Mapping calendar entries made me think, if this could be used for other stuff than simply putting events on a map, – which is quite useful in it’s own way. I thought it would be cool if you could create an interactive map-timeline, controlled dynamically by a (shared)calendar.

Read the rest of this tutorial in my article on the Online Journalism Blog.

Here’s a short rundown of the main points in the first draft.

What is Google Maps?

A free mapping service that provide easy tools for creating simple, interactive maps that can be embedded in any web page. – And, crazy useful for journalists.

Why you should use it?

Maps are probably one of the oldest forms of visuals, that has been used in news reporting. Apart from static maps, such as jpg images, interactive maps lets you put additional data such as images and video on top of the map. Interactive markers let the user decide what information they want, and when they want it. The web is not a passive media, it’s active and engaging and users want to be in control.

How you use it

First of all you need a Google account. If you haven’t already got one then it’s about time. Google has their own tutorial, and if Google has done something, they’ve probably done it the best, so I will shamelessly steal directly from theirs (btw. if you don’t like to read, watch the video demo). First of all log in to you Google account and go to Google Maps.

Creating your first map.

1. Click My Maps
2. Click Create new map.
3. Add a title and description for your map.
4. Decide whether the map should be public or unlisted. Public maps are automatically included in Google Maps search.
5. Use the icons in the top left corner of the map. These include:

Selection tool. Use this to drag the map and select placemarks, lines and shapes.
Placemark tool. Use this to add placemarks.
Line tool. Use this to draw lines.
Shape tool. Use this to draw shapes.

Adding Photos/Text

You can add photos to your map, as long as they are hosted online. Please use a service such as Google PicasaWeb to put your photos online.

To add photos:

1. Create or open a map.
2. Click the appropriate placemark, line, shape. The info window appears.
3. Click Edit.
4. Choose Rich Text or Edit HTML.
5. If you chose Rich Text mode, click the photo icon above the description field (the last one in the toolbar). Enter the URL of the photo you would like to add.
6. If you chose Edit HTML mode, use the <img> tag to add photos. For example, <img src=”http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/images/maps_results_logo.gif” width=150 height=55> adds the Google Maps logo to your map with a width of 150 pixels and a height of 55 pixels.
7. Click OK to save your changes.

Adding Videos

You can add Google Video and YouTube videos to your map. To do this:

1. Create or open a map.
2. Click the appropriate placemark, line or shape. The info window appears.
3. Click Edit.
4. Choose Edit HTML.
5. Find the video you want on YouTube or Google Video. Copy the snippet of code that lets you embed the video into a website or blog.
   • On Google Video, the snippet looks like this:
     <embed style=”width:400px; height:326px;” id=”VideoPlayback” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-274981837129821058&hl=en” flashvars=”"> </embed>
   • On YouTube, the snippet looks like this:
     <object width=”425″ height=”350″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/hKoB0MHVBvM”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/hKoB0MHVBvM” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”350″></embed></object>
6. Paste the snippet of code into the description field of your placemark, line or shape.
7. Click OK to save your changes.

Here’s an even simpler version of the above for the complete beginner.

This is just a rough draft and intro to why journalists should use Google Maps, I would love to hear if you got any better motivation factors for why journalists should use this brilliant service.

Friendfeed let’s you publish everything, or a few selected services to Twitter. If you have a lot of stuff going into your Friendfeed stream, you might not want to share everything on Twitter.

Sign up for an account on Friendfeed if you haven’t already got one. Import your Google Reader shared items and go to your Advanced Twitter Setting. Check the box that says ‘Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter by default’, then select to share ‘The services I’ve selected below’ and put a check mark in Google Reader. Save Changes and your shared items will be republished to Twitter.

Link to the original source or the Friendfeed entry?

You might notice that at the top of the settings page, you have the choice of ‘Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments)’. If you don’t check this box, the link you send to Twitter will send your visitors to your Friendfeed entry. If you like me, want to encourage people to subscribe to your Friendfeed page you might like this. But for most people using Friendfeed only for this purpose, it makes sense to check it and send your visitors to the source.

Ryan has a great post on a more detailed strategy for sharing links, I encourage you to read it of you frequently share links on different platforms.

And… if you’re not too hung up on the Google Reader interface, consider installing Feedly into Firefox. It allows you to easily share stuff on Twitter, it even shorten the link.

It seems like hardcore twitter users are mostly trying to compare the two services, and friendfeed users take pride in separating the two.

