newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Two other smartphone options: Flickr and SoundCloud
A smartphone full of apps opens all kinds of opportunities for journalists. Here are a couple:
Flickr
You can easily take a bunch of pictures and upload them to Flickr as you go. The pictures go into a queue so you don’t have to worry about waiting for one to upload before you move on to the next.
Once you’ve got a good selection, you can go to the newsroom and head for the Flickr website. Pick your pictures and put them in a set. Display them as a slideshow, copy the embed code, and place it on your website.
Voilà! The event is hardly over and already you’ve got it covered with pictures.
SoundCloud
Sometime words and sounds are all you need. How about a one-minute, heartfelt statement? How about the distant boom of avalanche control?
You can capture these moments by tapping the record button in the SoundCloud app. Tap the save button and it’s uploaded.
As with Flickr, you can later get the embed code and place it on your website.
Boom! The echoes have barely died down and already you’ve got audio.
(Just one caveat, though — you can’t do any editing on the SoundCloud site, so try to get it right the first time or you’ll have to fire up a program like Audacity.)
More posts in the Photo category
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Give more meaning to photos with ThingLink
From the what-will-they-think-of-next category comes ThingLink, a fun and easy way to add linked annotations to photographs and embed them on your website.
Using it is dead simple. Just upload a photograph of your choice and start clicking where you want hotspots to appear. Each time you click you’re given the opportunity to type in a description, insert a link, and choose an icon. Place as many of these as you want on your photo, then save.
You can share via Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumbler or galleries on the site. Or can embed the photo on your own website — as I did here. This was something I whipped up between other tasks on my first try — there really isn’t much of a learning curve.
Besides the cool factor, ThingLink offers a genuinely innovative way of providing information to readers. Photos have a lot of impact by themselves, but ThingLink allows you to explore them even more. I highly recommend it.
More posts in the Photo category
