WordPress, once considered mainly a tool for bloggers, has become a standby for quick-to-launch, easy-to-operate news web sites. One of the strengths of WordPress has been the ability to use story tags and categories to group similar content, such as local business coverage or cultural happenings. But now a new toolkit has been developed that allows producers to get around the key limitation of that automated aggregation — the lack of creative control over the resulting “topical” news page.

The team at Knight Digital Media Center has created a straightforward toolkit that lets producers and editors make topic-focused news pages, but with distinct, original and easy-to-maintain page elements, while still grouping content automatically around a news subject or theme.

One of the most notable advances is that editors can now lead the topic page with an ever-evolving news summary that can lay out the basics of a “topic” but be easily updated to reflect new stories as they’re added to the mix. In addition, the topic page toolkit allows the site to display a unique masthead image for each topic page, as well as a unique blogroll. And, as a nice bonus, that unique masthead and blogroll show up not just in the main topic index page, but also on any story that’s associated with the topic.

This kind of approach could be great for hyperlocal sites that are looking to create topic verticals for their community. Here’s a recent example of a topic page on California’s education budget crisis by Oakland North, a hyperlocal news project managed by the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, where KDMC folks are based. The page combines news stories with background time lines, maps, multimedia and charts.

KDMC developed the topic tool kit in late 2009 to help spread the word to its multimedia trainees about the benefits of the topic sections. I was able to test out the tools during a recent Web 2.0 training at the center, so I can attest to its ease of use and functionality — it took me just a few minutes to build a simple demo topics page.

Here’s an online tutorial to help create a topic site based on the Cutline theme, although it can be used with other WordPress themes. The tutorial, “Building a Topics System,” covers required plugins, and, if you’re familiar with PHP, there’s an additional tutorial on “Theme Modifications.”

KDMC is continuing to refine its topics tools — for instance it’s looking into integrating an ad system into the toolkit and is already thinking about how it might be adapted to publishing platforms like the iPad — so keep an eye out for improvements.

Note: A version of this post appeared previously on the Poynter.org web site’s E-Media Tidbits column, where Glenn is a contributor.

Monitor News and Events

Monitor in real time, what people are saying about specific news topics or events. Limit your search using the advanced search operators, or the advanced search form to focus in on a specific location, date, user, attitude, etc. For example, use the following search strategy to find out what people in New York City have been tweeting about the health care reform bill since March 21, 2010:

“healthcare reform” near:NYC since:2010-03-21

Tip: You can search and view tweets without having to have a Twitter account, or being logged in by going to http://search.twitter.com.

Monitor Organizations

Find out what people are saying about a particular organization or business. Think of it as monitoring the “buzz”.  In doing so it may also be helpful to limit your resulting tweets to those that include external links, to also see what Web sites they are sharing to help you come up with a story idea. For example, take a look at what people are saying about Toyota and what sites are they sharing:

Example: #Toyota filter:links

Tip: The hashtag (#) before a word in a post, designates that the word is to be recognized as a category (think keyword). Therefore when you search tweets placing a hashtag in front of a search term refines your search and increases the likelihood of relevant search results.

Find Experts

ExpertTweet is a new Twitter application developed by the folks at Journalististics that enables users to tweet requests for expert suggestions to the ExpertTweet community. This free service offers a faster way to find experts on Twitter without having to use a keyword search, or scanning #followfriday shout-outs. The intended audience includes:

* Event organizers looking for speakers or panelists
* Reporters or bloggers looking for quick source suggestions, comments on a
topic, or other quick feedback
* Entrepreneurs and business owners looking for expert advice
* Employers looking for suggestions on candidates
* Authors looking for sources for a book
* Consumers looking for expert advice on purchases

ExpertTweet is simple to use. Login into ExpertTweet using your Twitter credentials and submit an ExpertTweet request by typing it in the text box. Your handle is automatically included as part of the message, so be aware that you will have less characters than usual to type your message. Your post is then shared with those Twitter community members following ExpertTweet. If your topic isn’t too esoteric, you should start receiving suggestions and recommendations within minutes.