I have been describing friendfeed as Twitter on steroids which I believe to be true to some extend. At least to someone who’s not familiar with friendfeed but is using Twitter like nobody’s business.

Some of the stuff that to me shows their differences are the fact that, you can’t link to individual comments and on Twitter we hate when users are simply spamming their streams with automatic rss feeds, where on friendfeed we love it. To me it suggests that people expect more intimacy on Twitter than they do on friendfeed, or that Twitter users expects some kind of selective sharing, where on friendfeed you are expected to share everything by default.

A lot of features separate the the services. Friendfeed has an impressive set of features that Twitter lack. This will undoubtly make friendfeed more popular by tech geeks and social media addicts who are used to dealing with lots of information and needs these filtering options. But, it seems like only a very small amount of friendfeed users can actually handle that amount of info, as only a small percentage of it’s users are actually subscribed to more than 40 friends. Or, is that just a snapshot of the active user-base that friendfeed currently has? Is Mike Arrington right after all?

here are some of the responses I got on friendfeed. I’m sorry I can’t link to them ;-)

friendfeed will not be superior to twitter for conversation before a feature to easily isolate, and link to individual comments is released.

I say:

[E]specially bloggers and news reporters, frequently use responses they get to questions posed on twitter in their final stories. Such responses would be impossible to link to here on friendfeed. And if friendfeed can’t persuade bloggers and news-makers to come over here, friendfeed will have a very hard time getting a substantial user-base.

Lindsay D.:

FriendFeed has a loyal following and community, many of who prefer it to Twitter for their day to day communication with others online, and take offense to Twitter being referred to as superior [...] FriendFeed outshines Twitter in many ways, and is much better for conversation in my opinion.

Lindsay D.:

So I would suggest that FF’s goal may not be to have bloggers linking comments in their blogs, but getting the whole conversation here instead. [...] I think the people who prefer Twitter are not the same as the people that prefer FriendFeed because they have different needs and expectations.

I say:

[A]n interesting take, that friendfeed is trying to steer away from individual comments because they want to focus on the whole debate. I think individual comments can be worth more than that, and a feature to like comments or link to them would be very useful I think. For example; a question about someones opinion on X, is encouraging opinion regardless of context and would give a lot of individual viewpoints that likely could be very worthy, even out of context.

This was simply some selective highlighting of the main points, but if you want the whole picture and participate in the discussion, I recommend you take a look at the original friendfeed entry.

I really like the potential of Friendfeed, and I want to get a few more subscribers than the 11 I have got now . here are a few of the things I’m going to try to change that.

• Use Friendfeed to post status updates.
  I will start posting status updates to Friendfeed and cc twitter. This will show my subscribers that I’m actually using Friendfeed and not just aggregating. The problem with people that only aggregate, is that they probably won’t see the comments you make on their entries. By posting actively to Friendfeed I can show that Iactually spend time there. The other upside is that all my short URLs on twitter will be ff.im/xxxxxx, people on twitter using Friendfeed can see that I’m on Friendfeed and maybe they’ll subscribe (I know it’s a long shot but anyway).
  Update: I have my twitter settings set to ‘Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation’, deselect that, and your twitter links go directly to your Friendfeed entry instead of the link source. It publicises your Friendfeed account more, but it also requires one more click on your users’ part. Scobleizer and Thomas Hawk use this so it can’t be that bad, considering they are some of the biggest Friendfeed users. – Maybe I should try it?
• Join rooms and, most importantly, contribute.
  Contribute to the community! Friendfeed supports ‘groups’ as they call them. Everyone can create their own room and invite others to post to them, this gives a space for a community to have a specialised discussion. A little like you know it from forums and discussion boards. Posting to these rooms should get my name out there to the Friendfeed community and hopefully a few people will notice and follow me.
• Use the Friendfeed bookmarklet
  The Friendfeed browser bookmarklet is actually quite handy. It works almost like the Shareaholic Firefox add-on . You can share anything on Friendfeed by the click of button. It’s an extremely easy way to post interesting links, and if you use the post to twitter option your links will go straight to your twitter stream. No more copy pasting into Tweetdeck or various URL shortening services.
• Discuss on Friendfeed, not twitter.
  I will start engaging more in the discussions that are happening on Friendfeed. It’s super easy to follow discussions on Friendfeed, they are all grouped together around the original post, like a blog post.
• Using saved searches (filters).
  This saved searches are really filters, bu t I guess saved searches make more sense to the average user. These let’s me filter for keywords, like count and comments count. Great feature if you want to cut down on all the noise and discover the most important discussions. Let’s say you are into formula 1, you can filter all entries with 1 or more like which have at least 5 comments, – powerful feature .
• Like more.
  It’s no secret that I have had doubts about what the like feature on Friendfeed and Facebook was good for. But with the saved searches function it really makes sense, it’s like a voting system where you can filter out the best entries. Whenever you like an entry, a little link to you Friendfeed profile is displayedjust underneath the entry saying ‘kasperbs liked this’.

