I apologize for the gap between posts. It’s been a busy summer for me.

In my last post I shared many tools newsrooms can use to keep track of each other out in the field. The point of the list is to show you how you can communicate away from your desk with lots of sources and many editors. There’s absolutely no reason a reporter or editor can’t work exclusively in the field today.

Today I want to discuss workflow. Specifically integrating news workflow into an online ecosystem.

The Internet is an ecosystem. Like all ecosystems, the more diversity the more healthy the entire ecosystem.

The same is true of stock portfolios. Diversity is a good thing. A truly diverse portfolio will better weather disaster if one stock takes a dive.

Ecosystems rely on symbiotic relationships amongst fauna and flora, creepies and crawlies. The Web, too, relies on the generosity of others. A single Web site is only as strong as its network.

If I were to build a news center from scratch, this is how it would happen. There is not necessarily a need for a clearinghouse of information. Readers have many ways to discover your content. Mixing relevant content with content that is highly likely to be irrelevant to a reader is bad news. Eggs in one basket and all that.

The Internet is my platform. Not a Web site. Not twitter. Not mobile devices. The entire Internet.

1. All reporters, columnists, editors and photographers would blog their beat(s). No exceptions. The blogs would be hosted on their own domains and the bloggers would be responsible for the growth of the sites. These bloggers should use as many services as possible to grow their communities.
2. Editors should cull the best and most interesting content from the beat blogs into niche sites. Let’s say we have five features reporters (Faith, Nightlife, Arts, Columns and Gardening) and one feature photographer. You then have a recipe for a local life Web site. They should be content hubs by also aggregating related information from around the Web. Attach paid items like Obits and personals with other forms of advertising and you have a site with low overhead, possibly high returns. Editors are responsible for the growth of these sites.
3. ‘Brand’ sites (The general news place where still too many newspapers are posting today’s newspaper) should gauge which stories from the niche sites and blogs require follow ups and more in-depth coverage. From there the blogs and niche sites link back and we can begin to see how the Internet feeds on itself.
4. A media group would be wise to further aggregate content. If a group has 30 newspapers and a TV station, chances are there’s much overlap in types of content. Further aggregation would mean a wider community to tap.
5. Meta data is required of all content. At the very least this means properly tagging content.
6. Advertising should sell the network. (Example: I could buy an general run of network ad, a run of site ad on a specific site, or I could buy impressions based on certain meta-data across multiple sites)

I’ve created an information ecosystem.

1. The essential production of news hardly changed. Information still flows from source to reporter to editor to audience, but the audience and advertisers are given multiple access points. These access points allow for editors and the community to put a check on bad coverage, but it also creates a situation where a media company has complete ownership of the news online from start to finish.
2. Multiple sites means lots of diversity. Diversity means lots of links which ensure the health of the entire system. The community at a politics niche site would benefit from an environmental issues blogger where the two subjects intersect.
3. Diversity also means that if one product doesn’t meet expectations, it doesn’t bring the rest of the system down with it. If a gardening blog fails, it only affects the few readers of that gardening blog. The only advertisers affected would be advertisers looking to buy ads on that specific blog, but they still have options if they’re willing to take impressions solely from the blogs archives and the niche site archives. But if they buy ads based on the gardening meta data, other blogs that feature that content type still keep the impressions rolling.
4. Plenty of room for growth. The advertising network can easily expand to accommodate other sites (presumably discovered via the beat bloggers) through revenue sharing. Much of the aggregation could be automated or built into push button solutions.

To me, this is what a newsroom should look like today. It should be many small pieces loosely joined via links. It should have granular relevance and it should be mass at the same time. Give your newsroom the tools and they will create the links.

Part One: Streamlining the minutia of reporting

Will Sullivan’s recent post about getting more done with less reminded me about this post I’ve had sitting in my draft queue for too long.

This two-part series will cover tools to help make mobile, Web-first reporting and editing more efficient. I’m not going to cover gear in either post. What gear you use doesn’t matter. You only need two pieces of equipment to get started: A decent Web-enabled cell phone and a laptop.

