Free Web Tools for Everyday Operations
In today’s Web-first, print-second workflow, any tool or service that offers a high quality solution quickly—and even better—for free, is highly prized.
In today’s Web-first, print-second workflow, any tool or service that offers a high quality solution quickly—and even better—for free, is highly prized. But publishers are starting to catch on to the fact that they can leverage public and shared sites to meet many of their needs.
“We’ve been using quite a few open source solutions for years, which is what many of the sites like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook are based upon,” says Jay Hook, IT director for Reni Publishing. “Personally, I feel that open source in the publishing world is going to become a turning point for many independent publishers as they become more user-friendly and feature-rich. Many publishers are unaware of the solutions available, mainly due to a lack of research.”
Reni is now in the early stages of looking at a free site for creating digital editions, called Issuu. “It also has its own markup language, which is used to control the viewer’s theme,” says Hook. “This means that designers will have the ability to create all kinds of new things for the Issuu viewer.”
Twitter: Your New Best Friend?
Many publishers are leveraging established social networks like Facebook to promote their titles and push content out to the Web. The Nation recently added Twitter—a service that lets members stay connected and share news with short messages—to its arsenal. “We’re putting up four stories a day,” says online director Jeff Larson. “Right now we have 66 followers, but that’s just word of mouth. We will soon start promoting onsite with RSS.”
During the first week of September, The Nation received an additional 24,130 viewers from links and postings on other free sites. “That’s relatively quiet,” says Larson. “Often digg, reddit and del.icio.us can send much more when a big story hits.”
Twitterholic is a service that scrapes the network for the most popular posters. Many publishers, including Time, have editors post to Twitter to develop a following. “Get your columnists and experts to put stories on Twitter,” says Jim Louderback, CEO of Internet video company Revision3 and former editor-in-chief of PC Magazine. “It binds that following to your brand. You may also find people in the community who should be part of your brand.”
Portal sites offer new traffic-driving services. With Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo! determines the most popular searches, then showcases the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and users emailing the stories to friends. Stories with the most buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page. Publishers can put Yahoo! Buzz buttons on their own site to drive votes.
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