Cool Tools
Capture a screenshot of a website
Need to make a screen capture of a website? That’s much simpler to do when the site neatly fits the size of your monitor, but most don’t. To avoid having to piece together a series of screenshots to capture a single webpage, use Aviary’s screen capture tool. Try Talon, an online tool from Aviary.
Talon allows [...]
Let users suggest, then vote among questions or ideas
Google Moderator lets you create polls where users can decide between competing questions, suggestions or ideas.
Except it’s different than a traditional poll in that you, the creator, don’t have to provide the ideas for users to choose among. Instead, the tool harnesses the power of the crowd to create the ideas and to moderate the [...]
Create an online game or puzzle
So you want to create your own game? Try a free online service such as Sharendipity.
It’s one of several online services out there that will let you create games from scratch or allow you to customize an existing template. A great deal of the services out there offer templates and games that can’t be customized [...]
See Twitter trends in your area
One of Twitter’s most useful features, even to casual users, is that it allows one to look in on conversations going on all over the world. The downside to that is that the hundreds of thousands of conversations out there must be filtered to make meaning out of them.
One tool that may help is Trendsmap, [...]
Host live chats or live-blog an event
Here’s a tool that’s starting to pop up all over the place lately. CoveritLive is a sort of hybrid between a chat room and a blog. It’s often being called live-blogging.
CoveritLive (and similar services) is often used for sporting events or for fluid breaking news situations. The free service allows you to place a box [...]
Make interactive timelines with video and photos
Here’s a new take on the timeline. Vuvox allows you to piece together a timeline using multimedia elements. It’s a free service. All you’ll need is an e-mail address to sign up.
For an example of what Vuvox can do, check out their Video Haiku of the 2008 presidential campaign
Use your computer as a teleprompter
So you’re trying to do a Webcast and you don’t have a teleprompter? There’s software out there to turn your computer into a teleprompter, but you can also use free online services such as Cueprompter.com.
Just paste in your script, click Start Prompter and you’re off. It doesn’t have all the features a desktop software package [...]
Create rich data visualizations
Ever jealous of the cool data visualizations produced by the NYT or WaPo? Check out Many Eyes. It’s a site you can use to process complex data sets and output all kinds of graphs and charts such as this graph with forty decades of government expneses, a word map of Shakespeare’s favorite words, or this [...]
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