However, I did have a lot of fun today playing with UMapper. Last week I started looking at the cool kinds of maps that can be created from Umapper. Today, I made two interactive maps that are actually GAMES! So much fun!
To do this, you must create an account and go to "create map". Then you will have to create a title and description for your map, as well as choose which type of map you would like to use.
Then you click the tab "Templates" which is next to Edit Info. This is where you will choose what kind of map you want to make. In this case I chose "GeoDart Game" because I wanted to create an interactive game.
Next you use the tools on the right hand side of the screen to create your map. You use the hand symbol to move the map around. You use the pink icon to place your point down on the map. If you can't find a specific place you are looking for you have use the search bar.
When you place your cursor over a set point a box with come up that gives you some options:Info Window Content, Marker Appearance, Reposition Marker,Date/Time,or Remove Marker.
Click on "Info Window Content" and you will see a pop-up. For the Geo-Dart Game, you must post your question into the description box and place the answer into the title box. IT also gives you the option of inserting a link or audio into it.
When you are all done placing your points and inserting the information, click the big blue button on the right hand side that says save. Then go to the top and click "View Map". And there you have it.
Here are the two that I did today:
U.S. State License Plate Slogans
What to do in Staten Island:
I did the Staten Island one first because I did not have to look up any street names, landmarks, or information. I knew where everything was because I am familiar with the location so it was extremely easy for me to create this map. It took maybe ten minutes, probably less to put it together because I did not have to do any research. The second one I did was the license plate slogans. This one took a lot longer because there were a lot more points and I had to look up the information in order to ask the question.
I think that this would be cool and very engaging to people on the web. I think that it can be useful for some stories as a visual aid, and a fun thing to keep them on the page with the story. If the creator is familiar with the information and location that they are using it takes almost no time and effort to put it together.
After I did that,I did a lot of reading and researching. I kept a tab open with a Poynter live chat about "What skills do journalists need to effectively engage audiences?".
Chrys Wu, an established journalist answered questions about when to post tweets, how to engage an audience on facebook,and how to crowdsource effectively. The chat was almost like a summary of this blog as well as an overview of the detailed JRC chats.
I took a look at Health Indicators Warehouse hoping to be able to download information as an excel document and then be able to upload it to other tools in order to create charts and diagrams. This however, did not work as well as I would have liked it to, mainly because no matter how I saved the files and tried to change the format they were in, the documents were not compatible with the programs I was using. so that was a fail, sadly.
I posted last week about the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics and how it needs to be updated. I wanted to see how things were going with the debate on this topic an was pleased to see that it is becoming somewhat of a hot topic among journalists (which I think it needs to be). There are now multiple links on the website with articles written by established journalists on their opinions. If you are at all interested in the field of journalism I suggest you take a look at the debates.
SPJ also has a site called the Journalist's Toolbox. This site contains tons of links that can be used a resources for journalists. Although I have not been able to go through all of them yet, I have found a few that may have some good stuff for online journalism.
Tools for News is literally just a page with multiple lists of links that are categorized into: Audio, Blogging, Data Scraping, Data Visualization, Databases, Design, Feed Readers, FTP, Legal Guides, Maps, Networks and Associations, and Other. From there you can look at other tools that may be useful to you and also see what other people think about them.
Daytum is one of the tools I found and have been looking at and am trying to figure out how it could be useful to journalism. This is a video that shows the basics of the tool:
Daytum Screencast: Categories from Daytum on Vimeo.
Although the video makes this tool seem trivial (it was literally tracking somebody's food intake), I think it may come in handy for a story that is being developed over a long period of time. Maybe a story that requires taking your own data in order to produce a story.
Woobox is a site that allows you to create contests, coupons, giveaways,etc to your audience. At first I thought this would be cool because it allows you to do this on social media sites such as facebook and twitter,which have strict regulations on this sort of thing. However, it is not FREE. So, nevermind. But it is kind of cool.
Lastly, I found Flare which is a data visualization tool. It looks AWSEOME. I didn't have enough time today to play around with it but I did look at some of the tutorials. There are not video tutorials which is sort of a disappointment; however, the text looks detailed and includes sample codes to insert. I'm going to have to try it out next time!
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