Robin Brown

After the rollercoaster thrill ride of three men disagreeing with each other and an off-camera man occasionally shouting, I’ve compiled this exhaustive list of newspaper and website coverage taking place both during the debate and over the next 24 hours.

• Debate clearly won by Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Nick Clegg

• Tiresome analysis of clothes worn by three candidates

• Article on Richard Nixon / JFK Presidential debate

• Infographic making inexplicable use of shapes in three primary colours

• Daily Mail picture of Gordon Brown looking sweaty

• Analysis of various ‘blunders’ by three party leaders

• Composite images of three leaders with mouths open

• Tiresome ‘Have Your Say’ section with numbingly tedious and/or ill-informed user-generated content

• Hopelessly unfunny sketch by Simon Hoggart/Rod Liddle/Amanda Platell

• Shit Sun mock-up of Gordon Brown looking like Compo from Last of the Summer Wine

• Dull profile of Alistair Stewart

• Live blog from short-straw reporter in pub in Hartlepool

• Millions of links to Twitter feeds churning out pointless quotes

• C4 blog by Jon Snow’s tie on what Brown, Cameron and Clegg were drinking backstage

• Swing-o-meter-style mock-up based on how many times each man says ‘change’.

• Live panel quizzed throughout debate consisting of white-van driving racist, muesli-eating hippie and boring middle-aged woman

• Plaintive whinge from Alex Salmond, live from reactor building in Dounreay

Now with added Clegg!

It’s a week later, and I deliberately spent the night cycling, editing photos and watching cricket. Anything really to avoid the dreaded leader’s debate and the ensuing media volcanic ash torrent of drivel. If you did too, here’s what you missed.

• Lots of articles and reports about end of two-party hegemony

• Right-wing press fall in line to paint Clegg as nutter/shirker/gay/gyppo/foreigner-loving liberal who is, quite possibly, a maniac

• Some of the broadcast media inexplicably start reporting rumours they’ve heard about Nick Clegg from hostile briefings

• Someone from Keane backs Nick Clegg

• Lib Dem supporters wonder how much further ahead they’d be with Charles Kennedy

• DPS Observer interview with Vince Cable called ‘The man who would be King’, trailed with front page lead headlined ‘Cable to bring City to heel’

• Marina Hyde writes shit sketch about how she fancies Vince Cable. Called The Cable Guy.

• Sue Malone writes poisonous article about Miriam González Durántez’s wardrobe

• Scratchy radio interview with Paddy Ashdown, saying how great Clegg is, and what a bastard Tony Blair is

• The Sun mocks up a shit photo of Nick Clegg heading down a hill in a tin bath.

The Huffington Post was number one in The Observer’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs at the weekend, alongside plenty of other aggregators.

The Post, says the article, ‘hoovered up traffic’ and ‘made the first generation of bloggers look like two-bit prospectors panning for nuggets in shallow creeks before the big mining operations moved in’.

This is, undoubtedly, true and a pretty decent simile to describe the awesome site’s Death Star-like entry into the blogosphere.

But the Huffington Post isn’t just a big mining operation – it’s a strip-mine operation that decimates the blogging landscape by using the value of whatever it republishes, vaguely repackaging it and leaving a credit-plus-link behind.

Huff Post editors will argue that those links and that traffic are of value to the original site, but really the Post’s aggregation model is the online equivalent of harvesting a village’s annual crop and leaving behind an IOU. The Observer article continues:

In the era pre-Huffington, big media companies ignored the web, or feared it; post-Huffington they started to treat it as just another marketplace, open to exploitation.

That much is true. Huffington, and other mega-blogs like Gawker, opened the door for aggregators that use work done by other people to generate cash, traffic and engagement.

But Huffington and others like it have gone beyond aggregation as it used to be understood; it scrapes, albeit using a human hand as opposed to a bot, taking much more than a header and abstract. Was the effort that went into your blog post or article really worth that hard-to-find link back from the aggregator?

In its wake, other mass meta-aggregators such as Mahalo have followed, blurring the definition of ‘fair use’. It’s a tough one to call, but it’s easy to make apocalyptic predictions about where this sort of thing ends. What else is left when everything has been mined of its value?

Ironically, The Huffington Post was set up to take on the right-wing US blogs and news corporations; to provide a ‘liberal’ point of view and media beast to rebalance the landscape.

But by introducing the slash-and-burn aggregation model to publishing content, it’s allowed corporate behemoths to enter the mass aggregation game, with revenue-generation as the first and last priority.

And, greatest irony of all, Mahalo – a great black hole of aggregation – is backed by none other than News Corp; the greatest enemy of mass aggregation in the world.

So, when you’re confronted with SERPs results consisting of content scraped by Mahalo, earning plenty of cash for Rupert Murdoch into the bargain, remember to thank The Huffington Post.

It was with no sense of satisfaction today that I scanned the morning’s front pages to a sea of blurry Jon Venables shots, but it was proof that the tabloids are scenting blood over the man’s return to prison.

