Visualise your data and embed interactive, annotated graphs in your stories for free... At Journalism.co.uk we've been regularly using Datawrapper, Infogram and Google Sheets to name a few, and we have highlighted many others in our pieces. Plotly is perhaps one of the more complex resources, but it's free to use and enables its users to cre…

"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

The Journalist's Toolbox

"There are some choice accessories that will take your Meerkat and Periscope performance to a new level of professionalism. From devices that turn your iPhone into a mini video rig to grip-anywhere tripods, check out these accessories that will make your live streams look and sound better. " - 5 accessories to improve your crappy Meerkat videos

"Margin is the space between our load and our limits ... something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations ... the gap between rest and exhaustion, the space between breathing freely and suffocating." Not just for designers. A seriously good piece for all interested in boosting their personal productivity, with a whole bunch…

"But Meerkat, which designed to work exclusively with Twitter, has taken off because its simple interface makes it almost effortless for anyone to start broadcasting. Users say it also owes its popularity to the evanescence of its recordings. Once a user records a stream, it’s impossible for other Meerkat users to watch it afterwards. Meerkat is …

"Images with text over them ... do make a post more enticing to your followers or friends... Buffer's Pablo, which creates these images, out of beta." - Buffer Officially Launches its Image Creation Tool Pablo

"Newsrooms don't need large budgets for analyzing data--they can easily access basic data tools that are free or inexpensive." - Drilling Down: A Quick Guide to Free and Inexpensive Data Tools | Global Investigative Journalism Network

"we wanted an easy way to create and share social cards with our readers... Vox Media’s ‘meme’, an open source social card making tool. A few hours of tinkering later, and we had our own version set up with some simple functionality, along with a new name: CardKit.... a simple and easy to use tool for everyone to quickly and dynamically create im…

Of them all, I particularly like the look of Write Or Die, Wridea & StayFocused, which possibly says more about me than my 5 latest blog posts combined: "These tools will not only provide you with a way to write down your ideas whenever they hit you, but will also enable you to organize your time better and start writing more content through a re…

"At the moment, it looks like the feature is experimental " Just in case the world didn't have enough cat gifs... - YouTube Now Lets You Make GIFs From Videos

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium

Overpriced and under-powered?

"How we made our first comics-journalism feature-and the tools for you to make one, too ... We thought we would walk through some of design process and also document some of the code tricks we learned along the way. The final products are a web viewer, Pulp, and the comic-maker interface, Pulp Press... released as a free and open source project…

"By submitting your content and your keyword through nTopic we determine statistically how relevant your content is to the keyword and make recommendations on how to improve it. Getting your nTopic score is completely free, but you must upgrade to get access to keyword recommendations. "

"Swarmize enables journalists to tell new, collaborative stories by making use of real-time data collection and visualisation" Just the tests they've already done are awesome. The code's on GitHub. Think to use in surveys, real-time social media monitoring, live blogs ... anything where real-time is useful and/or you might want a second bite at t…

Lessmeeting looks like a cool tool. Even if you don't try it: "Below is our best practices guide to writing meeting agendas, capturing meeting minutes and following up on action items:"

"Chartist is noteworthy because it doesn't just make existing charts smaller or bigger, it changes the the way the data is displayed so that it makes sense on whichever size screen it's being viewed on. A chart showing each of the 12 months along its x axis when displayed in a full-width browser window, for example, will change to show only six m…

"If you come across a video, all you need to do is add "GIF" before "YouTube" in the URL, and you will be redirected to the app. For example: Original video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BT1cd49pIw To convert to GIF: www.gifyoutube.com/watch?v=2BT1cd49pIw " - Add "GIF" to the Start of YouTube Links to Convert Videos to GIF

"Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor Find the key influencers to promote your content "

"Today Google launched Web Starter Kit, a download that consists of all the templates and tooling developers need to create sites that function on any device and any display... Google doesn't plan to compete with Bootstrap in terms of user interface components, of which it has notably less... may tie into some new design concepts coming from Goog…

"an open source tool ... has been used by a number of news organisations to show how stories or events have unfolded in an interactive manner. It is essentially a way to create an embeddable timeline with cards of text or multimedia to explain key moments in the story." - Screencast: using Timeline.Js to make interactive timelines for stories |…

No fremium model - minimum price $19/m - but it looks worth it: "Meshfire turns Twitter into a dashboard of tasks... The tasks can be to reply to different tweets, or to block someone or follow someone. Every twitter account is a mission inside Meshfire, and every mission has a goal. You define the mission ... a virtual assistant inside Meshfire…

Excellent intro to @buffer team's toolkit. Many I'll definitely check out, particularly Sqwiggle "... a video chat tool that helps you stay in touch with your team when you're working remotely. Every few seconds, Sqwiggle takes a screenshot of you so your colleagues can see that you're around, and just by clicking on another person you can join a …

"I had been searching for some templates to make explainer videos for clients and my own projects and there are some good options if you are willing to sift through all the crap out there. If you know me, you know I research like a beast before buying something. I have Adobe After Affects and was willing to invest the time to get familiar enough t…

"Getting the bloggers to review and publish content about you is not going to be a walk in the park. It is not about you, it is about them. So you need to offer something of value to them." - 3 Social Media Tools to Identify Influential Bloggers - Jeffbullas's Blog

Quite like the look of this RSS reader's search features: "Want to search the entire history of your feeds? It's not a problem when you have InoReader around. Our unique Active Search will actively monitor and alert you when new content is matching your search. " - InoReader • Light and Fast RSS Reader

Some resources from JeffBullas: "These are the tools I use and also that I recommend. Socialoomph – Professional Edition: This allows me to do a range of tasks including scheduling, publishing recurring tweets and auto-follow back and that save me about 40 hours a week. Hootsuite: This is an essential tool for managing Twitter and other s…

"an app called Voice that makes producing animated videos really simple. Animated videos are any type of continuous video that uses moving shapes, graphic images or icons as part of the story. Pros generally use complex, expensive software to create these, but animation software — along with other video editing tools — is becoming more accessible.…