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Tech & Tools

Tech & Tools

Easily Create Web Pages for Most Anything Smallpdf.com - A Free Solution to all your PDF Problems GISS (IS NOT) TV Choose from a Kit | Scroll Kit Blank Use Kit Intro Use Kit Basic Profile Page Use Kit flavor tripping party invite Use Kit confetti birthday card Use Kit counterfeit obama website Use Kit Facebook kit Use Kit Tips New open source tool to help reporters rethink quotes in stories Credit: Image from Thinkstock Quotes are often the most interesting part of a story. They can help the audience relate or identify more with the topic and strengthen the reporting, but quoting a source in text often doesn't do justice to the impact their words could have in audio or video form. This is why The Times is testing quickQuote, a tool that uses videos and automatic transcription to make quotes easier to find and use in articles. "The initial problem was finding a way to make it easier and more interesting to work with video in the newsroom," said Pietro Passarelli, former newsroom developer intern at The Times, who developed quickQuote. Earlier this year, The Times also experimented with audio quotes, using the format in its multimedia coverage of the 7/7 bombings anniversary. QuickQuote, which was open-sourced last week, requires users to upload their video footage and then provides an automated transcription using natural language processing. Screenshot from quickQuote.

Editor e gravador de áudio livre 20 tools and resources every journalist should experiment with Tools have always come from the need to carry out a specific task more effectively. It's one of the main differences between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. We may still be slaves to the same old evolutionary urges but we sure know how to eat noodles in style. In journalism, an abstract tool for uncovering the most interesting and insightful information about society, we can generally boil the workflow down to four stages: finding, reporting, producing and distributing stories. So with that in mind, here are a range of tools which will – hopefully – help you carry out your journalism tasks more effectively. 1. A somewhat simplistic start to the list, maybe, but Google has many tricks that every self-respecting journalist should be taking advantage of. While it is very good for a spot of online shopping and business, journalists need to learn a few tweaks and tips to improve their online searching with the use of search operators. The site search function (e.g. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by Richard Stallman When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. The free software movement has campaigned for computer users' freedom since 1983. Not all of the users and developers of free software agreed with the goals of the free software movement. “Free software.” Fear of Freedom Conclusion

Creating Animated Bubble Charts in D3 - Jim Vallandingham Update: I moved the code to its own github repo - to make it easier to consume and maintain. Update #2 I’ve rewritten this tutorial in straight JavaScript. So if you aren’t that in to CoffeeScript, check the new one out! Recently, the New York Times featured a bubble chart of the proposed budget for 2013 by Shan Carter . As FlowingData commenters point out , the use of bubbles may or may not be the best way to display this dataset. In this post, we attempt to tease out some of the details of how this graphic works. #Simple Animated Bubble Chart In order to better understand the budget visualization, I’ve created a similar bubble chart that displays information about what education-based donations the Gates Foundation has made. You can see the full visualization here And the visualization code is on github **Warning Coffeescript** The example is written in [CoffeeScript]( as I find it much easier to read and write than javascript. #D3’s Force Layout #nodes #gravity #alpha

Unleashing Creativity: Greg Kulowiec App Smashing - from Beth Holland Greg Kulowiec begins his session by asking, “Why limit our students to one tool at one time?” With App Smashing, students can create content with a variety of apps and then publish it to the web – don’t let content “die on your iPad.” The general concept between App Smashing is merging content from a variety of apps. Toolkit for App Smashing – keep it simple! The key to App Smashing is the camera roll – use apps that can save to camera roll or take screen captures and bring them in. While the concept is to create content, get it into a central location, and make something with it, now, what can you do???? App Smash Creations Create a multimedia book about whatever concept, topic or idea is happening in class. Create a published web-book that can be exported to the web as a PDF. “Making books if fun, but advanced video can be more fun,” says Greg. The ThingLink Smash is one of Greg’s favorites. Common Craft Videos are also possible as App Smashes. >> View Greg’s presentation materials Save

Analyzing the Top 30 Infographics on Visually Ever wonder what makes an infographic successful? Why do some infographics accumulate more than 1 million views and others, barely 100? We’ve talked about viral infographics before, from a creative process standpoint: the story, data and design of an infographic all play a role in whether it will appeal to the masses, as does the way it is promoted. But what does viral content have in common? The primary statistic used is unique pageviews accumulated since the Visual.ly website launched in July 2011. The graphics can be grouped into buckets based on four dimensions: 1. We’ll look at content type (1), design type (3), and data visualization (4) in this post, and leave a study of content domains, or topics, for another day. Four Content Types (The SVG charts embedded below link to the individual graphics, but may not appear in some browsers). 1. 54,097 avg. unique views per graphic (excluding outlier) 2. 45,440 avg. unique views per graphic (excluding outlier) 3. 4. Six Design Types

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