Flickr, the Press and Remembrance Sunday

Soldiers marching in Llandudno, by Andrew Stuart, via Flickr

Great to see the local 'papers making use of local people being members of photo share site Flickr to cover the remembrance Sunday services across north Wales.

The Daily Post has a successful public pool on Flickr and used their discussion board to invite people to share photos, like Canalman53's photo at Wrexham.

The Evening Leader had the same idea, although they also used Flickr to show off their own photographers' work as well.

Speech-to-text searching

I've been looking for more applications to do with speech-to-text functionality after being impressed by the BBC's new portal, Democracy Live website which enables users to do text searches of video - and tells them exactly [what time] to find the reference. [Editor Mark Coyle explains more here]

Where else is it used like this?

3. RSS feeds and feed readers essential for life on the real-time web

With the web's move towards real-time updates now, more than ever, you should be reading all your favourite and must see sites via a feed reader.

journalism.co.uk has some tips about managing your reading material using readers.

Basically, you should be getting websites to come to you these days via their RSS feeds.

Those feeds are brought to your computer, mobile, etc by a reader. I use Google Reader, but there are plenty of others.

The reader's at the core of my day-to-day work as a journalist.

It's a console if you like, my window on my web, and it only notifies me as and when I need to know.

Daily, we read info and stories on dozens and dozens of websites and blogs.

But for users of feed readers, we don't necessarily visit any of them - they come to us via the reader.

Every time I visit a website I think could help me in my work, I grab that site's RSS feed - it's a URL - and I paste that into my reader.

Then, every time a new story is added to that site, I'm notified automatically.

I can even set it to give me just the first few paragraphs of a story. If I want more, I click the link and then I visit the website.

Try it yourself. Go to a website news aggregator like Google News and type in a search term.

Then, look for and click on the RSS feed for that term and add it to your reader.

[I've blogged more about this here, 4. RSS-ing search terms]

Now, every time that term comes up in the future, you'll be notified. Simple.

And finally, here's an example of how managing contacts via a reader helped with a story.

1. Making the most of your web profile
2. How to link your web profiles
3. RSS feeds and feed readers
4. RSS-ing search terms

2. How to link your web profiles

or how to be in several places at once

Next, you need to keep them updated - but you need them to work for you and not the other way round.

So, firstly, I set my accounts to notify me via email if someone gets in touch.

And I populate the profiles of those accounts with info from my other accounts.

There are lots of ways to do this and lots of sites can help.

If I add a bookmark on Delicious, it is fed to my Twitter account and the same is said every time I upload a photo to Flickr.

To do this go to the settings of your accounts and follow the instructions. These days they do all the work for you thanks to APIs.

To link your accounts to your Twitter feed, I used twitterfeed.com

Basically, visit your profiles on your other sites, grab the RSS feed from that account and paste it into twitterfeed.

1. Making the most of your web profile
2. How to link your web profiles
3. RSS feeds and feed readers
4. RSS-ing search terms

1. Making the most of your web profile

It's quicker to search social media websites to find a story's principal players than it ever was door knocking.

Theses sites are the village pubs or corner shops I used to cold call when trying to glean more about this person or that who'd, often unwittingly or tragically, had become the subject of a local or national news story.

People are posting messages, photos and films before the authorities tell us journalists what has happened. It's up to us to be web savvy enough to know how to find them - and fast.

After all, if it has been published on a web platform like Facebook, Youtube or elsewhere, then we've already been scooped.

If you're going to use these sites as a source of information, or to make contact with people, you need to have your own profile on there so it pays to make it interesting.

These days a stranger is someone you've not yet added as a 'friend' to your Facebook account. And if you're both members of the same social media site, you're half way there - it's like being a member of the same club - you've got something in common.

In my working life I have profiles on Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Bloglines and Google Reader.

But you have to participate - you can't just take from these site - you have to join in. [Here's an example of a story that came from being a member of a tin online community representing, of all things, a housing estate on my patch]

I use them because they bring contacts, tip-offs, places and people to gather quotes, a way to draw on others' experiences, story ideas, and readers.

As well as the stories and tips, some of these contacts have popped out and taken a photo for me, saving me an hour's drive! Others have been quick to point out a glaring omission in a story that can save embarrassment later on.

I manage these accounts as a professional journalist, not the hill running, family geneaologist and dad of two kids that I am outside of work.

My accounts or profiles are full of what I'm doing in a work capacity and that keeps them topical, on message and, hopefully, of interest.

1. Making the most of your web profile
2. How to link your web profiles
3. RSS feeds and feed readers
4. RSS-ing search terms

4. RSS-ing search terms

So I'm a local reporter interested, obviously, in stories on or about the patch and the people associated with it.

A good way to keep across things online is to use place names as a search term and take a feed of that term and add it to your reader.

What the hell is he on about?

Well, go to Google News and put in a search term. I'll use Llangollen, a place on my patch.

Now scroll to the foot of the page and click RSS.

Add that url to your feed reader. I use the Google free reader.

Now, every time that search term is mentioned and the Google bots find it, you'll be notified via your feed reader and so you'll never need to go looking again!

1. Making the most of your web profile
2. How to link your web profiles
3. RSS feeds and feed readers
4. RSS-ing search terms