In order to truly become a mobile newsroom, internal communication becomes much, much more important. The first post in this series deals with how to build an internal communication infrastructure. It will help reporters stay on top of their sources and help editors stay on top of what their reporters and other editors are working on. The second post will deal with how to radically transform your news gathering process, generate more traffic and discussion on your sites and build better, more relevant top-tier products.

I chose the following because many of these services have tight integration with each other and they’re either free or incredibly cheap, but feel free to mix and match to suit your needs. The point is simply to get out and report and get away from your desk to do it.

Some of these services will make your process more transparent. Some people won’t like that, but trust me for now when I say transparency is a good thing for business and reporting. I’ll offer some reasons why in my next post.

Firefox

This may seem obvious, but we often miss the painfully obvious. If you’re serious about mobile journalism, you need a browser that gives you plenty of flexibility. Internet Explorer doesn’t cut it. There are also many Firefox extensions for the services I’m going to talk about. Take advantage of them. Your browser is your new desk. Download Firefox now. Also check out the portable Firefox client which can run off a thumb drive or iPod.

ADrive

ADrive gives you 50 gigs of free online storage (Yes, 50 gigs). I wouldn’t count on ADrive lasting long, what with OmniDrive’s collapse. Keeping files in a central place where others can grab them speeds things up.

If you have your own server space with a common FTP log in, fine. Grab FileZilla (and the portable version) and go to town. That’s probably more secure than the Java application on the ADrive site. But, if you need cheap space (I’d use ADrive for getting raw audio and video to an editor back at the office), this solution will get you up and running TODAY.

del.icio.us

Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, keeps links out of email. I can’t stand those mass-emailed-hey-look-what-I-found links because email is for communicating work-related tasks that are too long, or less immediate than instant messenger. Nothing more.

Del.icio.us moves those links out of sight. While I think we should share information we find with each other (and it’s a culture we should encourage), we need to move it to the appropriate arena.

Del.icio.us has a couple FireFox plugins that speed up bookmarking items.

There are several ways to integrate your del.icio.us bookmarks into your site as well, to create a link blog of sorts.

Google Reader

Almost everything has RSS feeds these days. Keep up on your beat by following related blogs, or follow news releases (which are cropping up more and more often in RSS format) or hunt down the XML feeds that happen to be all over government Web sites (They may not be obvious, but they can be found anywhere).

Gmail

Sullivan covers this best in his post:

Corporate policies and IT concerns will never allow email on a third party system. Well, they can cram it with walnuts. The paper tiger of ’security’ is false, we’ve all heard people use that before when they just wanted to maintain unfettered, unquestioned control. Microsoft’s product vulerabilities are widely known and have been the target of hackers, spyware, malware and viruses since the dawn of the Internet. Beyond that, Outlook is purely a waste of money, including time (and therefore money) spent dealing with inept software. That time-as-money waste is almost as gross as the mountains of cash spent on the proprietary software that is causing this time suck. It’s a vicious circle.

Plus, if you’re lucky enough to have a Web-client version of outlook, you know how much it sucks.

Gmail’s filtering, offline access and built-in instant messaging keeps you organized, freeing you up to get work more work done.

There’s also an excellent mobile Web version if you’re away from a computer.

I also use Gmail as a personal database.

Gmail integrates tightly with Remember The Milk (which I’ll get to in a bit).

Google Docs

Sullivan also covers Docs in his post, but I’d like to add that Docs means not buying expensive front-end systems, as well.

Docs isn’t just a writing tool. You can publish directly to your blog from the software or let your Web developers take the data for fun mashups using Google’s APIs (like this crime map I made a while back).

Google Calendar

Manage multiple calendars (events, deadlines, personal meetings, schedules) from one space. Share and collaborate. Text and email alert reminders. Access it online with your full browser, or use their handy mobile Web interface. It also integrates with Remember The Milk.

Again, email should be used for relaying complex tasks, not for figuring out when everyone is available for a meeting. At a quick glance with Gcal, you can see who is available when and set up a meeting invitation right from the software.

Sold yet?

Grand Central

If you’re going to be truly mobile, people need to get a hold of you. Grand Central is another Google product, so there’s great integration with other Google applications.

Here’s what it is: One phone number that rings all of your phones. Access any voice mail from any phone. Record calls and download them for posting to the Web later (no annoying gear required!).