These are just a few ways of using Twitter to enhance your reporting, but there is much more to learn. As with any product or application, to learn how to use Twitter more effectively, start with reading the instructions or the help screens.

I was recently helping some students identify the best day for an event they were planning, and suggested they use some kind of “preferential voting system,” one that allowed users to “rank” their answers, rather than just submitting a single “best” response. The idea was to allow voters to create a list –from most preferred to least preferred — in order to find the group’s “least worst” option.

Why bother? Let me illustrate. Let’s say you and your colleagues want to go to lunch, but can’t decide between Chinese, Italian or Thai. Half the group loves Chinese but hates Italian, the other half loves Italian but hates Chinese, and everyone is just fine with Thai. A standard poll that forced a single response would show a tie between Chinese and Italian, with Thai in third, leaving you as hungry as when you started. On the other hand, a ranking poll would show Thai as the top choice, i.e. the least undesirable option. Spring rolls, anyone?

Now, the only problem with my suggestion was that while I knew I’d encountered a web-based survey tool like this a couple of years ago while visiting MIT Media Lab, I couldn’t remember what it was called or where to find it. And a quick check of other survey-building tools I’d successfully used before didn’t unearth similar functionality, so I was momentarily stuck.

No problem! A quick query to my professional online network on LinkedIn pointed me to that MIT tool within a few hours. Called Selectricity, it was created by MIT Media Lab‘s Computing Culture group as a Knight Foundation-funded Future of Civic Media project. Selectricity has a very easy-to-use “QuickVotes” function that allows you to create polls with amazing speed, and with a nifty sorting tool that has users dragging their preferences around the list before submitting their vote.

But the even nicer thing about my LinkedIn pals is that they also pointed me to a slew of other preferential polling tools and techniques. I haven’t been able to check these all out, but would love to hear about it if you do. Here’s what they suggested:

• Lots of folks pointed out that Google Forms can be used to record responses on a 1-5 scale (Thanks Len De Groot of the Knight Digital Media Center at Berkeley J School, Mathilde Piard of the Palm Beach Post, Dorian Benkoil of Teeming Media, Sree Sreenivasan of Columbia J School and Sandeep Junnarkar of CUNY J School)
• SurveyMonkey offers ranking functionality, emailed Joseph Maser, a senior business analyst and process engineer consultant at Autodesk, who says he’s used it and that it works great (although it may be a feature only available to paid accounts).
• Surveygizmo does allow respondents to rank choices, says former colleague TereLyn Hepple, a web content developer and technical writer at ECi Software Solutions. And it can be free depending on your response rates. Plus, she added, Micropoll does ranking by entering numerals and it’s free too.
• Cvent’s web surveys can do ranking as well, according to Sherrie Mersdorf, a database marketing analyst there. Cvent has a “Rank Order” survey, a vertical list of categories with a numeric text box next to each that respondents rank in numerical order

So a big thank you to all those folks that pointed me to Selectricity (Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.com, Jose Zamora of Knight Foundation, Jody Brannon of News21, Michele McLellan and Chrys Wu), and to the other folks who offered suggestions and responses (Rob Duncan of Biritah Columbia Institute of Technology, Paul Grabowicz of UC Berkeley J School, Joe Filippazzo of CUNY J  School and producer/programmer Wallace Jackson).

If you know of other survey tools, by all means suggest them below. We’ll be adding a page with links on our J School wiki page, which can be updated anytime, and will post it here when it’s live.

The first 11 sites, below, are primarily for reading, gathering, organizing and managing information. For each site listed, I also suggest below a few related sites that I’ve found useful.

I put together the list as part of a workshop for the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s January Academy. I created a Delicious.com bookmarks page for the sites; for those who prefer old-fashioned paper, here is a free print-ready PDF I used as a handout, listing these first 11 sites. More to follow separately.