The Mirror reports that Venables has been returned to prison for fighting at work and that he has been struggling with drug use for some time – shamefully for a Labour paper relegating the death of Michael Foot to a masthead boxout – and apparently breaking the worldwide injunction that prohibits any reporting on Venables or Robert Thompson.

The details, vague though they are, are clearly sufficient to allow dozens of people to confidently guess Venables’ assumed identity – which obviously poses significant problems for Venables, the probation service, the police, prisons, the Ministry of Justice and dozens of other auxiliary services.

This is presumably why Jack Straw was so determined not to allow this to come to light. At best, Venables requires a whole new identity and cover story somewhere else in the country, or spends the rest of his life in prison with a round-the-clock guard. Or, more simply, someone murders him.

I’ve been considering how the public interest has been served by these revelations coming to light. In what way are we enlightened, I wonder. What’s the benefit to society in these details being brought to light?

It’s fascinating trying to watch the newspapers maintain some sort of moral high ground on this issue while exploiting the grief of Denise Fergus to sell some more papers.

In today’s Sun, we’re told of the ‘Bulger Case Outrage’? What ‘outrage’ is that exactly? The manufactured outrage of tabloid editors denied the opportunity to make another meal of a genuine human tragedy?

It’s an unfortunate – or is fortunate? – coincidence that the outing of criminals as part of serving the greater good dovetails so smoothly with the media imperative to sell copy.

Who’s to say what the real reason behind the Venables muck-raking is? Every newspaper editor will point to the former, explain that it is a duty of the media to reassure society. Whichever way you paint it I can’t see the moral justification in the howls of anger over the government’s refusal to cave in to the papers.

But it won’t stop here – this story has legs now, and we all like to know how a story ends. I’ll save you the bother of actually buying these papers.

In a few days time, following a tidal wave on unrelenting pressure from the papers, reflected and intensified by other mainstream media, spread far and wide by social media, which will in turn be re-reported by the tabloids, people will start coming forward with stories to sell.

Some time next week one of the papers – probably the Sun – will get recent pictures of Venables and decide, on balance, that the legal risk is worth taking, arguing that to do so is in the public interest. Then the rest will follow suit.

The public interest will have been served. Paper sales and website traffic will increase accordingly. Some hack will win a self-congratulatory ‘Scoop of the Year’ award.

It remains to be seen what happens to Venables. At best, a life of looking over his shoulder. At worst… well, we know the worst.

I genuinely wonder if, at any point, those in the media demanding to know these details have ever thought beyond the scope of ‘public interest’ and considered the high stakes of this game. That convenient public interest defence can cover a multitude of sins.

The media is baying for details about exactly why Jon Venables has been locked up again, several years after he was released from prison, where he served nine years with Robert Thompson for the murder of James Bulger.

I don’t have any connection to the sorry affair, apart from reading the challenging As if – a superb account of the case by Blake Morrison – and living in Liverpool.

But I do feel a deep ambivalence about attitudes towards the case, especially those pursued by the media.

This has been reignited today with the news that Venables has been returned to prison for unspecified breaches of his parole licence. The media is barred from reporting what Venables has done and may not even seek to discover why, such is the blackout on information relating to the two boys’ new identities.

Various figures in the media are outraged that they cannot report these details, arguing that it is in the public interest to make them known.

I’m unclear on exactly why they believe this to be the case, beyond the principle of the matter. There are some important questions to be asked about the unprecedented nature of the anonymity afforded to the two, but I don’t think this is the best time to ask them.

It seems likely that the case will generate a lot of publicity, which media outlets tend to like. Further, it seems not unreasonable to suggest that the reasons many editors want the Venables details made public are rather less high-minded one that the principle of publicity as part of the judicial process.

To my mind any further details that are released about Venables, even down to exactly why he’s been banged up, make it more likely that he is IDed. When that happens, it’s only a matter of time before Venables is attacked, and possibly killed.

The alternative is that the probation services, police, judiciary and Home Office go through the process of creating a whole new identity for Venables.

I don’t think either of these options are in the public interest, and I don’t believe the notional trade-off – that public interest is satisfied – is worth it on balance.

Nevertheless, the media has blown its top and adopted its usual ‘pressure grows’ and ‘speculation is rife’ echo-chamber reporting on the issue in an effort to get at the details.

But it’s adopted a new technique too. The media is, in no uncertain terms, banned from going anywhere near the case so, in the case of Sky, appears to be actively encouraging the public to do its work for them.

Now, how long before a fellow inmate guesses who’s next to him in the dinner queue and fronts him up?

And whips out a mobile phone and takes a snap and makes a call and…you get the picture, or at least the Sun will.

Or somebody nicks the custody photograph, like they did with Fred West, and flogs it?

Venables was supposedly banged up again sometime in the past 10 days, along with around a thousand new prisoners.

Shouldn’t be difficult to identify a 27-year-old with a hint of a Scouse accent and a chip on his shoulder.

It could earn you more than your next armed robbery. And no risk of getting shot.

So there you have it – get a snap of Venables to the Sun and you could be rich. If you’re at a loss as to how to do this look at what happened with Fred West, or whip out your camera phone should you come across a new cellmate with a scouse accent in his late 20s.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for Venables given his track record, maybe he’s brought this on himself.