Grand Central basically turns telephones into Gmail. There are more than enough features to make it worth a look. Personally, I like the call filtering the best. Incoming calls from certain people ring different phones.

Flickr

All photographers should be using a pro flickr account. Period.

Why spend thousands on front-end photo systems when for less than a few hundred bucks a year you can give every person in your newsroom who even touches a camera a full account? Through tagging and RSS, you can create dynamic workflows between photographers and photo editors. Using flickr’s tools and their API, your developers can immediately post images to your sites with almost zero lag time. You also tap flickr’s massive audience.

Lastly: You can control your copyright how you see fit.

LinkedIn

Professional social networking. Many professionals already have an account, but if you don’t, get a free account. The mobile interface is handy for looking up contacts that may not be in your Grand Central list.

Jott

With only a voice call, post to your blog or twitter, set Google calendar events, create tasks in Remember the Milk. Jott is great for posting quick bits right from your phone when you don’t have a good Internet connection.

Remember the Milk

Lists. That’s all this service does. Sounds silly, but the collaboration tools take the lists to another level. Editors can see what you’re working on, while assigning quick tasks and deadlines. And that information can be fed back to a boatload of services (the twitter/jott integration being the most useful to me, personally). With so many features you can easily defeat the object of having prioritization lists, but with some discipline and solid work flow, it becomes an invaluable tool for setting reminders and prioritizing the minutia of newsroom life.

Twitter/BrightKite

Twitter is a microblogging tool. BrightKite is a location tool that integrates with twitter.

Twitter and BrightKite have been covered pretty extensively by media bloggers, so I’m not going to bore you with more. Just know that these tools will let your editors (and readers) know what you are working on and where you are in the field.

(I have some invites to BrightKite, which is in beta, if you’d like to see it. Leave a comment if you want one.)

Ning

Every reporter and editor should have a Ning network. They should build an online relationship with their sources, their readers and their editors. Beatblogging.org covers this extensively and it’s a principle I firmly stand behind.

Also consider creating a closed network for your newsroom. Consider it a free intranet/social network that can be accessed anywhere and can become a central hub of information flowing into the news desk.

Any good blogging platform

WordPress and tumblr are my favorite flavors, but if you can find a robust blogging platform that works with Google Docs, Jott and others listed above–and they work for your newsroom–go for it. At the very least, every reporter and editor should have a blog covering their beat(s). I’ll get into this more in my next post, but the flow of information should move from source to blog to aggregation sites (like a targeted niche sites or general news sites).

—

Any other suggestions are certainly welcome in the comments!

The second part of this series will specifically address editorial workflows. Once you have reporters out in the field, producing their own beat blogs, then what do you do? I’ll bring up some ideas I’ve been running through my head for a while.

There’s been complaining about conversation leaving the blogosphere for a few weeks. I’ve written my thoughts here, but I fear bloggers have been falling back to old media ways, especially bloggers who try to make a living as conversationalists.

Let’s move on from ridiculous statements like these: “If they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice.” Syndication is a good thing for your brand in any form. Who cares whether the conversation happens at your blog, some other blog in response to you or at a water cooler in a lonely New Jersey office park?

I’m releasing all rights to my content to the public domain.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll notice that this is a logical conclusion. I’m a Cluetrainer; Conversations happen everywhere, but technology lets us see the scale of that conversation that we, as mass media, didn’t previously have access to. I’m a big proponent of Information Architects‘ idea that our content is our brand.

Zenhabits did this not too long ago, so in the spirit of public domain, here’s what Leo had to say:

From now on, there is no need to email me for permission. Use it however you want! Email it, share it, reprint it with or without credit. Change it around, put in a bunch of swear words and attribute them to me. It’s OK.

Credit and payment
While you are under no obligation to do so, I would appreciate it if you give me credit for any work of mine that you use, and ideally, link back to the original.

My sentiments exactly. If you want to make money off my content here, fine. I don’t care. I care less about intellectual property and more about intellect and the free flow of ideas. If you want to talk about my posts elsewhere, go for it. I’m glad for it.

Only the stuff that is mine is public domain, obviously. Where noted, other’s content isn’t under public domain (duh). The site template belongs to iA.

