I had planned to use Dipity, which I’ve heard good things about. But when I created an account, I didn’t see how to manually build a timeline. At least with the free account. I saw a lot of auto-update ability tied into other media accounts (YouTube, Flickr, RSS feeds). But I wanted to add bullets as far back as 1890. I didn’t have a Google account back then.

The reporter had learned about Time Glider while at a Knight Digital Media Center multimedia seminar, so I decided to try it. Check out the result, then let’s go to the bullet points.

Pros

• Simple, web-based interface that’s easy to learn.
• Embeddable
• Highly customizable: You can upload photos directly or link to images on your own server. You can change the icon with each point. You can assign relative significance to each point on the timeline.
• Linking out: Give your readers a taste and link to the full story
• Free!

Cons

• Requires Flash support.
• Clunky on the user end. You can adjust your view from the month to the century level (or anything in between). But scrolling and jumping between items didn’t feel instantly right.
• No thumbnails. Photo support is great, but you have to scale your images to 200px or below to avoid clutter. It would be great to be able to expand a thumbnail on the timeline to a bigger image.

In hindsight, I might use this again, but only if working with a time span tighter than 130 years. I’d much prefer to roll my own — after I learn django and improve my CSS skills.

Brothers Cody and Kyle Ives travel the world performing a motorbike stunt known alternately as the Globe of Steel, Globe of Thunder and Globe of Death. They performed in Spokane at the Inland Northwest Motorcycle Show and Sale on Friday, Feb. 12, 2010.

I shot and edited this Friday night at the Inland Northwest Motorcycle Show and Sale in Spokane. It was definitely a Plan B effort. I’d intended to get footage of Spokesman-Review columnist Doug Clark standing in the middle of this globe with rider Cody Ives buzzing around him. Let’s just say technical difficulties changed that.

At least I managed to salvage a little eye candy for speed geeks.

Here’s my take from Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010:

• Rewrote headlines for the web and tagged stories that exported from our print edition.
• Posted breaking news to Twitter ahead of local competitors.
• Edited and uploaded audio clips for a story that runs next week.
• Created a slide show for a story running Friday: Operation Lake Pend Oreille Trout Catcher.
• Posted breaking news about Bill Clinton’s arteries.
• Brainstormed a strategy for news expected to break in the next couple days.
• Posted more stories to the Web with excellent headlines.
• Added addresses to approximately 100 stories from the past two weeks to feed a great new feature on the The Spokesman-Review’s mobile site.

That filled more than eight hours, especially the last one. Things not included that I regularly do: shooting and editing video; coding and visualizing data; posting content to our Facebook page; training colleagues in our content management system and other online tools.

Hope this was illustrative.

It gets better.

Besides a couple crucial newspapers and links I follow from Twitter, I don’t do much of my reading on the originating websites. Though I’m perpetually behind, Google Reader remains my main portal.

And thanks to this post, I was able to integrate my Publish2 account and public Reader shared items page. Click once, share twice*. You can set it up so Publish imports these shared items automatically or manually, you can add tags, you can add notes. I’m going automatic, but if I were aiming this feed at the publication I work for, I might choose a greater level of control.

No, this tweak won’t save newspapers. And neither will link sharing via services such as Publish2, at least not by itself. But integrating services does save headaches, and it’s worth exploring more ways to apply this technology.

* Or more, depending on how many places I direct my Publish2 and Reader feeds.

I found this at my dad’s house during a Christmas visit. Conference swag. Although it wasn’t that long ago, the title seemed dated. A new media artifact.

If you look closely, you can see a date. But I’ve blurred out the year. Care to guess? (No Google.)

Download a crop of the image to check your answer.

It’s not like there’s much to do. Anyone who has figured out Twitter’s web interface will quickly get the hang of making a list.

But because I’ve been tasked with integrating this feature with my workplace account, @spokesmanreview, I thought I’d read up a bit. I saved the best of what I found using Publish2 so that I could easily share the links in this post with the handy Wordpress plugin.

My biggest question was about how a journalist could make better use of Lists. I hope you find these links helpful.

• Twitter Lists; Limitations, bugs, impact, and brilliance
  scobleizer.posterous.com | October 18, 2009
• How Journalists Can Use Twitter Lists to Customize, Discover and Curate
  Poynter Institute | October 29, 2009
• Twitter Lists: Frequently Asked Questions and Strategies
  mashable.com | November 3, 2009
• 10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists
  Mashable | November 4, 2009

Despite their interest in producing video, I suggested the students start with an audio slide show. So I set out to show them how to do two things: 1) Create a multitrack audio file in Audacity. 2) Combine this audio with photos in the irresistibly simple Soundslides program.

If you’re curious, here’s the rough outline I followed. And here’s what workshop attendee Rikki King of the Daily Evergreen took away from the session.

Finally, a couple useful links for anybody interested in mastering audio slide shows from Colin Mulvany.

• Great audio starts in the field
• How to make your audio slideshows better

(Disclaimer: File this under “off topic,” “not rocket science” and “somebody has probably written about this elsewhere.” I’m just pleased as punch about this discovery, I wanted to share, and this is my soapbox.)

