http://www.wordherder.net Tools and techniques for readers and writers Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:36:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Image by Olivander via Flickr In my search for workaday happiness, I left another job. This is becoming a habit. This job was one of the dullest things I've ever done - filing news via an awful content management system that didn't let me format pictures properly, wouldn't ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=49 Image by Better Than Bacon via Flickr It's me again, and I have something important to tell you. Sometimes, it's hard to make choices that you know are right. I know lots of writers who are struggling to make ends meet. Five years ago, you couldn't walk out of ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=54 Sorry to have been away for so long. Some of you know that I have had some major personal life-type stuff to deal with. Hey ho, onwards and upwards. Let's ease back in gently, shall we? Check out this list of resources for writers, which comes courtesy of the Association ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=47 This project, called Jourknow, looks interesting. Although there isn't a stable release for download yet, goldarn it. It reminds me a little of Ubiquity, the experimental browsing enhancer for Firefox, in its ability to process natural language input. But Jourknow is more concerned with extracting meaning during information gathering and ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=44 I'm a big fan of Google maps in general, but it can be particularly useful when you're trying to illustrate a story about a particular area. I experimented with it here, while writing a story about an alleged attack by the Russian government on Kyrgyzstan's cyber infrastructure. This wasn't a blindingly ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=38 How effectively are we using digital media in our reporting? I write regularly for some large news organisations. Some embrace suggestions for including new digital assets within stories. I've asked others for the opportunity to do basic stuff like provide extra links at the bottom of a story, and been told ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=31 What's going to happen to us poor freelancers? Newspapers and magazines are closing or scaling back in record numbers. Budgets are being cut, and writers are getting laid off - which means more freelancers on the market, competing for less work. Chilling stuff, to be sure. But there's another problem facing ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=17 Journalists and fiction writers alike often need access to data about all sorts of stuff. Writing a story about how consumer confidence and home prices just nosedived? Might be handy to be able to correlate the two together, over a 20-year history. Maybe you might want to check them against ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=13 Mariner, which publishes writers' software for both Windows and OS X, has its software on sale for previous customers tomorrow in a 40% off one day only blowout. It's as good an opportunity as any to give Contour, its screenplay development tool, a whirl. The company launched Contour 1.0 this month. ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=9 Welcome to Word Herder, a blog for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. As a journalist and aspiring fiction writer, I'm an avid consumer of information. I'm always on the lookout for research sources, and for tools that help me to organise and consume that research more effectively. ... http://www.wordherder.net/?p=1