Last Monday I made a guest appearance at a reporting class in town. I speak to students fairly regularly lately, but usually on quick topics like Web writing, video or multimedia and the like. This time I got a good hour and 45 minute conversation with a couple j-school professors and a small reporting class that had some great questions.

This conversation started with a 15 minute presentation about the state of the media. I didn’t talk about specifics like video or multimedia or programming. I explicitly avoided those topics. I wanted to have a conversation about conversations. I wanted to talk about how conversation and mass media can be the same thing on the Web.

We covered some topics like blogging, how people can commit acts of journalism without being “citizen journalists” and some tough issues our industry faces. We talked about how the act of searching narrows your scope as a news consumer, creating a tunnel vision that ignores the bigger picture. We talked about how technologies like tagging can increase the scale of that narrow scope and how it can lead to pivot points to other conversations.

It went over very well, I think. I was on top of my game when asked tough questions.

But one question came up that I think I stumbled on: What can journalism students do to help themselves get jobs after they graduate?

I mumbled something about LinkedIn and I said start a blog, immediately, but I should have been much more specific: I didn’t mean that you should start a blog to learn how blogs and the Internet works. We grew up with this. Point and click. Easy. I trust (and expect) you’ve gotten at least that far. I meant: Start a blog to network with others in the industry.

There’s a big difference between a blog that you use to grow a larger audience and a blog that you use for networking.

1. A networking blog should be a living document of your professional self. You should stay focused on topics that matter to people who may hire you. You should start reading blogs from people in your field.
2. When someone makes you think, you should think out loud on your site. Have a conversation with others. Email people questions. Chat with them on twitter. Get to know people. Working a blog isn’t much different than working a room at a conference. Stay focused.
3. Show off your work. When you do something good, show it off. Don’t be bashful.
4. SEO the crap out of yourself. When you apply for a job, the first thing most people do is Google your name. If your MySpace shows up with some compromising pictures, that puts you at a disadvantage. I don’t think you should have to take down those photos (with a bit of digging, I’m sure you can find some videos of me doing the drunken robot somewhere), but make sure your best stuff is at the top of the results page.
5. Seize every opportunity you can. When I talk to people about Creative Commons and copyright, I talk about a student who sent The Forum photos from Northwood, ND. A tornado ravaged the small town last summer and Forum Communications had multiple properties covering the news. One student drove up to the site and started taking photographs. He took some great pictures and then he put them in front of us. We used some on In-Forum. On Monday, just as I was about to break into this spiel, a student in the back of the room told it for me. I had the fortune of finally putting a face to the photos. So:
6. Always remember that there’s a real human being on the other side of the machine.

This post is a tutorial on how to make a simple photo gallery that also displays locations on a Google map. It’s intended for the Wired Journalists community. If you’d like to learn how to do more cool journalism projects with the Web, sign up now!

One of The Forum’s photographers came to me with a project at the beginning of the year. She was starting a weekly photo column in the paper, snapshots of people in the community and she wondered what we could do to give it a good presentation online.

“Let’s put them on a map!”

Here’s the result.

I always argue for more information and I tend to see photo captions with locations or approximate locations. That’s data. That’s very useful data when you imagine it in relation to other photos.

Since Ann’s project was going to be weekly, I figured we add the “where” data as another way to discover the photos. Over time, you’d get a broader picture of how the images relate to one another.

While I argue for putting more information out there for your readers, I also don’t like asking the development team for help programming one-off projects (we have a small team and this was a “want to have” project not a “need to have”). The nice thing about this project is that we can host nearly all the media and have complete control over the data in Google’s KML file so if we chose to port it for deeper integration into our sites, we could do that rather painlessly.

So, I went out in search of free mapping tools. This project only uses My Maps from Google and  MapChannels.

Let’s get to the nuts and bolts.

First, you need photos, captions and addresses. You’ll also need a Google account and a free account at MapChannels.

Upload all your photos to your host and make note of their URLs. You could even upload them to a free photo service like flickr. They just need to be online, because Google Maps doesn’t offer hosting. Once you get all that together head over to Google Maps.

Click on the My Maps tab and create a new map.

Enter the address of the first photo.  In the bubble that shows up with the pin, there’s a “Save to My Maps” link. Click it and select the map where you’d like to save the location. The bubble will turn into a couple of fields.