It might sound like I’m all interested in the number of followers or subscribers. And I’m am, to a certain extend. For a service like Friendfeed to be more useful to me, I think you need to build a following just like you do on twitter. These services are great for instant discussion, but it doesn’t make sense if you are only talking to yourself. – That is why I still have the ‘post to twitter’ option turned on so all my updates will go to twitter, where most of the people who care, spend their time.

You can have multiple tabs open with several advanced searches going on. This seems like an improvement over something like Twitterfall, which is browser based, and doesn’t have the same advanced search functions.

Here are Yahoo’s goals for the app:

• Create a desktop application that allows for the creation, grouping, and auto-execution of advanced search queries against Twitter
• Leverage existing skill-sets and tools
• Target the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and minimize the amount of platform specific code that must be written
• Open source the code so that others can learn from, contribute to, and/or extend the product as they see fit

But to be fair, it does also seem like the ONLY advantage is the advanced search. Sideline offers very little in terms of interaction, you can’t reply or DM anyone, you can’t even log in. You can mark tweets as favourites, but as you are not logged in, these will only be saved locally and won’t be viewable in your Twitter favourites.

Except for being a desktop client and featuring tabs, it doesn’t offer much more than the official twitter search. It only updates every minute, you can set this to be less frequent. But you can’t have it update every two seconds or so, meaning if you monitor popular search terms, you will be bombareded with 100’s of results to go through every minute.

Hopefully Yahoo will improve this Twitter client in the future to include some of the features that you have in TweetDeck and Twitterfall, but at the moment it doesn’t seem very usefull. I will stick to Twiterfall for my Twitter searches. But as mentioned on mashable:

Sideline seems to be more of a research project for Yahoo rather than building a new major new product or division.

There hasn’t been many reactions as of yet in the blogosphere, but there has been a few on Twitter:

mahadewa@avianto That’s cool :) re:sideline 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to avianto

alicam: Not sure if we need another Twitter search app but it works nicely – http://sideline.yahoo.com/ 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck

frumpa: trying out Yahoo’s Sideline but the links are NOT active hyperlinks http://sideline.yahoo.com 38 minutes ago from TweetDeck

e_D_D_y: Is Yahoo! SideLine an April Fools joke ? Can’t get any result, it’s just… empty :( about 1 hour ago from DestroyTwitter

As Gavin Wray says in the comments on Michael’s post:

“Thanks for making this guide. You make clear sense out of what can seem a daunting task.”

You see it time and time again. Organisations showing terrible timing and understanding, responding to bad feedback by alienating people and ignoring the community.

If you can answer these questions by a yes or no, you have come a long way in your aproach to bad feedback. The golden nugget being: listen first, then react.

The audio of my Social Media presentation at WxWM (mp3) (courtesy of Rhubarb Radio).

Is there a difference between using social media profesionally or personally by kasperbs

The slides that accompanied my talk:

A list of all the other presentations (with audio) can be found at Rhubarb Radio

The Format:

Monday March 30th. around 2pm, 20+ online journalism students from Birmingham City University will use twitter to ask questions about twitter, signing their tweets ‘#twask‘. – We need people to help us answer their tweets; so if you are up for it, help us teach twitter by following the #twask hashtag Monday afternoon.

Background:

As some of you may know, I run BirminghamRecycled.co.uk and have a great team of online journalism students, mentored by Paul Bradshaw , to help me. We see twitter as one of the most important tools in our online journalism toolbox; both as a research tool, but mainly as a way of keeping in touch with our users. One of the primary objectives of the site is to interact and connect with the local community of bloggers and content producers.

The majority of students have had no prior experience with twitter and have now only been using it for a couple of weeks. Some are starting to find their feet and are now looking to build their twitter profile, expanding on what they have already learned. Others find it harder to get to grips with the social and conversational nature of twitter, and are a bit uncomfortable with the idea of ‘stalking’ strangers online.

We hope by arranging a session like this, we will demonstrate how useful twitter can be when multiple people are talking about the same thing. It will give the more adapt twitterers a chance to explore ideas around the use of hashtags , and introduce beginners to @replies and the social aspect of twitter in general. But most importantly it will be a, hopefully, fun exercise for everyone.

