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Microsoft launched its foray into social and search-powered news aggregation, msnNOW. According to the site’s description, “msnNOW is a new way to stay current on the trends people are talking about, searching for, and sharing the most.”

The site uses realtime data from Twitter updates, Facebook posts, YouTube activity, Breaking News and Bing searches to find patterns and tally what’s trending.  Top stories are featured in a slider, and the rest of the stories are shown in a grid-like display (think Newser, but cleaner) in reverse chronological order. They summarize those top trending stories in 100 words or less, and snow you an icon to indicate where that trending story originated. If a story originated on Twitter, you see the top tweets about the topic displayed at the top of  the article. Read more

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When looking for inspiration for your own reader-submissions projects, The New York Times’ collection of storytelling tools is a good place to start because they do it so well. The following examples are ways that The Times have creatively gathered and displayed information submitted by people on the Internet to tell a story. The common thread amongst all of the examples below are that they limit readers to a very specific and thought-provoking theme. Read more

The Knight Digital Media Center at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, acknowledging that people are hungry for data, has launched a simple tool that makes it easy to turn data into searchable databases. The tool, freeDive, uses the Google Visualization API to pull data from a Google Spreadsheet and generate an embeddable widget that you can drop onto any page — no coding required. You can see an example here.

The video below shows you the end result of a database that includes name, city and donation amount for 25,000 campaign contributors (meaning the tool scales well for large amounts of data).

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As more news organizations move toward web content systems that were originally intended for single-person bloggers, the need for a more dynamic tool has becoming increasingly apparent. The New York Times recognizes this and has launched some code that could help. Called ICE (“Integrated Content Editor”), the tool lets collaborators of a web-based text document track changes from multiple users.

In the demo, you can select different users from a dropdown to see their various contributions and deletions in the document. You can toggle between showing/hiding changes.

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The ice is finally starting to melt in Seattle today after one of the worst snow and ice storms in recent years — one that prompted Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire to issue a state of emergency. It was a storm that affected everyone’s day-to-day lives, from transit changes and road closures, to snow days at local elementary schools and colleges. Through it all, The Seattle Times has been a hub for the latest information on the web using a combination of creative packaging, a steady flow of fresh blog content, lots of multimedia, and help from readers who were eager to share information. These are a few ideas you can riff off when weather news breaks in your region.   Full disclosure: I’m a producer at the newspaper.

Live chats

During the worst of the storm, web producers hosted a live chat throughout the day, which served as a place for readers to ask questions about the commute, share updates about weather and ice in their locations, and allowed Times staff to quickly give updates about ever-changing conditions and closures. This community-service chat, while happening, was always linked to high on the homepage, or embedded into the sidebar of the homepage.   Tool of choice: Cover It Live. Read more