I love tools that allow writers and producers to create digital-native content in a hurry. One of my new favorites is Qwiki – a video-generating platform that gets several things right:

* It recognizes that digital devices are non-linear, and benefit greatly from annotation.

* Unlike, say, Final Cut Pro, it is stupid easy to learn.

(I’d show you the first Qwiki I created – it took only 20 minutes – but I built it by annotating a simple speech. (Hey, the video was laying around, so I grabbed it.) Here’s a much better use case, from fashion blogger Shea Marie:

Play the Qwiki: 5 Easy Summer Hair Styles to Try

I just spent 45 minutes showing the tool to some colleagues from around PBS. I think it’s safe to say you’ll see some interesting tests in the coming weeks (and for once, nothing bad will happen to poor Beaker. I think).

(Edited to fix a typo. H/T to Dani Abraham @Qwiki for the catch. Hey, I was a line editor, and always grateful the copy editors were behind me.)

I’ve been having interesting conversations with a number of folks lately around a basic premise:

Webinars suck.

They seem a useful way to disseminate information to a large audience at once. But the format isn’t terribly engaging – and as a friend always reminds people, on the Internet, porn your email is just one click away.

I’ve conducted webinars that seemed engaging – yet when I looked back at the dashboard later, I’d see that at any given moment (even during my best jokes!) a third of the audience or more had some other app at the front of their screen. (Yes, the webinar system spies on you.)

So what’s better? Well, I’m playing around with that, and I’ll share results when I know more.

But along the way, a couple interesting free/low-cost tools:
– Have a PowerPoint that you really need turned into an embeddable video? Yeah, the latest versions of PPT will do that for free – but if you’re using PowerPoint 2007 or earlier, try Brainshark. (Free to try; as little as $10 a month per prezo to get rid of the nagware and open up the full feature set.)

Here’s a sample (one that happens to emphasize how cheap digital technology has democratized content):

* And speaking of video, I’m especially intrigued at how people are using overlays to add hyperlinks to video content. It reminds me of the first days of (quotes imply irony here)  “hot links.” (Or, to date myself even more, HyperCard).

Video is on the verge of becoming a non-linear, ever-extensible story-telling form … and my obsession of the moment is Qwiki. Play with it and you’ll probably see why. (And your reactions are welcomed in the comments.)

The very interesting social-media curation tool Storify was released in private beta on Tuesday at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference. It neatly twists the idea behind Flipboard.

Flipboard automatically generates a list of stories that might interest you, based on links suggested by people you follow on Twitter or your Facebook friends. Storify reverses the flow – it allows you to easily curate a list of readings you recommend, based on your own (or others’) social-media postings.

It’s still early-release stuff – the UI, while clean, is a bit obscure (especially the flow to save, then edit, a Storify “story.”) And, like all new tools, it’ll take a few weeks for the collective “us” to figure out how to best use it. But it’s a neat mashup of technology and journalism, and it’s worth watching.

Why? Tools like this are part of the emerging news ecosystem – how can we tap the experts out there to surface smart stories on important niche topics? It’s a problem – and opportunity – my skunk-works team at PBS is thinking about a lot.

A sample – which I ginned up in all of three minutes based on the intertwined riffs of newspaper brain drains and the reinvention of what Washington journalism can be:

OK, so a raw feed of pertinent tweets isn’t a “story” in a traditional sense. But marry this with a quick text introduction (which I, um, was a bit too lazy to write) and you’ve got the makings of useful information.

A side note: The smart folks at Storify deserve all the kudos. But I’ll point out that my friends at the Knight Fellowships at Stanford can claim godparent status: co-founder Burt Herman spent the last year as a Knight Fellow, thinking about ways to use technology to reinvent journalism.)

And a big hat-tip to MediaBug‘s Scott Rosenberg for the blog post that tipped me to Storify.

My favorite ballclub opens their brand-new stadium today, so forgive me if I seem a bit preoccupied.

Watching all the hoopla – on multiple media platforms at once – gives us all another lesson on the folly of the paid-content argument from some traditionalists. Continue reading →

Over at the GrowthSpur blog, Mark Potts and I have posted about a bunch of free tools we like that are highly useful for entrepreneurial journalists.

(Oh – and that jokey lead about hardware stores? Not a joke. I’m so bad that the Fabulous Sue Corbett (trademark pending) jabbed me in a one-act play about Noah’s Ark she wrote for a youth group.

Scene: Noah’s sons talking after God commands their father to build an ark:

Son 1:  You know what this means?

Son 2: Dad has to make a trip to the hardware store.

I started reading a new blog today – one launched by a handful of writers to continue the work they were doing at a now-defunct trade magazine.

I commend them. They’re gamely carrying on in the face of the implosion of their publication, and they’re doing it without getting paid.

But I’m not linking to them here because I don’t want to embarrass them. The new site is, well, a bit of a mess.  has issues. Continue reading →