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In this week’s edition, two new social media products in one week; a few good longreads for the weekend; and more stuff for your online toolbox.

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…

Here we look at five superb Instagram tools featuring functions ranging from time-saving scheduling to in-depth analytics, along with comments from Instagram experts: - 5 outstanding Instagram analytics tools | Articles | Home

At Buffer, we create all the images for our blogposts and social media sharing without any outside design help. We rely on a handful of amazing tools and resources to get the job done, and I’ll be happy to share with you the ones we use and the extras that we’ve found helpful or interesting. - 23 Tools and Resources to Create Images for Social …

- How They Did It: Part II — Medium

A bunch of useful tools for telling stories, with examples. - How They Did It — Part I — Medium

Easily assemble a variety of content types - videos, slides, PDF, webpages... - as an elegant and interactive reading experience that you share with your audience. We call it a “tute”

This software is a clever mix between Sketch, Keynote, Flash and After Effect (plus some bonus features specifically for interactive prototypes)... Easily creating tap transitions from one screen to another is, to me, the core of the software. - Principle : the prototyping tool you’ve got to try — STARTUPS + WANDERLUST + LIFE HACKING — Medium

- OpenElections: Using Tabula for Extracting Data from PDFs - YouTube

Here’s the trick I figured out to send a ton of personal emails automatically. - How to Send a Ton of Personal-Looking Emails Automatically — STARTUPS + WANDERLUST + LIFE HACKING — Medium

Readers aren't the only ones who want quick and easy access to information. You, the infographic creator, are also short on time. You need simple, quick ways to create beautiful infographics. Forget about Photoshop and other time-consuming image-creation methods. These tools make creating infographics simpler than ever: - 20 tools to help yo…

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:"