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)

Here’s where media relations people are your friends. At the official games site, somebody had helpfully prepared bios of Spokane-area athletes who would be competing.

A lot of these guys – and they were all guys – were competing for the first time. But I noticed one who had been to the games before and seemed to be pretty active in the veterans community. When I called up Brent King, of Cheney, he was happy to work with me.

Check out the almost-finished* product below, then keep reading for why I’m not happy with it.

OK, the production value is pretty good, but there are a number of reasons I’m dissatisfied with this project.

1. It’s dull. There’s not a lot of pop, from beginning to end. Nor snap, nor crackle. The closest thing is, somewhat literally, the sound of the air-rifle pellets hitting the back of the trap.
2. It’s repetitive. I’ll elaborate with something I posted to Twitter last week.
   

   Learning, Part 1: I am mining the B roll on this video for every usable second. And here I thought I’d collected plenty.

   For those learning the jargon, the B roll refers to everything you see that is not a talking head. And I wish I’d found more to work with than target practice.

3. It’s shiny. King told me, in jest, that he hoped I made his bald head look good. My goal is, of course, neither to make subjects look good nor bad. But because I chose an outdoor setting (hello, birdies) to shoot the interview with King, his bald head becomes pretty, um, unnoticeable. Despite the lovely cattails in the background, I wish I’d set up in a shadier spot.
4. It’s got my voice in it. I don’t like to do voiceover. I know it can be done compellingly, like in this recent collaboration between videographer Colin Mulvany and reporter Kevin Graman. But I have yet to find the formula when I’m the one talking. I can’t help but wonder if I’d phrased my questions a little differently I could have elicited responses from King that would have told the story on their own.

You might recall the asterisk above. I say “almost finished” because I’m covering some live events at the games this week, and I plan to stop by King’s first air gun event to get some footage of him in competition. I’ll edit this into my original video to create version 2.0. I credit this idea to my colleague Dan Pelle, who did the same with this much more impressive Bloomsday story. But perhaps with some more B roll, I can give this video a little bit more snap, crackle or pop.

That’s enough self-flagellation for tonight. What do you think?

We (as co-workers other than me) debuted a new feature on spokesman.com videos today: video embedding.

If you check out my previous post, you’ll note that the video player looks identical to the one on spokesman.com. Thanks to Brian Immel, it is!

To grab the code on any Spokesman-Review video, just click the <> button in the lower right of the player, click “copy code,” then paste on your blog or elsewhere.

This is a great step forward in sharing the multimedia talents of Spokesman-Review photographers and videographers. We get our content out there, and we get the clicks. But why should you care? Well…

If you’re a food blogger, you might like to share this Jesse Tinsley slideshow on challah.

If you’re a sports fan, this Best of the West award-winning homage by Dan Pelle on high school coach Ron Long is worth reposting:

If you’re a weather buff, Colin Mulvany’s hustle on a serious mess on Stevens Street during last winter’s record snow is one for the books:

And if you just love a great story, consider spreading this collaboration by Kathy Plonka (photography) and Dan Pelle (production) about a Coeur d’Alene couple who got a new purpose in life when they adopted four grandchildren:

I tip my hat to my talented co-workers in this post. In the future, I’ll repost some of my own work on this space.

We’ve got about eight photos and some audio. I’m asked to put it all together in a slideshow. And I couldn’t be happier. I’ve always loved the edit process best, so when good material lands in my lap, I feel like a kid at play. Compression issues kept me a little late, but I was able to pound this one out fairly quickly. My reward was pretty good traffic over the weekend.

Click on the screengrab below to view the result at spokesman.com, where you’ll also read about how to adopt one of these dogs. See that yawning puppy? He’s saying either “click me!” or “pick me!” You might just be lucky enough to do both.

I spent the first half of May traveling in Central Europe. Pleasure, not business. So I think I’ll ease back into this with some photos from my trip. I recommend clicking the full-screen button in the lower right of the player.

Prague

I spent about six days in the shining city of a thousand spires. I used to live there, so this trip was mostly about revisiting favorite places. But I did make it to Terezin, a former concentration camp I’d never visited.

Budapest

I’d never been to this city, and I fell in love. I almost stayed. The food, the people, the thermal baths, the Unicum. So much to enjoy. Getting there was an adventure, as a short-notice rail strike nearly left me stranded at the Slovakian border. A kind family gave me and another American a ride to the town of Esztergom, however, and told us what bus to take into Budapest. A memorable beginning.