In an effort to make it easy for high school journalism students to be journalists, I created this list of tools that are available to help anyone share news and information online.
Blog/Website
Weebly - A free website building tool
Jimdo - Another free website building tool
Google Sites - A free website building tool
Wix - A free website building tool using Flash
Blogger - Simple way to blog
WordPress - A blog and static webpage product
MovableType - A downloadable blog system
Blogsome - More blogging
Livejournal - Blogging with a social community
MSN Spaces - Another community blogging product
Vox - Nice clean designs for blogs
Audio Editing/Podcasting
Audacity - Free audio editing tool (needs to download LameLib to create MP3 files)
MyPodcast.com - Free podcast hosting tool
Video Sharing/Editing
YouTube - Everyone uses it and it’s available for use on WordPress.com and you can create a channel for your content
Vimeo - Beautiful, clean video player
Motionbox - Clean video player, offers a video editing tool
Photobucket - Free place to store video
Viddler - Nice video player and you can comment on the video
Tubemogul - Upload your video EVERYWHERE!
Video Streaming
Justin.tv - One of the first free streaming services
Mogulus - Lets you produce as simple or as complicated a webcast you want (you can even have multiple cameras)
Ustream - Another popular and reliable multi-camera tool (And there’s a really popular puppy cam)
Blip.tv - Another nice option for streaming video
Photo Sharing/Editing
Flickr - Professional storage and free editing tool (size limit) - has a social community
Photobucket - Free place to store photos
Picasa - Photo storage (works directly with Blogger and all other Google Tools) and photo editing
Photoshop Express - Just like Photoshop image editing but online
Mashable created this page with even more photo editors.
Social Networking
Ning - Set up your own social network with ease
Flock - A web browser that makes it easy to follow all of your social networks
Twitter - A microblog that lets you connect socially and share links and information in a concise way
Twhirl - A tool that lets you Twitter with more than one account
Twitter Search - Follow Twitter themes by searching keywords
Utterli - Share audio updates to your site
MySpace - Old school social networking
Facebook - Many opportunities to promote your news product here
File Sharing
Getdropbox - Share files big and small without worrying about file size
Social Link Sharing
Digg - Share links and discuss
Social Median - Similar sharing but also community and theme based link sharing
del.icio.us - Bookmark and share links
StumbleUpon - Discover links that fit your interest
Magnolia - Another spot to share and learn about links
Content Management Systems
(let’s get complicated here)
Django - many newspaper websites are built on this open source system
Drupal - many other news and information sites are built using this open source system
Check out this incredible visual display of social networks and what they do
Feel free to email me more links and ideas: jenleereeves (at) gmail (dot) com or @jenleereeves on Twitter.