1. Google Reader
An inbox for RSS feeds, blog posts, pictures, videos and other materials
Also Try: feedly.com, bloglines.com, igoogle.com

2. Delicious
Save, organize and share links and discover new sites. Search by subject tags to find relevant pages
Also Try: Diigo.com, Publish2.com, Facette for Delicious

3. Evernote
Organize notes and Web research
Also Try: Google Docs, Zoho Notebook, Backpackit.com, MIT’s List.it

4. Instapaper
Save stories to read later
Also Try: Laterloop.com, readitlaterlist.com

5. Readability
Make articles and sites more legible
Also Try: Tidyread.com, printfriendly.com, readable-app.appspot.com

6. Alltop
Create a custom page for subjects you want to research or keep tabs on
Also Try: popurls.com, OriginalSignal.com, EuFeeds.eu, digg.com, stumbleupon.com

7. NY Times Prototypes
Innovative formats: How tomorrow’s journalism may look
Also Try: labs.digg.com, fastflip.googlelabs.com, SI tablet video – and one from Bonnier

8. The Internet Archive
Find open-source material and look back at historical Web pages
Also Try: creativecommons.org, flickr.com/commons, Life Magazine’s photo archive

9. Spezify
Track Your tracks. Monitor social media references to your work or topics you cover
Also Try: socialmention.com, google.com/alerts, viewzi.com, pipl.com

10. Scribd
Find and share documents and presentations on subjects of interest
Also Try: Slideshare.com, Docstoc.com, issuu.com

11. Muck Rack
Journalists on Twitter. Find colleagues and collaborators to track on Twitter. Monitor subjects.
Also Try: monitter.com, tweetdeck.com, wefollow.com

33 Sites Every Journalist Should Know - Part I

Please share your comments about these 11 sites or the alternatives listed.

Part 2: Sites 12-22 – Posterous.com, Tumblr.com etc.

Part 3: Sites 23-33 – Vimeo, Google Voice, Picnik etc.

Drop.io lets you set up free digital drop boxes – as many as you want – where you can share photos, documents, PDFs, videos, audio files and links with colleagues.

On the home page you start by naming your drop box or “drop.” (You don’t have to sign up, log-in, or provide any personal info at all). I’ve called the drop I created for this post “cunydnj,” as you can see in this screenshot. The next step is to select files to upload to your new, shared workspace. Or just create the drop to use later.

You get 100mb of storage for free for each drop you create, which is enough to upload lots of photos, documents, PDFs, audio files, links and whatever else you might be sharing. You can create as many free drops as you’d like.

I have several drops where I share teaching materials with students, including how-to tipsheets and audio and video tutorials. I have a couple drops I use for collaborative writing and multimedia projects. I store document drafts, interview transcripts and recordings, photos, and PDF research files. I also maintain drops for sharing personal photos and documents with friends. I access the drops online and from my iPhone, using a new free app called Droppler.

One of the nice things about drop.io is that once you create a shared workspace or “drop,” anyone can access it and add files to it, provided you’ve given them the URL, the e-mail address, or get this — the phone number. They don’t have to register or log-in, unless you’ve added a password to your drop. That ease of access means drops can be used for efficient crowdsourcing, enabling readers, viewers or blog visitors to contribute to the editorial team. Readers of a local blog, for instance, could call your drop’s phone number and record comments or story tips. Or they could send in community photos or videos by email.

If I were soliciting comments or contributions to this blog, for instance, I could ask you, the reader, to share your thoughts about drop.io by calling my new drop’s unique phone number, which in this case is: 917-512-7396 x 23506. Or you could contribute photos by attaching them to emails sent to cunydnj@drop.io. Once that content is in the drop, I can embed it into my blog. That means site producers can easily post crowdsourced voice messages, photos, videos or whatever else the community has contributed.

