BBC Multimedia: The Long Way Home

Volcano-induced air-travel paralysis has been splendidly captured in a BBC audioslideshow, The Long Way Home, ingeniously produced by Paul Kerley.

The blend of stunning images and soundbites are cleverly set to the beat of REM, Sinatra, Pat Benatar, Dwight Yoakam, and more, underscoring the comic preposterousness of the whole messy situation.

Watch it here.

(Cyberhat tip to Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.)

10 Things Journalists Should Learn in 2010

'Tis the season of "ten best" lists, and we thought about posting our ten best "ten best" lists, but that seemed too ... ambitious. So we'll bring to the party instead this forward-looking list of "Ten Things Every Journalist Should Know in 2010," courtesy of Journalism.co.uk.

Everyone's prognosticating these days, but this particular list has more weight of authority simply because last year's version, "Ten Things Every Journalist Should Know in 2009," turned out to be reliably prophetic, and still valid -- starting with using Twitter and RSS feeds for news gathering and community building. Since we cast our Oscar ballots with those who have strong track records in that department, we'll take the same tack here.

So here's the top of this year's updated list of what journalists need to learn.

1. How to monitor Twitter and other social media networks for breaking news or general conversations in your subject area using tools such as TweetDeck. Understand and use hashtags.

2. You are in control. Don’t become a slave to technology, make it your slave instead. You will need to develop strategies to cope with information overload – filter, filter, filter!

3. You are a curator. Like it or not, part of your role will eventually be to aggregate content (but not indiscriminately). You will need to gather, interpret and archive material from around the web using tools like Publish2, Delicious and StumbleUpon. As Publish2 puts it: “Help your readers get news from social media. More signal. Less noise.”

4. Your beat will be online and you will be the community builder. Creating communities and maintaining their attention will increasingly be down to the efforts of individual journalists; you may no longer be able to rely on your employer’s brand to attract reader loyalty in a fickle and rapidly changing online world (see 7).

5. Core journalistic skills are still crucial. You can acquire as many multimedia and programming skills as you want, but if you are unable to tell a story in an accurate and compelling way, no one will want to consume your content.

Read the rest of the list here.

What's on your list of new skills and information to acquire in 2010?

Tip of the cybercap to Alltop.

Bookmark This: Journalism About Journalism

If you're looking for journalism about journalism, Alltop's "Journalism" page is your one-stop destination, with links to the top 5 daily stories at nearly 100 top online publications and blogs that cover every aspect of journalism.

From the Columbia Journalism Review to Editor & Publisher and Poynter, they're all here.

Mouse over each link, and an internal popup provides the first few sentences of what awaits at the destination, enabling you to better decide if it's worth clicking.

If that selection is still too overwhelming you can slim it down for your own use, by creating your own MyAlltop page. That, in fact, is Alltop's strength -- selectively aggregating quality content, and providing a self-controlled filter to prevent information overload.

MyAlltop enables you to create a “personal, online magazine rack” of your favorite websites and blogs. You can create a personal collection from over 32,000 information sources—if you’re interested in something, we probably have it covered.

You'll even get your own customized URL -- http://my.alltop.com/yournamehere -- that you can share with others.

We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points -- they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed. In a nutshell, Alltop is an information filter to help you find your nuggets of gold.

If you're looking for the Web's best videojournalism, then of course KobreGuide is still your single best online destination.