#Tip: Try storytelling tool Cowbird – which now has embed option

Image by miheco on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Cowbird has released a new feature that allows you to embed a single story into a blog post or news story.

Cowbird is a storytelling tool which allows users to create multimedia stories with audio, images, text and other features.

An email was sent to Cowbird users earlier this week making them aware of the “long-awaited and much-asked-for single story embed”.

You can now embed any Cowbird story anywhere on the web, using our handsome story player (complete with audio, connections, sharing, handwriting, and more).

Just click the ‘Retell’ button on any Cowbird story, select the ‘Embed’ tab, and grab the code.

Recent examples of Cowbird stories can be found here.

Cowbird first came to our attention at Journalism.co.uk when the National Geographic used it to allow people living in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to tell their own stories, in their own words and pictures.

Mediashift wrote this article: How National Geographic used Cowbird storytelling tool to tell a reservation’s whole story.

Cowbird is also included in our list of 14 visual storytelling tools.

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#Tip: Some useful Chrome extensions for reporters

Image by stshank on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The ever-useful 10,000 Words blog has produced a collection of five Chrome extensions which could prove helpful for journalists to install, both for reporting and organisation purposes.

One not on the list, but a firm favourite here at Journalism.co.uk, is Transcribe, which lets users listen to their audio, transcribe, pause, rewind, slow down, speed up and fast-foward, all in the same window.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip: Tools for creating visualisations of data

By Jorge Fran Ganillo on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The website for .net magazine has posted a list of 20 tools and platforms journalists may find useful when looking to visualise data. The list also organises the tools by type, based on users’ skillsets or the sort of visualisation they want to build.

See the post by Brian Suda here.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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Tool of the week for journalists: Taggstar, for adding links to your pictures

Tool of the week: Taggstar

What is it? A tool to add links so when readers hover over a photo they see links to video, audio, text, maps, retailers and more.

How is it of use to journalists? Taggstar launched last month as a free tool to allow journalists and news sites add links to other content from photos.

It is similar to ThingLink (a previous tool of the week for journalists), but, according to TechCrunch, Taggstar is focusing much of its attention on e-commerce opportunities and making images ‘shoppable’ so that readers can find links to buy a product or service.

For example, see how MSN is using Taggstar to show where readers can buy dresses, shoes and a necklace similar to those worn by Kate Middleton.

The TechCrunch post explains how this works:

Not only can publishers make their image galleries ‘shoppable’, but Taggstar’s image search technology claims to be able to interrogate hundreds of thousands of product images from its network of over 200 retailers, and display the best results based on colour, pattern and style. It does this by relying on the tags that publishers add to their images when using Taggstar’s platform and by taking a visual swatch of the product being tagged. It then crawls through the XML feeds of retailers who have signed up to work with Taggstar and automatically delivers results by analysing those product images, as well as the related textual data.

Publishers can add a revenue stream by using Taggstar, and, according to the Taggstar FAQs, there are “more monetisation features in the pipeline”.

Publishers can also link to video, audio and other rich media sources. To test it out we added links to a photo of the Newsstand iPad app, linking to iTunes.

Before tagging an image you will need to add some code to your site or blog or download a WordPress plugin. We tested it out using Tumblr. Taggstar explains exactly what you need to do.

When logged into Taggstar you then right click any image on your site to easily add links.

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Tool of the week for journalists: Story Wheel, for easy audio slideshows

Tool of the week: Story Wheel

What is it? An easy audio slideshow tool using Instagram and SoundCloud

How is it of use to journalists? If you are a journalist who regularly uses Instagram to share photos, here is a tool that will allow you turn the images into a story.

Go to the Story Wheel site, connect your Instagram account, click the pictures you want to use and then record audio, hitting the space bar every time you want the picture to change to the next in your selection.

An audio slideshow takes just minutes to make and is a quicker option than using tools such as Soundslides.

Although you can’t embed the audio slideshow, it does offer journalists a great way of telling a story around their images and sharing via social media.

You can see examples of Instagram audio slideshows on the Story Wheel site.

According to the Story Wheel site, the tool come out of a hack day. It was built using the SoundCloud api for the audio part and is now part of SoundCloud Labs.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Take a look at this list of tech and tools

The Web Journalist Blog has a “quite random selection of tools and technology to inspire, invoke and maybe innovate” web journalism.