But ultimately the equation is a simple one. The more details about Venables that come to light, the more likely it is someone sticks a knife in him. I don’t see how that’s in the pubic interest either.

I’ve noticed a bit of an upsurge in emails asking me if I want to be part of something exciting!, BIG! or fantastic!. These are, invariably, invitations from some massive corporation to provide professional copy for them – for free.

The way this model works is fairly straightforward. The company takes your copy, and that of several dozen other journalists or bloggers, hosts in on ad-heavy sites or syndicates it to larger media organisations and watches the cash roll in.

In exchange it gives you nothing of real value, beyond vague promises of link juice, raising your profile or potentially the odd bone thrown from central office – a DVD or trip.

There’s another model a step above this that promises revenue share – a split of the advertising revenue generated from the page on which your articles sit. This will literally add up to a few pennies a day.

I’m aware of a few services that have contacted me in the past, offering decent copy at under a penny a word. How can anyone make a living out of that?

Likewise, there’s a whole host of subcontinental outfits offering cheap content from skilled writers. The costs from a client side don’t really stack up when you look at everything, but you can bet there’ll be plenty of agencies weighing them up against employing a UK-based hack.

Now, the market and collapse of newspaper and online ad revenues is ultimately to blame for all of this – that’s globalisation for you. Simply put, there are not enough jobs out there for skilled journalists, or snappers for that matter.

But I’m extremely uncomfortable with the way certain companies are taking advantage of this. They are, essentially, using free labour and making money off the back of it. Where to begin with the moral ramifications of that one?

Journalism is a skill without compare in many ways, in that it’s extremely hard to put a value on writing. Most quality stuff rises to the top in journalism but, in the online arms race for more and more content, crap will suffice a lot of the time.

So it’s becoming harder for good writers to stand out in a crowded market. Quite simply, that market isn’t too picky at the moment.

You might provide an article for less than you’d like, but someone else will do it for less. And if they do it for half the amount you would, who’s to say that it’s only half as good? Certainly not the Community Managers scavenging out-of-work journos and bloggers these days for free copy.

I find it hard to blame any journalists who do provide copy for free – that nebulous offers of ‘influence’ and ‘exposure’ may be a valuable one further down the line.

And short of some kind of universal ‘all for one’ stand by writers of every stripe on the planet, refusing to work for free is a rather empty – if noble – gesture, I fear.

To an extent working for free – especially in PR, journalism, advertising – has always been part of the equation, but when companies actively go out soliciting free work from professionals it’s a bridge too far.

What’s to be done? Send a polite but pointed reply turning the offer down?

That’s certainly my choice, but I’m gainfully employed. Who could blame an out-of-work journo or freelance hack for taking a punt?

There is no answer: there’s demand and there’s supply – no amount of wailing or gnashing of teeth is going to do anything about it.

I’m reminded of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: the powerless and exploited workforces; the lowering of standards; the compromise of quality for a fast buck.

It’s not edifying, but it’s the economic system we live in. Manual workers have been exploited in the way for decades, centuries even. Now it’s the turn of professionals.

I’m not really one for whinging about people using my stuff unattributed – as long as they’re not trying to make cash from it or I perceive it as something other than an honest mistake by someone not really au fait with netiquette.

A lot of the stuff I write gets syndicated out via feeds with varying, limited, amounts of the original text and a link back to the original article.

Generally I think this is fine, the idea being that you don’t extract the maximum value from the article, though I have my doubts about sites that exist simply to aggregate as much content as possible, regardless of accreditation.

I don’t think it’s good for the internet from a user experience perspective to have to trawl through sites crammed with aggregated content and optimised to the max, but that’s by-the-bye.

Where I draw the line is sites that make money from other peoples’ content. Which is where MyVillage.com, a local ents and listings site, comes in.

The site has dozens of subdomains representing areas around the UK and appears to be curated by a number of volunteer members.

All laudable stuff, but less laudable is the fact that the Liverpool section exists largely on dozens of articles apparently scraped from local blogs, including my own Liverpool Culture Blog.

David Bartlett’s Dale Street Blues blog is presented with a paragraph and link back to the original article, which is how you’re supposed to do these things.

But articles by me, articles from Art in Liverpool, articles from Paula Keaveny‘s local politics blog, and the Birkdale Focus politics blog are simply reprinted lock, stock and barrel.

Look a little closer at other subdomains around the site and this seems to be par for the course – blog posts reprinted wholesale, presumably taken from RSS feeds.

To give MyVillage the benefit of the doubt, maybe they have come to an arrangement with the owners of blogs that have donated the articles. But they didn’t ask me, and Ian Jackson didn’t know anything about it when I contacted him.

This is, depending on how you look at it, either extreme aggregation or copyright theft. It’s an area that’s become increasingly grey as aggregator sites push boundaries of what is deemed acceptable and social network sites further blur what belongs to the users and what belongs to the platform.