Click the image button on the bubble and paste in the photo URL that corresponds to the location you’ve set. You can resize photos under the Edit HTML tab. Add text, HTML (embed flash videos too!), add links, etc. You can change the color or type of the pin by clicking on the pin in the bubble. Google has quite a few predetermined pins, but you can also add your own 64×64 pixel pin here if you’d like.

Repeat for all your photos.

Now here, if you want to embed the map as is to your site, just click the “Link to this page” above the map on the right side. A window will appear with two options, one of which is an iframe you can paste into the page.

For what we’re trying to accomplish, I’m not to thrilled with the result.  The pins don’t tell you much about their contents.

That’s what MapChannels helps us with. Before we head over there, right click / copy link location of the “View in Google Earth” link. You’ll need that in a minute or two.

Don’t be turned off by how hideous the MapChannels site looks. The tools it has are pretty powerful and they’re free. Register for an account if you haven’t already.

Once logged in, click the “Create New Map Channel” link (upper right side of the page; it’s yellow).

In the data source field, paste the “View in Google Earth” link you saved earlier.

Give your map channel a name in the second field, agree to the terms and conditions and you’re almost there.

Here you’ll find tons of features. Play around with them to get your desired look.

For the in view map linked at the top of this article, all I did was changed the sidebar width, making it wide enough for the content and change “Info Window Type” to Zoom and Sidebar. I also deselected all the map channel links in the sidebar.

Copy the iframe code to your site and you’re done. Simple as that.

You can read the tutorials here for more on how to host all the scripts and other collateral on your own site, giving you some room to monkey with the functions at a more advanced level.

I’m taking a bit of a cue from my micro-blog with this short post, but Everyblock’s Paul Smith has an interesting post up on why they decided to create their own maps. Rex Sorgatz has a great interview with Everyblock’s Holovaty if you haven’t read it yet.

Web teams and especially their publishers need to start thinking about raw data as useful content, instead of simply data from newspapers (i.e. photos and text) as content.

Something like Everyblock could be monetized on a micro level very easily (think lots of small dollars), and with an integration that would be super useful (rather than simply annoying) from a user perspective. Think if you could integrate a LJWorld style marketplace with super local user generated content streams, your own classifieds, your own news items (particularly crime) and government data sources. Maps and freely available data could be the pivot point for all your other content.

Now that’s completely rethinking how news works.

If there’s one thing I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we spend so much space repeating what we’ve already written.

If there’s two things I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we don’t spend enough space explaining what we’ve already written about.

We too often have a case of too much or too little.

This is why tagging your content matters so much.

I know it’s a simple thing, we see these little guys all the time on the Web, except on many news sites. It needs to be the top priority for your editorial strategies.

When you write a story about X subject and then follow up on X subject repeatedly, it’s incredibly useful for your readers to easily follow the history of the story or find related content. Those tags, not repeating paragraphs, add breadth to your content.

We still think in terms of sections as buckets. You have a news bucket and a business bucket and a lifestyle bucket and we cram content into one of those buckets, no matter how ambiguous the story may be. What if you have an article about the iPhone? It could fit in all three buckets. Plus a technology bucket, plus a bucket specifically for Apple, Inc. Tagging allows you put one piece of content into many buckets.

News has a short shelf life. Tagging every piece of content gives those older pieces new life, in context of the broader picture. It turns every article page into a targeted mini-homepage. It uses the power of databases to aid in relevant serendipity, meaning your users find extra information based on their interests that led them to that original item.

This seems so incredibly simple, so why don’t more news sites do it? Why are we still stuck thinking in terms of traditional section buckets?

Last week, while staying with family in the small town of Shirley, Mass. I got into a brief discussion with my brother-in-law about the community paper there, the Shirley Town Profile.

The paper was eight pages, max. A little weekly thing. I love small papers, because oftentimes I think they’re doing things better with what they’ve got than big and medium-sized papers do with their resources. I pulled a couple issues out of a basket near the fireplace and my brother-in-law started telling me about how he loves that paper because it actually has local news. I’ve seen the data. I’ve read countless articles about hyperlocal news. I’ve certainly preached it. But I have never actually heard someone outside the media industry qualify it.