Create a new smart playlist with this criterion (brackets denote dropdown-menu variable):

[Last played] [is not in the last] x [months]

I went with 12 for an even year, and I also added a genre specification. So for me, the settings looked like this:

Give it a name, and you’re done.

When I load this playlist, I’m guaranteed to get a bunch of songs I haven’t heard for a year. And let me tell you, when it’s been a year since I’ve listened to Ween’s “Push the Little Daisies,” something was out of whack.

I’ve long known the smart playlist tool was there, but only today did I get up the curiosity to see what I could make of it. Hope you like this trick, and feel free to share your own from this highly customizable feature.

MSNBC.com Likely Will Add EveryBlock Feeds To Its Local Section In ‘Next Few Months’
paidContent | August 17, 2009

ryansholin: Over at Publishing2.0, I’ve gathered my EveryBlock and YCombinator notes just for you: http://bit.ly/2yArEy
Twitter | August 17, 2009

onemoreryan: Good grief, maybe @everyblock didn’t WANT to be acquired by a newspaper co! Why would they? Even a chain limits locales. MSNBC offers scale.
Twitter | August 17, 2009

michael_duvall: RT @chicagonow Twitter gives props to EveryBlock – Breaking Tweets Chicago http://bit.ly/44ioW
Twitter | August 17, 2009

MSNBC.com Buys EveryBlock as Interest in Local Content Grows | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
All Things Digital | August 17, 2009

Reflections of a Newsosaur: How did newspapers lose Everyblock?
newsosaur.blogspot.com | August 17, 2009

MSNBC.com acquires EveryBlock
blog.everyblock.com | August 17, 2009

EveryBlock acquisition and me
Holovaty.com | August 17, 2009

At first blush, I’m impressed by the ease of use. The plugin is highly customizable, but I started largely with the default settings. I do intend to go in and figure out some better styling for the links.

To create the list above was simple.

1. Start a new post. The Publish 2 Link Assist – which I enabled under Users -> Your Profile (scroll to the bottom) – pops a sidebar to the right of the new post interface. The sidebar displays links from whatever Publish2 URL you enter. While enabling Link Assist, you can customize this. I directed it to my link page but I may go back to the default page of all users’ recent links.
2. Find a link you want to share (you can filter by tags) and click the “link” or “Add link and details/tweet/video” button. The first inserts the link into your post. The second will supply all the information you set the plugin to include on its setting page. I used the “details” option for  the list above.

And that’s it.

I love the underlying principle of Publish2: curation. It’s the role I relish most at work, wading through the online information glut to pick out the best. Publish2’s tools make saving and sharing these links a breeze.

For this post, I took a topic that users had curated down to 27 items. From there, I picked out a handful that I liked (including my own, of course!). From the potential torrent of Google results relating to EveryBlock, I was able to grab some standout items.

I look forward to playing with this useful plugin more, especially the sidebar widget capabilities.

More links:

• If you want to read more about Publish2’s projects, follow the Publishing 2.0 blog.
• Here’s more about the company.
• Here’s a good summary of the principles behind the project.

During my high school and newspaper reporting days, I wrote no more than four sports stories, all features. And I’d never tried to photograph, let alone video, athletes on the fly.

So it was ambitious to choose as my subject the game of quad rugby, also known as “Murderball.” But damn if it wasn’t worth it. The game is filled with collisions and athletes breaking up and down the court. The players exert themselves quite visibly. And the crowd gets into it.

Here’s the result. Dive deeper into the post for more post-mortem. Also, find the trailer for the outstanding documentary “Murderball.”

Learning to anticipate the action of the game was crucial. I should have watched for a while before hitting record. As a result, I had a lot of unusable b roll.

But after the rugby players rolled up and down the court a half-dozen times, I started to get a feel for the game and could start sequencing my shots.

I also watched other photographers and videographers. I saw how they moved around. I saw how they got low. Worrying about shaky camera syndrome, I relied heavily on my sticks, which made me feel encumbered. I wish I’d taken more chances and worked around the whole perimeter, moving to the action instead of waiting for it to come to me. I wish I’d visited with the athletes on the sidelines, getting tight shots of their chairs, gloves, faces.

I attended two games because my interviews after the first left me without A roll that established the story (i.e. I needed somebody to talk explicitly about the game of quad rugby, if only for a few seconds). On my first day, the hall was relatively quiet for my post-game interviews. On my second, music blared. In both cases, I wish I’d used my wireless mic. The rock anthems pervaded the hall, so finding a quiet spot wasn’t an option. The wireless mic might have helped.

Basically, I was caught flat-footed. I had to compete with other reporters to flag down the exhausted athletes, and I was asking them to talk with me before changing into more comfortable equipment and fresh clothes. For instance, the first guy in the video, Delvin McMillian, had lost his extremities to hanta virus and so had athletic tape all what remained of his forearms. I could tell he was itching to unwrap it. Making him wait while I attached and checked the levels on my wireless unit seemed cruel.

The biggest takeaway, I guess, is that I need to be more aggressive when covering these kinds of events. Hesitation can kill.

Below: Trailer for the documentary “Murderball” (2005)