andrewzahler.com

You can talk all the smack you want to about link journalism and its related buzzword, curation, but Publish2 is a convenient service. Case in point: The new sidebar on this blog. From now on, it will display 10 links to articles or blog posts I’m reading. All I have to do is save the link to my Publish2 account and tag it (wait for it) “What I’m reading”.

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.

If you’re reading this, then, like me, you have been procrastinating on doing your Twitter Lists homework.

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

I popped down to Washington State University on Tuesday to lead a multimedia workshop with former colleague Ben Shors’ journalism students. The class is working on a reporting project that will appear in The Spokesman-Review, and this time they wanted to add an online component. (Check out the first story generated by the class.)

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

Here’s a trick for those who have a couple thousand songs in iTunes and feel like they’re often overlooking some old favorites.

(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.