But really anyone should know that this sort of behaviour just fucks up the internet for the people who play by the rules. When you’re using copy and images belonging to other people and trying to make money off them it crosses a line.

With the content arms race taking place around the web this sort of thing can only become more prevalent as sites churn out as much as they can – regardless of quality, duplication or legality.

For bloggers and small independent sites the web only works if everyone enters the same gentleman’s agreement not to break the rules. Without those rules the whole thing just falls apart.

• I’ve emailed MyVillage asking them to take my articles down and explain how they came to be on the site in the first place. They haven’t replied.

• UPDATE: Having changed my RSS settings the articles now show an excerpt. Still no reply or evidence of action from MyVillage

• My articles on MyVillage

Snow brings Liverpool to its knees

Rev Billy exorcises Tesco

Best of Liverpool 2009

Ringo Starr message

39 steps review

Santa Dash photos

Dick Whittington review

RIP Derek B

Spike Milligan review

Don’t buy The Sun

Ground share article

Regular readers – there are regular readers, right? – will know that I reserve a special scorn for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free section; a comment and opinion subdirectory that collects viewpoints from across the political spectrum.

In itself, a section like this is laudable. It exposes people to new viewpoints, attitudes and lifestyles that the print version of The Guardian does not. Its strapline is ‘Comment Is Free… but facts are sacred’ – a quote from Grauniad progenitor CP Scott.

It’s a broad church, features some fascinating articles and regularly generates some vigorous debate.

However, I feel that that concept has been somewhat bastardised to create a deliberately provocative and emptily heated section of the website, where drivel like Sarah Palin’s climate change invective is published without comment.

Another recent article on video games relating to rape was similarly witless, and pulled apart by Comment Is Free regulars. And I think that’s the point.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that much of Comment Is Free constitutes link- and flamebait, dog whistling, tail pulling – whatever you want to call it.

It’s like the post on a forum that exists simply to irritate, the equivalent of poking a bee’s nest and running away. In web parlance it’s known as trolling.

It exists to provoke, and provoke it does. There are regularly hundreds of well-informed, well-written and well-argued comments on Comment Is Free posts, coming from many points of view.

Thousands of words of user-generated content, lots of outraged inbound links, lots of return traffic from people keeping tabs on the latest debate.

The Guardian’s site has become a slick SEO machine, as evinced by its URL keyword stuffing and habit of publishing several permutations of the same story, and perhaps a bit too good for its own good.

It’s clever, but it’s a step too far for me. I can’t believe that a lot of Comment Is Free isn’t simply designed to rile up The Guardian’s own readership, the very people who buy the newspaper, in order to generate more copy, links and hits from them.

Is this what happens to a newspaper’s content when too much thought is given to chasing traffic and the holy grail of user-generated content? Is it OK to debase and undermine your moral weight and editorial line in search of more web traffic?

Is the trade-off worth it? Crap, often dishonest, generally lazy, frequently hysterical and badly-structured arguments and articles in exchange for a few more hits, and a bit more cash?

There are other symptoms at other papers – the Indie seems to print a diet of increasingly outlandish lists, while the Torygraph recently printed this beauty, a disingenuous piece of phony conspiracy-theory outrage about Google gaming its own algorithm.

The Telegraph article is breathtaking in its dishonesty, but The Guardian is the worst – a serial offender that sticks two fingers up to its own readership every time it wittingly publishes another bad article.

I’m all for a broad church, I’m all for challenging viewpoints, and I’m all for user interaction – but it’s come to something when the newspaper is the troll.

The explosion of the web may have caught out newspapers and a lot of journalists, but early adopters have been able to thrive in an environment where one man’s threat is another’s opportunity.

Certainly the web has caused a lot of problems for media and journalists, but the tools to adapt to this changing market have been provided for us.

What’s more, the vast majority of the most important ones for bloggers, journalists, editors and even PRs and marketers are freely available, easy to use and – perhaps most importantly – free.

Some of these tools are suited to building traffic, some for measuring traffic, some for sharing or collecting information and others to add value to traditional content.

Some will suit you, others will not. A couple may even be irrelevant and I will make no claims for what they will do for your traffic, brand, revenues or social life.

But these are all tools that I use, in some cases vital tools, and if you accept the metaphor of modern journalist as media Swiss Army Knife you need to constantly develop your skills and make use of the largely free tools you have at your disposal.

There are, literally, thousands of them out there and it can be confusing as to which may be of help and which – in all likelihood – will not.

These are the tools and applications I find most useful and I’ve tried to keep the apps, and descriptions of them, fairly basic. There may be some obvious ones I miss out, which just means I haven’t got round to making use of them or I don’t consider them worth flagging up for starters.

There seems to be a lot of suspicion surrounding social media and Web 2.0 apps. All I have to say to that is this: They are tools. How, and whether, you use them is up to you.

The only criteria are that they’re predominantly free and they are basic, widely-available online tools or apps.

Anyway, without further ado here’s the selection. Dive in.

Twitter and related

Twitter is, to my mind, so important now for online media types that it’s got a category of its own.

