Storify
www.storify.com
Currently in beta, Storify is here to let
you tell stories using social media. You can create a story from any content
that us online and publicity available, be it posts, photos or videos, the
ideas being to make a story that lasts and won’t be lost in the constant stream
of updates. Storify’s search interface enables you to drag and drop media and
text to your story, keeping their metadata in the process so you don’t need to
quote sources.
You just order the elements and add text to
give context to the reader. You can also edit and add to a story after it’s
been published. The results can be quite compelling.
Join.me
http://join.me
How often have you tried to explained how a
website works to somebody over the phone, only to find that they are lost, two
pages behind, or looking at the wrong menu? Wouldn’t it be great if they could
see what you were doing on your desktop? Before join.me came along, the best
way to do this was to take your laptop to them or send a series of screenshots
by email. Now you can let up to 250 people share your desktop from anywhere in
the world. It’s ideal for training, product demos and PC support, as you can
let others see your desktop from any web-connected device.
WorldWide Science
www.worldwidescience.org
Developed by the US Office of Scientific
and Technical Information (OSTI), WorldWideScience makes sharing scientific
knowledge as easy as possible by combining national and international
scientific databases and portals into a one-stop shop. It also allows for
real-time searching and translation of material from all around the globe. This
means that any researcher, scientist or curious member of the public can search
the site and read it in their native language.
Pinterest
www.pinterest.com
Pinterest is a way to keep an online
pinboard of the beautiful things you find on the web. It also lets you browse
and draw inspiration from the collections of others. If you see something in
somebody else’s collection that you admire, you can pin it to your own
collection, or just comment on it. It’s oddly addictive, but has some real
world uses too. People have used it for design inspirations when palnning to
refurnish a room, or to collect ideas for a wedding. With millions of people
giving it a try, Pinterest is already proving a compelling way to share ideas.
Kickstarter
www.kickstarter.com
Got an idea that you think would work, but
don’t know how to get the world out and start raising funds? If so, Kickstarter
may be a good place to start. Whether you’re an artist, designer or filmmaker,
Kickstarter can provide you with a no-risk way of seeing if your idea is good
enough to get patronage from a variety of interested parties. Simply say what
you want to do, how much you want to raise and by when, and if you hit your
target by the deadline you have set, you get the money to fund it.
Hipmunk
www.hipmunk.com
If you’ve ever tried to compare flights,
you’ll know it’s a confusing business. Different airlines have different costs,
flight lengths and changes, and trying to keep track of it all to work out
which option is the best for you is nigh on impossible. That’s the problem
Hipmunk was created to solve. Enter where you want to go and when into its
search engine, and Hipmunk will organise all the available flights in a simple
timeline showing you prices, airlines, journey times, departure times and the
number of stops.
Deezer
www.deezer.com
Deezer is another music site well worth
turning into. It’s been around in the US for a while and already has over 20-
million users, but it plans to open its 13 million licensed tracks up to 130
more countries, including the UK. Deezer is determined to be a legitimate,
licensed music site, supporting musicians and others who earn a living from
music. It’s easy to dismiss as just another streaming service, but it has big
plan. Deezer’s founders feel that MP3s have robbed people of the feeling of
browsing your shelves and listening to entire albums, and want to restore the
lost art of music curation to the masses.
Rapportive
http://rapportive.com
Like Xobni for Microsoft Outlook,
Rapportive helps make sense of the people you interact with on Gmail. Once
installed, it adds this information to the side of email messages where the ads
would normally appear. It can pull information from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
and Skype among others, so if they use the same email on all these services you
can get a lot of information about your email contact all displayed in the
Gmail window. Now you never need to admit forgetting a business contract again!
Openleaks
www.openleaks.org
Openleaks is an offshoot of Wikileaks set
up by defectors from the original site, but without any political leanings that
may colour how the whistle-blowing information is seen by the general media.
It’s also not interested in publishing the material itself – it just wants to
be a mechanism that lets users upload documents safely and anonymously so they
can be shared by the Openleaks community. Once a document is uploaded, it’s
added to a database so it can be shared with organisations like local support
groups, newspapers, NGOs and labour unions, who can publish it themselves.