Aptana – Web Development Environment

Aptana has just recently overtaken Dreamweaver as my editor of choice. It comes in two versions; a free and a paid. The differences can easily be overlooked and seems to come down to support requests. The interface is clean and doesn’t look too boring which can often be the case with open source software. The team behind aptana have recently added support for PHP which I have been wanting in some time. I didn’t make the switch fully until they added PHP support. PHP support comes via a plugin and is really easy to install. It is probably not completely up to scratch if you are a hardcore PHP developer, but for us humans who just wants something to edit our WordPress files,Aptana is perfect.

Aptana, My Favourite IDE

There are several cool features supported in Aptana and here are just a few of my favourites:

• Syntax highlighting
• Auto Code completion
• Easy tag wrapping
• Auto indention
• Auto source formatting

The Pro version, though not free, still checks in way cheaper than Adobe’s DW at $99 with upgrades costing $79. The main focus of the app is on Ajax development, but it is more than adequate for web designers HTML work and CSS coding. One thing I like about the paid version and which might just make me buy it, is the built in FTP feature which by the way works better than the one in Dreamweaver.

FTP Software

Even though I like the built in FTP feature of Aptana and Dreamweaver, I still need a standalone FTP client for those unrelated files and WordPress zip files that needs uploading to various hosting accounts. The one I currently use is a Firefox add-on called FireFTP and it does the job just fine. It doesn’t have any fancy features, but it’s stable and reliable. Not much to say about it, it just works.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets

None of us can live without some form of Word processing software, spreadsheets are used by many for budgeting and invoicing, so pretty essential. The only ones I really have experience with, mainly because they were too good to get rid off, is Google Docs and Open Office. Open Office is a fully fledged Office Suite right up there with that of Microsoft Office. And despite recent actions, Open Office is a very popular and widely used Office Suite. Google Docs run in your browser and can be accessed from anywhere. I normally use it for writing things like blog posts and documents that I would like to have access to from anywhere.

I also like that Google Docs doesn’t apply an insane amount of styling to my documents when it comes to copying and pasting them into WordPress. It’s nice that you don’t have to go through each paragraph to remove font styles.

Email

This might seem like an obvious one, but if you use Microsoft Outlook, you might not know that there even exist any other software for managing your emails. Up until a few months ago I liked to have a desktop email client, but now I have completely switched to Gmail for several reason. Mostly because of it’s great search features and labels, but I also got tired of having to keep several computers in sync. I wanted all my email to be available to me anywhere I went. If you want to use a desktop client and have all your emails synced at all time, I recommend Thunderbird in conjunction with Gmail. Simply use Gmail as you email hub and use IMAP with your Thunderbird client. This way you will always have all you email in sync across all your PCs and still have it all in Gmail. I had this setup for quite some time, but found myself simply using Gmail exclusively, so I ditched Thunderbird in the end.

Design & Art Work

This is an area where I haven’t completely managed to get rid of Adobe’s flagship Photoshop, but I keep making an effort in order to save some cash. As you are reading this article, I assume that you use Photoshop and are looking for an alternative.

The GIMP is pretty popular but very different from Photoshop

There are quite a few on the market but none exactly like Photoshop. The obvious alternative is the GIMP, and by using GIMPShop you can imitate many of Photoshop’s features and get the apps visual appearance to resemble that of PS. You can even get a script to add the same keyboard shortcuts to GIMP, but it is still not Photoshop, and you will have to make an effort if you want to completely make the switch. But if you need the money it’s definitely an alternative.

Other options include Paint.NET (Windows Only), Blender for 3D creation and Inkscape for an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. I don’t have enough experience with these tools to offer any commentary, so if you have any, leave them in the comments.

Invoicing & Time-tracking

We all need something to keep track of our time, and invoice clients. For that task I use Freshbooks, you are limited to a few clients at a time with the free version, but that is not a problem for me as I usually only work with one client at a time. You have great time-tracking abilities and simple elegant invoicing, which you can even brand in the free version which I like. You can provide your clients with a login so they can track the process and save you all those email updates.

Multimedia Playback

No one can work without some noisy distractions and for most of us that includes listening to a lot of music. You are probably using iTunes which is of course free, but not really open source.

If you want an open source iTunes alternative, I recommend checking out Songbird, it has been in beta for several years and has just recently been released in a stable version. My favourite is MediaMonkey which comes in both a free, and a paid version, but both great alternatives to iTunes.