Online tools + techniques for journalists

with Eric Ulken, Canwest Global visiting professor, UBC Graduate School of Journalism

Thanks for coming! Continue the discussion here.

Coping with information overload

• Clay Shirky: "It's not information overload. It's filter failure."

Making the filters work for you

• Search techniques
• Google advanced search. Some tips:
• Use quotation marks around names and phrases. (Want to see who's aggregating your stuff? Try searching for your lead. Want to see who's copying it verbatim? Try searching for the last paragraph.)
• Use site: to limit your search to a particular domain or portion thereof. (Want to search only .ca sites? Or only Canadian government sites?)
• Use + to require a term and - to exclude a term, or use both in a single query
• Use "show options" to limit your searches by date, medium, geography; see related searches and results tailored to your social network (if you've enabled social search); use the "wonder wheel" to see how search terms are connected.
• Google blog and news search (How many bylines has a reporter had in the last month?)
• Google real-time search
• Google alerts
• For story ideas: Google Trends (advanced: Insights for Search)
• Social media tools
• Twitter trending topics: What are people in Canada talking about right now? (see right rail; at 8:30 in the morning, Tim Hortons tends to be a trending topic)
• A map of the Twittersphere: TrendsMap
• Social news aggregators: Topsy and Tweetmeme
• Personalized news feeds that work: Feedly (from your RSS feeds in Google Reader), TwitterTim.es (from your social graph; here's mine)

Steering people to your stuff

• Google Analytics for web traffic analysis
• Bit.ly and Topsy for social media analytics
• Search engine optimization for blogs is a nice SEO primer that's relevant to mainstream media websites too.
• Test possible headline keywords with Google Trends

Telling stories with new web tools

• Examples:
• Some NYT projects I like: 2007 State of the Union visualization, Olympic medal count map
• Data sources:
• Distributed data collection with Google Docs: forms and spreadsheets
• List of some public data sources in Canada from CBC's David McKie
• Government stats repositories: Statistics Canada, BC Stats, City of Vancouver data catalogue
• A few sample data sets I put together for a UBC class.
• Types of visualizations:
• Quantitative: bar chart, line chart, pie chart, bubble chart, histogram, timeline
• Andrew Abela's "chart chooser" diagram shows which visualization style are best suited to which kinds of data.
• Geographic: dot or bubble map, choropleth (sometimes called a heatmap; note perils of using unnormalized data), cartogram
• Text: word cloud, tree diagram
• Visualization tools:
• Wordle: Great tool for making word clouds.
• IBM's ManyEyes: Powerful Java-based tool lets you create a range of text, quantitative and geographic visualizations. (read these tips on formatting your data)
• Swivel: Easy way to make charts and graphs; you can use existing datasets or upload your own and share your visualizations with others
• Resources:
• Two of my favorite dataviz blogs: Flowing Data, Information Is Beautiful
• Books by Edward Tufte: Tufte is the Habermas of data visualization, and his Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a sort of bible in the field.
• Fun stuff: Nicholas Felton's personal annual report and Daytum, the website it inspired.
• Distributed data collection:
• Examples: Guardian's crowdsourcing of research on MP expenses, Minnesota Public Radio's Public Insight Journalism