The paper had just a couple of stories in it. Mostly it was about school fundings and how area schools were at a deficit. The opinions section was littered with hearty debate and finger pointing from parents and politicians. The main story was about where the money was going. It felt a lot like a blog. There seemed to be real community happening here.

I’m not entirely sure about the situation, but it seems like parents are given the right to send their kids to any school in Mass. Yet, the people in the school district foot the bill for each school, so there’s a disparity when kids shift to richer districts.

This is the perfect opportunity for database reporting. The Globe and other larger media outlets in the state should have this story nailed in such a way that gives not only an overall picture, but allows members of each of these communities to see how the system affects their lives. It should allow people to communicate with one another the way Town Profile does.

But they don’t. Every night and every morning the space was filled with blood and horror.

Was nice knowing you, but you blew it and when the Town Profile figures out blogs, and all the other little papers around you figure this stuff out, you’re dead in the water. I say good riddance to these media outlets that miss this.

Then, when I got home, back to Fargo, I ended up at a party at my Father-in-law’s house in the small town in the Fargo Moorhead metro area, Dilworth. There were lots of people there and in typical Midwestern fashion, while the women were in the dining room drinking coffee, the men were in the living room talking about things that annoy them.

The conversation started out talking about general sales taxes in the area, something all the media here covers extensively,  but then it got specific. They started talking about special assessments in Dilworth. Special assessments right down to how much the curbs in front of their homes will cost them over the next few years.

Meanwhile, the local TV news was on and nobody was paying attention to whatever bigger picture things (or not) were happening in the region.

The contrast was striking.

Every large issue is built of small components and we tend to leave out all those little details. But it’s those little details that are relevant to small pockets of readers. Add them up and you have a nice audience. You also give them some place to connect and talk about the things that matter to them which gives your news (which could end up buried or ignored) a longer shelf life and more valuable to advertisers.

Think small.

Something happened early this year in the media blogging world. We suddenly stopped talking about what we should be doing and started talking about what we are doing. We started talking about being the change we wish to see. It was at the same time a jarring change in tone and an exhilarating one.

Now is the time to be that catalyst for change in your news organization. No more talking about it. We’re doing it. And we want you to do it too.

I’m excited to announce, with Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens, and many, many others, the official launch of WiredJournalists.com, a social network for journalists geared towards training and exchanging ideas.

We have gathered some of the most talented, standout and promising people in this business. We’re here to help you, at any level of your organization, create change in your newsrooms. This isn’t a time for talking any more. The economics of our situation changed long ago. We need to catch up.

Change, that nebulous buzzword we hear far too often lately, must take place at every level of organization.  But change can only happen through action. The Wired Journalists network will show you methods of action. No prerequisites required. We will help you through every action. And we hope to all learn from each other. That’s the power of networking.

Our mission statement:

Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don’t need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

We are here to help each other learn basic skills and learn how new technology and new societal expectations for media are changing journalism.

At WiredJournalists.com we are all teachers and we are all students. We help each other and learn together. Those who know more should help those who know less. Those with questions should never be afraid to ask them.

We’re done talking doom and gloom. We’re done making lists of what we should do to better serve our audiences. We’re going to start checking off items. We will better serve our audiences.
We want you to join us.

We want people who know a lot help those that know little.

We want those who know little to know a lot.

Please send the Wired Journalists link to everyone in your newsroom. Everyone.

Now we act.

[This post serves a couple of purposes. First it's part of a training side project some of us media bloggers have been working on (More on this soon). Second, I thought it would make for a good Carnival of Journalism post this January. Thanks to Adrian Monck for hosting it this time.]

Blogs in a nutshell:

For the uninitiated, a blog is, in a nutshell, nothing more than a publishing platform. Think of it like a series of Word documents that you can put up on the Web instead of putting them in a folder on your hard drive. They may have as little or as much organization as you’d like, but usually the most recent post ends up leading your page.

Blogs, however, are incredibly handy for journalistic purposes. Once we set them up–a relatively painless affair, you’ll soon see–we can work on producing content without putting much or any thought into the programming that creates a Web site.

Write about anything. We can have an editor look over our work or not. We can write about news, or comment on the issues of the day or just tell people what we ate for lunch. If freedom of the press only applies to those that own the press, here, my friends, is your press.