Twitter

The Web 2.0 Telegraph is the most fitting description I’ve seen of Twitter. Twitter is simply the platform of choice for important communicators interacting with one another: promoting links, sharing information, asking for help or shooting the breeze.

If you’ve built up good contacts in relevant fields on Twitter it’s the most important tool you will use.

• See: Twitter
• See also: Robin on Twitter

Twitpic

One picture is worth a thousand words, or 140 characters. Show Twitter followers what’s got your attention by connecting up your phone to Twitpic.

You can set up Twitpic so it directly and instantly feeds to Twitter, even old mobiles can do it.

• See: Twitpic
• See also: Robin on Twitpic

Twitterfeed

If you have multiple blogs and multiple Twitter personas you need to make sure the correct blogs are feeding to the correct Twitters. Doing it manually can be pain in the backside, so automating a feed to post to Twitter is worth investigating.

There’s some debate as to whether automated posting goes against the grain a bit on Twitter. As with anything, moderation and common sense are key.

If you’re using Twitterfeed you don’t want more than a couple of automated posts a day. A deluge of links will get you unfollowed. And Twitterfeed is no substitute for proper engagement on Twitter.

• See: Twitterfeed
• See also: Twitterfeed on Twitter

Hootsuite

If you manage multiple accounts it’s simpler to manage them from the same place, rather than logging in and out and juggling usernames and passwords.

I initially used Tweetdeck but it’s awkward and buggy. Hootsuite is easier to use as it’s on a webpage; simpler; customisable; and has useful add-ons like stats, URL shortening and scheduled posting.

• See: Hootsuite

Bit.ly

Essentially anointed by Twitter as the link-shortener of choice, Bit.ly is probably the best too. It will take your long link and make it into a 20-char link that won’t eat up your 140 chars in a tweet.

A simple interface and some basic metric-tracking and sharing tools are the cherries on the cake.

• See: Bit.ly

Twitterholic

Looking a bit rough around the edges now but this is the tool I used to build a following on Twitter by finding people in similar places or with similar interests to me.

It’s always easier finding people who will reciprocate if you have something in common, an area where a lot of people trying to build a group of followers fall down.

• See: Twitterholic
• See also: Journalists on Twitterholic

---

Social bookmarking sites

Using social bookmarking sites simply to try and drive traffic can be fruitless and potentially damaging. All have unique communities and all are different, even if they don’t initially appear to be.

If you’re representing a brand you may want to think twice before submitting ill-fitting links to Digg, Reddit and Fark. If you’re not going to engage or observe how things work, don’t bother.

Also be aware that chasing traffic, as an end in itself, can be somewhat self-defeating. Choose your bookmarking carefully.

Digg

Using Digg to its maximum potential – in terms of traffic – takes time, effort and patience. As with Twitter, it’s about building a community and using that community to promote your links.

I think Digg has a fairly narrow band of opportunities for editors or journalists. Funny, techy or sporty stuff seems to do best as Digg users tend to use it to share distracting, fun stuff.

The obscene amounts of traffic The Onion and Cracked get from Digg seems to bear this out.

Occasionally I happen to write something I think will do well on Digg, and I make sure I write a header and description that will appeal to Diggers.

A well-placed story on Digg will send you hefty amounts of traffic, and it’s good for in-bound links too. Also bear in mind the reason it’s there – it’s fun.

• See: Digg

Delicious

Of very little use for generating traffic in the way Digg and Reddit are, Delicious has probably grown into the most pure social bookmarking application.

It’s beautifully simple and, because it’s searchable, is a great repository for valuable information.

It tends to be used by people working in media, PR, programming and marketing so it’s a gold mine of peer-approved guides and information in these areas.

• See: Delicious

Reddit

Not a million miles away from Digg, Reddit has an arguably broader focus and is easier to get into for newcomers.

Reddit’s community is not to be messed with however. Get a link submission wrong and you’ll know about it.

• See: Reddit

Fark

Digg on speed, or maybe acid. Fark consists of ‘not news’ chosen by a community and as such a very difficult tool to wield with any success.

In fairness Fark is not a tool at all, but can be used as such. Many international media have successfully harnessed Fark as a tool to drive vast amounts of traffic.

A story on the front page will deliver tens of thousands of hits over a very short space of time, which often leads to servers being ‘farked’ – brought down by the deluge of traffic.

A very good understanding of the community is required, and there’s a good opportunity to sharpen up your headline-writing skills. Only the very best stories and write-ups are greenlit, but the resulting traffic can be huge.

• See: Fark

---

RSS, alerts and readers

Tracking the websites that are important to you, and sharing your own content with readers is an important element of the online Swiss Army Knife.

Netvibes

I say Netvibes because it’s the one I use and I think it’s smart, but any reader or personalised home page will do – they’re essentially much of a muchness.

If you’re in media or PR you need to keep up with events on a daily basis. That means browsing potentially hundreds of feeds a day.

Grabbing an RSS feed and displaying it in your reader alongside 50 others is a lot easier than going to those individual sites.

Add-ons like widgets, increased sharing abilities and clever use of APIs from other apps like Facebook and Twitter means you can potentially browse, and interact with, all the relevant bits of the web from one page.

