Tools, tools, and more tools.

For anyone who has taken a look at this blog before, I bet you can guess what I did at my internship today? If you guessed that I searched for and played around with tools that may be useful for online journalism...then you are RIGHTO!

I began by searching in Google for "visualizations for online journalism" and an article by Poynter popped up. The article featured a few websites that have been used for online journalism and gave tips and examples of how journalists could use them. Dipity, the website I used to create the Timothy Matthews Timeline that is featured below, was one of them!



This is an image that I created with Wordle. Wordle generates "word clouds" which is a visual that gives you an idea of the content of a specific speech, website, blog, document, etc. It allows you to insert a speech, URL for a blog or website, song lyrics, documents, etc and creates an image. The image that is posted above was generated from a link to my blog. The purpose of word clouds in journalism seems to be to give readers a quick look at what the content is about.



This image is a timeline of the "Charlie Sheen" trend on Twitter. It is created by a site called Trendistic. Trendistic allows users to search for a term or phrase; it then generates a chart of how often that term or phrase was tweeted over or within a certain time frame (24 hours, 1 week, 30 days, 90 days, 180 days). It also allows you to embed or tweet the chart in either a static or dynamic form. I think this could be useful when making a point of how much attention one topic is receiving from news media.

This image is of a map that I was able to create through a site called BatchGeo. The program allows you to copy and paste an excel sheet which includes: address, city, state, county, zip code, phone number, etc. Once you paste the excel sheet into the space provided, it generates a map of all of those places and the information you included in the excel sheet. I made a map of the places I am going over Spring Break. A visualization such as this could be useful when doing a story about a series of places: Christmas lights, Dine Out Against Hunger, Blood Drives, are all examples I am thinking of off the top of my head.

Stickybits is a website that I came across while searching for tools. I can not see any journalistic purpose to it; but it is really cool. It's an app for your smartphone that allows you to scan barcodes of any product in order to find deals and get free stuff.

Lastly, I found an article from the Investigative Reporters and Investigators that had links to visualization tools. It included a lot of tools that I've already messed around with; however the one tool I had never heard of Tableau Public. I downloaded it for free because it seemed like a really cool program; however it was sort of tricky to figure out. Again, you need an excel sheet for this application and once you download the excel sheet into the program, it is not that simple to create a visualization. Maybe if i spent more time on it I could figure it out but I definitely do not recommend it for beginners.

I took a look at the Nieman Journalism Lab's This Week in Review which had to do with "Google’s content farm crackdown, Facebook’s new comments, more TBD lessons". I am starting to think it is almost scary how interconnected everything is getting. The internet seems to have become a place with nowhere to escape.