Anyone can log-in to a drop to see the shared materials (or to upload additional content) by visiting its URL. In the case of my new drop, which you can visit and try out as an example, the URL is: http://drop.io/cunydnj

If you prefer your drop to be private, you can require visitors to use a password. Each drop has its own URL, generally http://drop.io/ followed by whatever name you give the drop when you create it. (You can also just use the default random letters and digits assigned when you first open the site).

If I want to use a drop for a collaborative journalism project, I can give colleagues the shared drop info and they can add to — or download from — the drop as we put together the project components. If I’m working with remote colleagues, I can even use the drop’s conference call number to set up a free conference call. An answer posted on GetSatisfaction.com/dropio says that the site’s conference call feature can theoretically handle an unlimited number of participants, but it’s been tested to work with 20. There are no fees or codes to use – participants just dial the conference number and extension.

Even if you don’t have a need for its collaborative power, drops are handy for backing up key files and enabling online access to them when you’re away.

A caveat: Drop.io is sometimes sluggish when uploading photos, audio files and videos. And if you’re using a drop primarily for multimedia, you may bump into the 100mb space ceiling. You can upgrade to a 1gb drop for $10/year. Or if you plan to use drop.io professionally, you can subscribe to a pro version with 20 drops of 10gb each for $19/month.

There’s lots more to the site. For instance, it allows you to:

1. Collaborate in real-time on your project with chat and presentation modes.
2. Receive faxes in your drop
3. Set up optional charges for access to premium drop content (A potential revenue source for a struggling local blog?)
4. Automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, SMS or email when new files are added.
5. Download all your drop files to your computer as a Zip file
6. Move files from one drop to another

Oh, and about that “.io” in the site’s name? Here’s how the founders explain it on their FAQ page:

‘.io’ is the Top Level Domain for the British Indian Ocean Territory… yah, we had no idea either until we were poking around wikipedia. We are using it because: 1. We see our role primarily is as a really simple In/Out switch for all your information 2. The British Indian Ocean Territory is an enormous expanse of water with lots of islands in it, which, at a stretch, we think is a good metaphor for our site…”

Please add your comments below about drop.io or other journalism file sharing tools.

A video introduction to Drop.io:

If you are up to it, visit this link for the plugin.

Installation instructions are here.

The code you need to insert is found here.

The post would also look like this:

Thanks Drew!

[audio http://digitalstoragespace.com/08/sandeepjunnarkar/audio/audio.mp3]

You need to include a paragraph break space before and after the code above.

This works only with MP3 and it must be at 44.1kHz. Again, this works only for WordPress hosted sites.

Click here to see what it will look like.

Thanks Drew!

2. In the “New Connection” window:

• enter “ftp.digitalstoragespace.com” into “hostname”
• enter “08class@digitalstoragespace.com” into username
• enter the password you have been given.

3. You may check “add to keychain” if you do not want repeat (2) in the future.

4. Hit “Connect”

5. You are now within a folder titled “08″

6. Click on “New Folder” in the Fetch window

7. Name that folder “firstnamelastname” in LOWERCASE ONLY! For example: “sandeepjunnarkar”

8. You will upload your media to ONLY the folder above but before you do that, proceed to(9)

9. You should create a new folder WITHIN “firstnamelastname” for each new project. Let’s say you name it “newproject” and within this folder, you must upload your media.

10. The main file in each folder (or directory) should be named index.html. This file is automatically displayed with only the folder name typed in.

Where will this file on the web? It can be found at:

http://digitalstoragespace.com/08/firstnamelastname/newproject/

1. Quickstart guide

2. Preparing your media files

3. Importing your files

4. Opening an existing project

5. You may find that you have to install the optional LAME audio encoder

6. Editing a slide show (including adjusting timing, editing image order, adding, removing and replacing images, inserting captions, headlines and credits)

7. Import a new audio track

8. Massaging the soundslides template

9. Exporting and publishing