I don’t do stuff like this very often, but last night I had a chance to spill my guts to about 30 or 40 people on a topic that I’ve kinda been obsessing over for quite a while. I’ve met a lot of people who write for a living over the past few months, and I always find myself recommending certain tools or a workflow tweak to help them do what they do a little bit better.
Maybe I gush about this stuff too much, who knows…
But in any case, Media Tectonics gave me a soap box to shout from yesterday and for anyone who couldn’t make it I’m posting the following video(s) below. I spoke for about an hour, and I’ve divided the video up into the sections. For anyone who’s having trouble in the current economic climate looking for work as a freelance writer, this will surely be of some help. I’ve also made it available via my iTunes feed if you want to download the videos there and put them on your iPod/iPhone. And as I promised during my talk, I’m putting a pdf here that includes all the links that I mentioned in the talk and even more that I didn’t have time to mention:
Download: Making the Shift to Online Journalism PDF
I encourage you to download it (it’s free!) and share it with anyone who might find it useful. Same goes for the videos below. If you have any feedback, drop a note in the comments or send me an email.
Video Links (YouTube)
Full Playlist: 1rick.com/playlist (grab embed code for the full talk here)
Part 1a: Building your Website (9:54) [Download]
Part 1b: Building your Website (cont’d) (8:55) [Download]
Part 2: Get a Media Dashboard (3:59) [Download]
Part 3: Find Content Feeds for your Dashboard (9:53) [Download]
Part 4: Find Job Feeds for your Dashboard (6:31) [Download]
Part 5: Building a Library & Writing Queue (4:19) [Download]
Part 6: Write for Love or Money (3:51) [Download]
Part 7: Converse & Collaborate (and Attract Employers) (8:27) [Download]
Update: On a somewhat related note, Eric Johnston of the Japan Times recently gave a presentation about getting freelance reporting jobs in Japan [ppt on Google Docs]. I encourage you to check that out as well. (h/t to debito.org)
About Media Tectonics
Media Tectonics is the brainchild of Cindy Mullins and Doug Jackson. They describe it as follows:
Have you ever felt like the world of social media is leaving you behind, making your skills and knowledge obsolete or irrelevant?
The rise of new media is rocking the ground beneath us, affecting the bottom line of industries like publishing, journalism, film, advertising and public relations, not to mention numerous major brands. That’s why Media Tectonics—a soon-to-be-launched subsidiary of 4M Associates—is presenting a series of workshops on publishing, social media and online technologies designed to:
• reveal the best ways to navigate the new landscape and save you time;
• explore ways to create multiple (and passive) streams of income where possible; and
• supply the support, mentoring and inspiration you need to do your best work yet, in whatever new media outlet suits your talents and expertise.Tectonics is from the Greek “to build.” Media Tectonics is committed to helping you build both a successful career and multiple sources of income with the words you use. Stay ahead of the learning curve and get prepared for what’s coming next!
If you’d like to get in touch with Cindy and Doug, here’s their contact information:
Cindy Mullins and Doug Jackson
Media Tectonics, a subsidiary of 4M Associates
Tel: +81-3-5464-0644
Fax: +81-3-5464-0645
Mobile: +81-(0)90-2451-0697 (Email Cindy)
Mobile: +81-(0)90-5333-3524 (Email Doug)
You can see Terri MacMillan and Lauren Shannon’s October 26 presentations from Media Tectonics here.
Here are a bunch of links and thoughts.
* Pukka http://codesorcery.net/pukka
* Instapaper http://www.instapaper.com/
* Delicious has a private mode if you are working on a secret project.
* Have multiple Delicious accounts if you want to break up work and private stuff.
* Reserving .info, .net, .me, .org may prevent future harassment about you.
* Don’t forget the privacy protection on the domains.
* http://www.squarespace.com/ if you have money.
* Subscribe to search result about you. Who is talking about you? A lot of search results have RSS feeds.
* Read faster http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=autopagize&search_type=&aq=f
* Delicious “minus” search. http://skitch.com/takaakikato/nbdbb/delicious
The problem I could find:
1. how to fight with duplicate information in input? Same news from different sites.
2. bookmarking too many. You collect, you collect and you are done.
3. tagging for me and tagging for others. For example, if I tag something, 80% of all the stuff is about Mac (so I tag them as “mac” in Delicious). If I use a non-social bookmarking system (e.g., Firefox built-in bookmark functionality), I don’t have to tag “mac” because it’s obvious. Any good resource to learn how to tag better?