Most have a public setting too. As a result I have a public homepage on Netvibes that displays all my various online real estate around the web.

• See: Netvibes
• See also Robin’s public page on Netvibes

Tabbloid

Takes your feeds and displays them in a newspaper format. A bit clunky, and there are a few similar tools out there, but handy if you get square eyes looking at a normal reader.

Can also be used as a promotional tool to round up your output on a regular basis.

• See: Tabbloid
• See also Tabbloid sample

Feedburner

Allows you to track and edit your RSS feeds, share links and embed ads in your feed. No earth-shattering, but provides far more control over RSS feeds.

• See: Feedburner

Google Docs

Put e-documents online, quickly, easily and – er – freely.

• See: Google Docs

Google Alerts

Track a developing story, stay abreast of any news concerning particular companies or trends or steal a march over others on breaking news relating to your chosen keywords.

• See: Google Alerts

Twitterfeed

Again. See above for details

---

Multimedia

There are a hundred ways to tell a story these days. Use images, videos and music to bring yours to life.

Youtube

There are half a dozen good apps out there that will allow you to upload and share videos, but for simplicity’s sake I’ve gone with Youtube.

Youtube as a platform is only really as good as your videos, but as a tool it’s probably more versatile than you’d think.

Most obviously it provides some fantastic, free, embeddable multimedia content. If you can’t do something with that you’re probably in the wrong job.

Insight actually provides some useful metrics – the one measuring the attention span of watchers per video for one – while playlists, audio beds and annotations allow for some personalisation.

Add a customisable channel page and Youtube becomes a valuable tool in branding and hosting.

Live Stream and Vimeo may be more obvious, and going forward will come into their own, but for ‘quick and dirty’ Youtube is good enough for most.

• See: Youtube
• See also MotorTorque on Youtube

Flickr

Please be aware of what Flickr is not – a free image bank. If you’re going to use Flickr to source images you need to have a thorough understanding of Creative Commons licences, and some form of contact with individual authors.

Also, Flickr is not a link-building tool. Any links are nofollowed and business accounts are frowned on.

With that in mind Flickr can be invaluable for finding good quality images to accompany articles and is also a pleasantly simple image storage and presentation tool.

Image sets can be presented as embedded slide-shows, which can be a great visual dimension to a story alongside a static image.

Flickr can also be used to create links within photographer communities and can be used to promote photographic work.

Again, its largely self-policed by one of the more righteous online communities, so ensure you know what you’re doing.

• See: Flickr
• See also Robin on Flickr

Pixlr

Essentially an online Photoshop but cheaper (free actually), faster and simpler. Great tool that’s good enough for most photo manipulation.

• See: Pixlr

MPEG Streamclip

Good tool for video file conversion and some very basic editing features. Plays virtually anything. Can also be very good at capturing online videos if that’s your thing.

• See: MPEG Streamclip

Spotify

Weren’t expecting that one were you? But any new free app should be considered for the possibilities it provides.

A few brands have flirted with playlists, and I’ve done a couple of articles involving playlists to accompany articles.

There may not be a huge amount more scope than that, but Spotify is a free resource that offers free access to millions of tracks. Who saw that coming a couple of years ago?

• See: Spotify
• See also Crucial Three article on Liverpool Culture Blog

Morgue File

A good free image-bank site. The value of a good image to accompany an article can make all the difference. If you have access to a free image bank you’ve really no excuse. Remember to add a credit and check licenses though.

• See: Morgue File

Stock Xchng

Another great free image bank, with a premium level.

• See: Stock Xchng

---

Mash-up and added value apps

Add value to your content with embeddable mash-ups and media that complement your content.

Dipity

Great for building timelines for events that can be embedded. Connect up RSS feeds to feed a topic or add manually.

The added value it can bring to a running story is not to be underestimated – it’s shiny and it’s useful, especially if you’re using your own content to build timelines.

• See: Dipity
• See: Dipity US car industry timeline

Google Maps

Google Maps should be subtitled ‘not just maps’. Any amount of mash-ups can be created with the API, but it’s just as easy to create interactive co-operative maps using the site itself. Also works well with Google Earth.

As with Dipity, you can add value to content and tell another dimension to a story. A no-brainer for travel reports and write-ups.

• See: Google Maps
• See: Half Map Half Biscuit

Cover It Live

The ability to cover an event live on a self-hosted platform can be invaluable. Cover It Live allows administrators to host guests, guide discussions and moderate reader comments.

While Twitter may be a more obvious platform for micro-blogging, Cover It Live can be embedded into a web page, customised and managed in terms of who can contribute. Images and video can also be embedded in the stream.

Again, it can add another dimension to traditional coverage and bring live events to life.

• See: Cover It Live

Xtra Normal

A tool that allows you to convert to text spoken by an animated character may be gimmicky, but it can be fun.

Any blogger worth their salt should be able to think of something at least funny to do with it.

If Xtra Normal had been around 20 years ago we could have had animated reports of Gerry Adams speaking to the UK via an animated avatar.