Because blogs are nothing more than simple publishing platforms, and they
lower the bar for anyone to publish, they essentially hand a printing
press or broadcasting license to anyone with the time to speak his or
her mind with text, pictures, audio and video; People express an amazing volume of ideas on the Web. Some of it
good, a lot of it not so good. It all comes down to personal taste.

While a blog can scale to mass media heights, it also remains intimate with readers through commenting systems. You can have a conversation with your readers on your page. These conversations help us all learn.

Choosing a platform:

There are dozens, if not hundreds of blogging tools out there. I’m only going to cover three free blogging platforms in this tutorial.

They are:

• Wordpress
• Blogger
• Tumblr

Between Blogger (owned by Google) and Wordpress (An open source project), Blogger is the easiest to set up and it integrates very nicely with other Google products.

Tumblr, is my favorite blogging platform because of its simplicity. It takes no more than 10 seconds to sign up, allows for different types of posts (audio, video, picture, text, chat, etc.). It allows you to import your YouTube videos, flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, twitter updates and so much more automatically. Most tumblelogs are microblogs, meaning they aren’t meant for long bits of text. If you’re a photographer, this is exactly what you want in a blogging platform.

Use Wordpress if you really want to know blogging inside and
out. The Wordpress platform will give you reporting tools that will
show you who has visited what on your site and gives you a ton more
options. It also requires a wee bit more knowledge.

Blogger:

If you already have a Google account, for watching YouTube videos, checking your Gmail or reading other blogs with Google Reader, you’re nearly already signed up. Just log in using the Email and Password fields at the top of the page.

If you don’t have a Google account click “Create you blog now” and follow the directions to set up a Google account.

Once you get that set up and you log in, you’ll be presented with a dashboard. The the main management area, you’ll have two links to click:

Click Create a Blog. Obviously. Fill out the forms. The address you choose may be taken so check its availability. You blog will appear at http://thenameyouchose.blogspot.com. Notice it’s at blogspot.com and not at blogger.com, where you go to administer your page.

Next, select a template that you like. This is what your blog design will be (and it’s ok, you can change your mind later).

Once your blog has been created, you can start posting immediately. You’ll see a little editor with buttons similar to a desktop text editor like Word.

When you’ve finished writing, click the publish button, if you’d like to stop writing for now and save a draft, click the save draft button. Simple.

To view your published posts and your drafts, click the Edit Posts tab where you’ll see something similar to this:

Click the view blog link at the top at any time to see what your blog looks like to others.

The next time you log into Blogger.com, your dashboard will look like this:

Once you’ve set up your blog, poke around to see what other features it has. At no point should you be afraid to push any buttons. Go ahead and mash away! You’re probably not going to break anything, and if you’re about to, Google will warn you. Plus, we’re here to help you out, too.

Tumblr:

Head over to Tumblr to set up this account. Click the big sign up button in the middle of the page. Fill out these three forms:

Done! You’re now ready to start posting different kinds of posts:

Under the Account tab at the top, you can select Theme, and select from a few templates to change the look of your blog. You can also select Feeds to start importing your content from other Web services you’ll use in the challenge:

Wordpress:

Wordpress is a little more complex, but you can begin heading over to wordpress.com/signup to set up your account.

Once logged in, click My Dashboard in the top navigation bar. Here’s where things get a bit hairy.

You’ll first notice a lot of menus and a lot of submenus (Dashboard, Write, Manage, Comments, Blogroll, Presentation, Users, Options, Upgrades, etc.). Don’t panic, this is why Wordpress is so powerful!

If you really wanted to, you could start posting immediately be clicking On the Write tab; There you’ll find a text editor similar to the others:

You can manage your posts under the Manage tab.

You can select different templates under the Presentation tab. There’s a lot to choose from. Try not to feel overwhelmed. This is good. Some themes let you import your most recent delicious bookmarks or twitter posts, to a sidebar (instead of your main post area), but we’ll touch on all the goodies in other tutorials (stay tuned).

That’s it!

For now, you’re ready to start writing. Don’t be afraid to click around. Don’t be afraid to ask us questions here. We’re glad to help.