Thanks Takaaki. Awesome stuff. Delicious private mode is a good suggestion, and in fact I used it for most of my writing queues. Almost everything else I open up to the public though. Delicious minus search is a great tip as well.
Regarding the problems you raised, I’ve experimented with Yahoo Pipes as a means of filtering duplicate content, and that works ok. But generally I find that if I’m reading content in Netvibes, I’m mostly scanning the headlines for interesting things. My eyes usually skip over any content that I’ve seen before quite quickly. I think this is the advantage of a layout like netvibes, myalltop, or feedly.
Regarding tagging better, I often use hyphens in my tags to be more specific. For example anything that I want to add to 2JPN.com, I’ll bookmark as ‘japan-food’ or ‘japan-sumo’ or ‘japan-blogs,’ etc. For mac-related links, you could always try ‘mac-apps,’ ‘mac-news,’ ‘mac-programming.’
It’s really interesting to see how different people create personal workflows. Thanks for the tips!
Before I forget, is anyone using http://www.scribefire.com?
Looks like a good tool as well. Maybe similar to Publish2.
Let’s say, I have many widgets in Netvibes, and each widget reads a RSS feed. I end up with many widgets, but it should be fine if I organize them tabs. A downside of this method may be that you may be scanning the same headlines if the website is not updated. In addition, you might be missing some of the headlines if the website has more post updates than the number of the headlines you can keep in a widget. What if I am ill for a day? There doesn’t seem to any way to catch up.
Most likely you can scan a number of headlines with the Netvibes-style approach, but you have a risk to miss some of them.
Have you tried Livedoor Reader? Actually they do have an English-only version called Fastladder. http://fastladder.com/
Concerning Twitter web app you mention in the video and suggest avoiding, you mean the “twitter.com”, don’t you? There are 3rd party *and* web apps though I haven’t tried any.
This http://feedafever.com/ is an interesting approach to solve *too many* feeds.
Damn, sorry for occupying this comment space.
Saw the presentation, Was cool!
Hope someone could do this is Japanese.
I find most of my English speaking friends are literate (at least partly) about this kinda stuff, but explaining something like RSS to a Japanese person, especially women (no offense!) is ……..
Most people i know here still use Bookmarks!
@takaaki One good feature with netvibes is that it clearly shows the published date, and also greys out any previously visited links. That usually means that whenever I see a grey link, I’ve likely already seen the links next to them as well. So I’ve trained myself to skip them. I still use Google Reader sometimes. I like reading some shared items from a few friends. I think that has a lot of value. But my primary reader for now, and likely for a while, is netvibes.
FastLadder looks cool. I just tried importing my OPML file though, and my browser crashed! Maybe it’s just a snow leopard thing…
I sometimes use Yahoo Pipes as well as a filtering tool. I didn’t included it in this particular talk, because I don’t think it is as easy to use as some of the others.
@Ady Thanks for the nice words (both on here and on Twitter!). Yes, it’s certainly a tricky topic to explain to people. Even those who understand the web well will sometimes find it difficult to understand what RSS is about at first.
Forgot to tell you, I was interested in what you meant by “Journalism and programming are converging” or something. It was most interesting to me other than your excellent French skills.
@takaaki First off, I think anyone who is into writing can benefit from having some knowledge of how information is presented online. You should have some understanding of how your writing in published, and at least have some vocabulary to communicate with web admins who are an important part of the story presentation. Chris (@eyeseast) could likely tell you more about this, but aggregating data from different sources and presenting it in an interesting way is a skill that writers and story tellers will need to have. For example, taking a table of data from wikipedia and repackaging it in a graphical manner or on a map can be a useful skill, I think.
Very informative, and you turned me on (pardon my French) to a few good ideas. Many thanks. Speaking as a former newspaper hack, I think what you say about profiting from your own site/blog (ie not likely to be monetary) is spot on. For me, blogging has kept me sane and in touch with the world I thought I’d lost when I left print journalism.
As a kid, I’d dreampt of being the editor of my own paper – that is what blogs can be for anyone now. In a sense I have attained my dream, therefore I’m free to get on with something more worthwhile – life!
And you are right about giving info freely, you never know when or how it pays off, but it does (usually).
@OurManinAbiko Thanks for the comments. And keep in touch if you’d like to knock more of these ideas around. Coincidentally, I was just browsing your site this afternoon. Keep up the good work over there.