• See: Xtra Normal
• See: Worried about acid erosion? on AdTurds

PollDaddy

Encourage user feedback and drive user-generated content with a poll – it can provide valuable insight or be used to drive original content itself.

Easy to configure and embed, you can stick it in the middle of an article one day and write a follow-up the next day based on the results.

• See: PollDaddy
• See also: Ten worst adverts of 2009 on AdTurds

---

Metrics, web editing and SEO

If you’re running a blog or website you want to be able to track its performance over a number of metrics. A basic understanding of SEO will benefit any journalist too.

Google Analytics

Or any decent analytics package that allows you to track, compare and dig down into various metrics.

Analytics will do all of that and more – you can’t seriously run a large website without something at least as powerful and detailed as Google’s statistics tool.

Analytics can be used at a very basic level for tracking your traffic and website performance, or can provide intricate details into what’s going on in the deepest reaches of your site if you drill down.

Makes a great pairing with Adsense.

• See: Google Analytics

Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools allow you to get your hands a little more dirty with the intricacies of web design and SEO.

If there are any obvious problems with the navigation and accessibility on your site, Webmaster Tools should flag them up, along with some SEO information on backlinks and keywords than may give you a different perspective on how your users – or search engines – view your site as opposed to how you view it.

• See: Webmaster Tools

Adsense

Making money from a blog or website can be something of a double-edged sword. I don’t have Adsense on any of my personal blogs, but do use it on other sites.

Simply put Adsense offers the ability to make money from your blog or site with a few clicks.

Style your ads, decide on what keywords you want to include on your ads, settle on placements and Adsense will generate code for you. Stick the code in your blog, verify your account and watch the cash roll in.

Don’t expect vast sums unless you’re doing thousands of impressions a day, and bear in mind the downside of changing your blog to a money-making device.

• See: Adsense

Google Trends

Stuck for blog topics or want to research a trend? Google Trends is a good way to track what’s popular, although Twitter Trends can be used in much the same way.

Comparing two or three different terms can be instructive if writing about brands, TV programmes or pop bands.

Trends also pairs up well with Insight, an advances search facility currently in Beta, which allows you to drill down into search data over different periods of time or by region and country.

Both are probably of more use to marketers, but keyword searches and tracking can also be useful for giving a fresh perspective on an article, creating unique content, driving Adwords campaigns or simply finding out who is currently winning out of Doctor Who and Star Trek.

• See: Trends
• See also: Who is winning out of Doctor Who and Star Trek?

Website Grader

A good all-in-one tool that will grade your site against others in terms of traffic, search engine placements, page rank and a dozen other metrics.

Can provide a good introduction to basic SEO and an insight into what you may be doing correctly or incorrectly.

• See Website Grader

---

Platforms

If you’ve not made the leap you’ll need a platform on which to host your blog or site. Make sure you pick a good one.

WordPress

So far in front of other blogging platforms it’s not even funny. WordPress hosted or self-hosted is easy to figure out, has an interface so intuitive it’s almost beautiful, good support and a peerless range of plug-ins.

If you’re a journalist you need a blog. If you need a blog, use WordPress. That is all.

• See: WordPress

Tumblr

Ultra-simple blogging platform that makes the easy-to-use WordPress look like quantum mechanics.

Tumblr’s simplicity and efficiency is its greatest strength, so if you need something that works out of the box and don’t need the extra bells and whistles, look no further.

• See: Tumblr
• See also: Robin on Tumblr

---

Promoting yourself

Much as it pains me to say it, you need to be a brand these days, and that means at least providing people with the means to browse your skills and experience.

I use this blog to do that, but there are a couple of other tools around the web worth a look.

LinkedIn

I’m not actively searching for freelance or seeking a new job, so I’ve not got much out of LinkedIn so far.

If and when I do I’ll no doubt investigate further as this is what everyone uses. I’m not clear how much business actually gets done on LinkedIn, but for now I’ve got a page on there with the basics on.

• See: LinkedIn
• See also: Robin on LinkedIn

ReTaggr

Unsure about ReTaggr at the moment, but it does what it says on the tin – essentially an online business card.

• See: ReTaggr
• See also: Robin on ReTaggr

• Image by Noodlepie on Flickr via Creative Commons

NB. There are 38

I’m feeling a bit ambivalent about AA Gill’s revelation that he shot a monkey on holiday for the sheer hell of it.

Included in Gill’s restaurant review for the Sunday Times was a sizeable chunk of the text given over to how he ‘blew its lungs out’ in an effort to see what it would be like to kill something, or kill ‘a close relative’.

I’m uncertain as to what Gill thought he would learn from this experience, though to wind back a bit I do think his first principle is an interesting one.

A charitable reading of his column might suggest that Gill is dubious about how we’re inured to violence both real and fictionalised these days, through the news and shoot-em-up films.

The way that modern life shields us from the reality of death is a common theme in newspaper columns these days too – and I think it’s an issue worth exploring.

But to go from this to shooting a baboon is like worrying what we can do about sexual crimes and then raping someone in an attempt to acquire a greater understanding of the issue.