It’s worth taking a look at the handy list of tools to see how many of them you are aware of.

Tipster: Marc Blank-Settle

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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Tool of the week for journalists: Cowbird, for unedited storytelling

Tool of the week: Cowbird

What is it? Cowbird allows people to tell multimedia stories, incorporating text, photos, sound, subtitles, roles, relationships, maps, tags, timelines, dedications, and characters.

It currently by invite only.

How is it of use to journalists?

Cowbird has been used by the National Geographic to allow people living in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to tell their own stories, in their own words and pictures.

The title has gathered the unedited stories on its site by teaming up with the creators of the storytelling tool.

Mediashift has an article on ‘how National Geographic used Cowbird storytelling tool to tell a reservation’s whole story‘, which explains why the title opted for this approach and how they teamed up with those behind the platform. It’s well worth reading.

Other news outlets could clearly take inspiration from the National Geographic and launch their own storytelling projects. It is also worth looking at the roles (such as journalist) and thinking about how people and their stories can become sources for a feature or news item.

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Tool of the week for journalists: WolframAlpha

Tool of the week: WolframAlpha

What is it? WolframAlpha bills itself as “a computational knowledge engine”.

It is like a search engine but where search engines “index web pages, then look for textual matches, then give you lists of links to follow”, WolframAlpha uses “built-in knowledge curated by human experts”.

According to the site, “it works by using its vast store of expert-level knowledge and algorithms to automatically answer questions, do analysis, and generate reports”.

In a video introducing the engine, Stephen Wolfram explains that it’s an “ambitious project that’s just getting started”, and encourages users to expect it to get better with age.

How is it of use to journalists? One of the reasons journalists turn to WolframAlpha rather than Google is to verify information.

For example, in this guide to verifying information from social media, Claire Wardle, director of development and integration at social news agency Storyful, says journalists there use WolframAlpha to ask certain questions, such as the weather in a certain place at a certain time, to verify images or video shared on social media.

In the above example I asked WolframAlpha for the weather in Damascus, Syria. You can also get cleverer and ask a question such as “what was the weather in Islamabad the day Osama bin Laden was killed?”

A word of warning: as with all statistics, do cross-check. For example, ask WolframAlpha how many journalists there are in the UK and it encourages you to ask the question around “reporters and correspondents” in the US.

WolframAlpha tells you there were 46,130 reporters and correspondents in the US in 2009 (which seems low, although Jon Slattery’s blog does report a 2012 figure of 40,600 “editors and reporters” in 2012 based on stats from the American Society of News Editors). It gives average salary ($34,360 in 2009) and the median wage yearly change (-$430) and presents you with graphs and charts.

Do you use WolframAlpha as a journalist? Any tips? Share yours in the comments section below.

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Tool of the week for journalists: Datawrapper, for quick data visualisations

Tool of the week: Datawrapper

What is it? A free, easy-to-use data visualisation tool.

How is it of use to journalists? At the Guardian Activate Summit on Wednesday (27 June), editor of the Guardian’s Datastore and Datablog Simon Rogers said he had recently started using a tool called Datawrapper.

Datawrapper is a free tool that was developed for ABZV, a journalism training organization affiliated to BDVZ (German Association of Newspaper Publishers) in an effort “to develop a comprehensive curriculum for data-driven journalism”.

Here is the Datawrapper site (note the button to switch from German to English). It allows you to copy and paste data from an excel spreadsheet, Google Doc or even a web page and visualise as a graph or pie chart and then embed the visualisation.

Here is a visualisation I created to try it out – which tool less than five minutes. It is based on a study by Rippla that found half of news articles shared on Twitter are BBC News stories

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#jpod: Why publishers are ‘excited’ about Windows 8 tablets

Last night Microsoft released a preview of its new Windows 8 operating system.

No launch date is set but it is widely rumoured that tablets running Windows 8 will be on sale in the autumn.

But what does the launch of Windows 8 mean for publishers?

In this podcast Journalism.co.uk technology correspondent Sarah Marshall speaks to:

• Rob Grimshaw, managing director of the FT.com, who this week announced that the Financial Times is working on an app for Windows 8.
• Daniel Sharp, co-founder of Stonewash, a firm of developers that has built Windows 8 apps for publishers, four of which went live yesterday.

Podcast: Download

You can see a video of the Windows 8 preview below.

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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