Second Day at The Daily Freeman!

I am finishing up my second day at The Daily Freeman with ten open tabs in my browser. Today I started to play around with different tools on webjournalist.org. I found that my favorite websites were the ones where you can play around with pictures in slideshows.

I used Animoto to combine pictures with music and a layout to create a video of my dog Daisy as a test run. It came out pretty good and was very easy to use. I had to ask myself, how could this be related to journalism? Right now I can see this being useful on a website to showcase a pet contest, holiday pictures, or something that involves a lot of different pictures. Vuvox is another site that is similar to Animoto but is a little more complicated to use.

I used a website called Prezi. This is used to create power point-like presentations. The end product looks very organized, creative, and sophisticated. It was confusing to use in the beginning but if I sit down with it for a while I'm sure it won't be that hard to figure out. I was thinking that this could be useful to accompany a story that might be harder to follow because it is animated and gives you a closer look at certain aspects of the presentation.

I also came across a program called TypeWith.me which allows more than one person to type on the same document from different computers at the same time. I think this would be annoying to some extent to use; however, it might be useful if you are doing a collaborative story and need to have two people working on it from separate locations.

There were definitely some websites that were really cool but I couldn't think of effective ways to apply them to journalism. For example, Gowalla was a great website for traveling. It allows you to keep track of the places you've been while allowing you to communicate with other people who are on the website about places you may want to go.

Besides playing with these new tools all day, I began to understand Twitter better today. I think I am the only college student who doesn't know the in's and out's of twitter. I think I may need a lesson, but for now I'm going to keep playing around with it.