Anyway, I suspect all the predictable attention on Twitter will only serve to provide Gill a satisfied feeling of validation. Rather like Clarkson he’s a superbly entertaining writer who frames his various chunterings on the world in a column ostensibly concerning cars in Jezza’s case and food in AA’s case.

But both marry their talent to a tiresome iconoclasm that rails against civil society and accepted mores, serving to provide a thrill of the taboo for conservative readers and an object of anger for others.

Media and public alike lap up this kind of mould-breaking, which often skirts taste, decency and – for want of a better word – political correctness. It’s a well-established routine, and well-practicsed by the likes of Clarkson, Gill and Julie Burchill.

Some might say that Gill has misjudged his act this time. I don’t think he’ll see it that way, in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he went and shot a primate in the knowledge that he would attract exactly this sort of response.

I’ve indicated before that I believe newspapers, with an online audience in mind, are deliberately courting this sort of controversy and I don’t expect this will be the last outrage of its kind.

Twitter has duly gone into attack mode, but I think to raise Gill’s idiocy to the ranks of Jan Moir’s nasty Gately column is a mistake.

This latest episode also raises the prospect of a semi-regular apoplexy of the week on Twitter, where the right-on fraternity go bonkers over any perceived slight, act of stupidity or ideological movement that captures the imagination of Twitter’s lefty groupmind.

It’s not an attractive prospect because I’m not sure the Twitter fraternity, acting as one, can really discern between what’s worth mobilising over and what’s worth writing off as an attention-seeking publicity stunt.

I was with the Twitterati over the NHS, Trafigura, the Mail’s gypsy poll and Jan Moir. But Twitter’s wrong over Gill, and I don’t think it will be the last time.

• UPDATE: Jon Henley has written an article over at The Grauniad that follows on from some of the stuff in this post and uses some quotes from me. See The power of tweets

At a guess Jan Moir has had about 10,000 tweets devoted to slating her intelligence, appearance and humanity today, following a nasty little article in the Daily Mail about Stephen Gately’s death.

Moir managed to get to the top of Twitter’s top trends, normally reserved as a kind of telegraph system for broadcasting death notices of celebrities, for a good couple of hours today – probably giving her the kind of widespread publicity most journalists would pay for.

In the article Moir states that there was ‘nothing natural’ about Gately’s death; writes a couple of hundred words of innuendo and speculation about the supposedly sordid final hours of the Bozone singer; and ends her article with the implication that all same-sex civil partnerships are doomed to end in an early death.

Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.

Moir, whether deliberately or not, conflates homosexuality with ‘dangerous’ lifestyles and ‘dark’ appetites, also dragging the death of Matt Lucas’ former partner into the argument.

It’s the kind of thing that the Mail, its columnists and readers revel in so it comes as no surprise to me. However the Twittersphere has seen things differently and sent tens of thousand of volleys of personal abuse the way of Moir.

Moir is the kind of self-righteous female columnist lampooned by Private Eye who make a habit of furiously attacking other women for their appearance, tread the tiresome ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ line and exist in a world where every crapulous observation is accompanied by an equally terrible pun.

They’re mean, spiteful and full of themselves, and newspapers lap them up. Here are some previous greatest hits:

• ‘Eating a ham sarnie causes cancer? These ham-fisted food fascists are just pig ignorant’ – Moir knows more about cancer than the World Cancer Research Fund

• ‘Oh, dear! That was a total dog’s breakfast’ – Moir slates Alastair Darling and his wife for their appearance

• ‘Jade was a unique and very brave girl. But let’s not pretend she was a saint’ – Moir criticises the freshly-dead Jade Goody

The Gately article is nasty, insidious stuff but it’s kind-of par for the course for these kind of columnists.

Where this case differs is that vast amounts of people can now access their work via websites, which were previously accessible only to newspaper buyers.

So, Moir becomes the most-insulted person on Earth for a day. But I strongly doubt the Mail will take the article down, with all the traffic and link juice such attention-seeking articles garner.

It’s the same reason The Grauniad’s Comment Is Free section keeps printing articles designed to specifically bait its own readership.

Inbound links, hits, ad clicks, user-generated content, publicity. They’re all likely to outweigh any negative publicity. And the Mail’s readership are hardly likely to see anything wrong with the article.

I suspect Moir herself will lap it up – she’s the kind of columnist that thrives on hatred.

Then again, it’s not every day one gets to see someone on the receiving end of such comprehensive come-uppance, so my gratitude to Twitter for its amusing and heartfelt outpouring of hatred.

• There’s already a Facebook group demanding a retraction and a suggestion that the article breaks several PCC rules. You can view the form here.

UPDATE: Well, I didn’t see this coming

UPDATE 2: Moir has apologised, though it’s a decidedly mealy-mouthed half apology:

“The point of my column – which I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read – was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

“In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages. In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”

This was exactly the kind of ‘what a lot of fuss over nothing’ response I’d expected, but it seems that if you hit papers where it hurts – in the wallet – even the likes of the Mail are forced to backtrack.