnson at the Olympics:

Gross Domestic Product music festival (you can see we forgot to add a thumbnail image):

Live chat at DesMoinesRegister.com

Earlier this year, we started doing live chats with sports columnist Sean Keeler in the forums at DesMoinesRegister.com. It got the job done, but it had some downside. The interface was slow, and you couldn’t really organize the conversation – new questions would roll in before old questions were answered.

That’s when we discovered the live blogging tool CoverItLive. After a little internal testing, we started using it for live chats.

Since then, we have expanded to include chats with athletes, actors and even city officials during the June floods.

Here’s how it works.

1. You sign up for an account.
2. You create and launch a live chat.
3. You embed the chat on your site with the provided code.
4. You use the admin tools to monitor the chat.
5. Once the chat is done, you get an archive of the chat that can live on at your site (you can download the entire chat text, or just keep the option of replaying the chat in their widget).
   

Here’s what I like about CoverItLive for chats.

• Reader comments go into a queue, so you can approve a comment, answer the comment and then move onto the next one. If you get a comment that violates the standards of your site, simply leave it in the queue and it will never appear on your site. If dozens of comments come in all at once, you still maintain control of the conversation.
• CoverItLive allows you to upload your company logo to customize the look of the chat window.
• You can set up certain people so their comments are always allowed. So if you are doing a chat with a member of High School Musical (we did), you don’t have to find that person’s comments and manually approve them.
• Readers don’t need to register to participate. They click on your page and can take part right away.
• You get an archive of all of your chats.
• You get statistics from all of your chats (unique users, average time on the chat, total views, etc.)
• CoverItLive is still small enough (for now) that you can email the company president and actually get a response.

Here are a few examples of how we have used CoverItLive at DesMoinesRegister.com.

• Weekly chats with sports columnist Sean Keeler (Keeler invites guests on a regular basis)
• We did flood-related chats with city officials and with FEMA
• We did a chat with cartoonist Brian Duffy before our annual bicycle ride across Iowa (Duffy is a host). That chat had 10 participants who spent an average of 39 minutes on the page.
• A chat with Drake basketball player Klayton Korver before the NCAA tournament
  

Some best practices:

• Tag team it. Have one person monitoring the questions and one person chatting – at least in the early stages. Once you are comfortable, you can go solo.
• Start asking for questioons 30+ minutes before the chat starts so you will have questions right at the start. Sometimes it takes awhile for readers to start asking questions, so chats start slow and really take off at the end.
• CoverItLive says its chats are ideal for a 1-person to 20-people conversation. We’ve had chats with 100+ people with no problem (a majority of people will just read without asking questions), but it’s easier to manage of you keep things small and focused.
• When doing a chat with a guest, it’s best to be right next to that person (or on the phone with them). You can tell them what questions you will approve into the chat next so they are ready and don’t have to waste time reading everything.
• Consider having a host and a guest on a chat. If readers are slow to ask questions, the host can chat with the guest. So it’s like a live interview where readers can join in by asking questions.