You, too, can be a nerd

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Tech for Journalists workshop on Tuesday night. Here’s an overview of what was covered for people who attended and are looking for links or for people who want to see what they missed. You can also find my presentation slides here.

Why keep up with technology?.

1) Editors love tech story pitches.
2) Knowing how to use a new obscure social search engine could be the difference between calling everyone by the last name of the source you’re trying to get in touch with in the White Pages and finding their contact information online in two seconds.
3) It’s easy, so why not?

It’s easy thanks to tech blogs. A tech blogger’s job is to find out what’s significant, interesting and new in tech and tell you about it. I keep up with tech news by following just one blog – Read Write Web. You could also read Mashable or Tech Crunch. Read a few posts and decide which one you like best. I also highly recommend Mindy McAdams’ blog Teaching Online Journalism because it’s aimed at journalists and journalism students. If you think you’ll have trouble remembering to go to the websites regularly, you have a few options:

- Follow them on Twitter. Read their tweets and only click the link if you think the post will be relevant to you. Here are their Twitter handles: @macloo @rww @mashable @TechCrunch
- Subscribe to a daily or weekly summary newsletter. Set your Gmail to send them directly to a folder called “newsletters.” Read them when you have time and mark them as read if they get too backlogged. Here’s how to use Gmail filters.
- Subscribe to their RSS feeds in Google Reader. I explain how to do that in this blog’s first post.

Blogs are also great for finding out what people are talking about in any niche topic you might be writing a story about. Here are some ways to do blog searches:

- Delicious: A site that lets you see what other people are bookmarking. If other people are bookmarking it, it’s probably useful and popular.
- Post Rank: Finds blogs by topic and ranks posts by user interaction such as comments.
- Google blog search
- Blog rolls, where bloggers link to other blogs they read and blogs on the same topic

Blogs are great, but sometimes you need to get specific when you’re looking for sources. Let’s say you’re looking for someone trying to buy a house for the first time in Ottawa.

- They might be tweeting, blogging, or writing about it on Facebook. OneRiot pulls real time results from a variety of social media. Not only will this find people who are talking about what you’re looking for, you’ll have a way to contact them through whatever social network they’re using.
- They might be talking to other people in the housing market through a forum or message board. Omgili searches obscure forums.
- Once you’ve found a potential source, you’ll want to know more about them. Run their name through Pipl to dig up a creepy amount of dirt.
- Find out what other social networks they belong to with People Search
- Amy Dempsey’s never-fail patent-pending method for finding people’s phone numbers: Using quotes, do a Google search for “firstname lastname” 123, where 123 is the area code. For example, if you're looking for John Smith’s phone number and you know he lives in Toronto, search “john smith” 416.

Finally, here are the links to the Firefox extensions I talked about at the workshop.

- Scrapbook: Save web sites exactly how they were when you first saw them and add notes and highlights. I have no idea how I ever lived without it.
- Quicknote: Take notes on web pages without awkwardly switching from word processor to browser and back.
- Add to search bar and Drag & DropZones: When you use the two together, you can highlight text and drag it into any search engine you add. A new tab with your search result will open.
- Delicious: Makes tagging and searching your bookmarks much more convenient.