This is not so much of a new post as a republishing of something that already exists on a third party site but there is a reason for it beyond lazy blogging.
Yesterday, I found myself rummaging through Delicious as I needed to use various Twitter tools I’ve either used or which have featured on, for example, Mashable, over the years. They were all neatly saved in my tags, but when I came to use them something like half of them led to redundant sites. That included the well-established Mr Tweet, which I always thought was an excellent tool (if a little annoying with the DMs) and far better than Twitter’s own recommends ofo people to follow.

Along with the rest of the online world I saved my Delicious bookmarks as a csv file within seconds of Yahoo intimating it was thinknig of closing the site.
And when Seesmic closed its video operation last year I thought about moving my videos and then decided it was a job too far (it involved emailling them and asking for the content) in a fairly hectic period of my life.  So, as far as I know, those videos (including a before-and-after of my epic hair cut, and all the lovely people who videoed their thoughts on it) are gone.More pertinently, I suspect a lot of people who crafted blog posts that included embedded Seemsic discussions are now missing content if they search back in their archives.

Of course, those videos weren’t particularly import but – extreme example, I know – what if Google was to close Blogger? Shifting three years-plus worth of content from this blog elsewhere would be a piece of work. And as a journalist, creating and embedding content up using curation or visualisation tools – like Storify and ManyEyes, both of which I like a lot – doesn’t mean you’ve crafted a work of permanence.

So, along with the idea of backing up as much of my data as I can (and accepting that, sometimes, things just come to an end) I’ve moved a piece of crowdsourcing that is very close to my heart onto this blog.
It’s the Journalism Cliches I Most Dislike list, which I started on Listiki and which so many talented and funny people took the time to contribute to.
Of course, Listiki still exists and I’m not suggesting for a moment that the site is likely to go away – I hope not, it’s great – but I also would hate for this to get lost because I enjoyed collaborating on it, and so I’ve cut n pasted it here.
I’m sure I’ve used or worked on papers that have featured every one of these cliches in the past, but that doesn’t bother me one jot. These are still awesome:

1. Saying something was ‘slammed’ when someone disagreed with it a bit

2. Tragic (when used to describe minor inconvenience)

3. ‘‘Sources close to’’ meaning the person concerned

4. Only time will tell (I haven’t a clue)

5. Firefighters use breathing apparatus to tackle the blaze… NO THEY DIDN’T, THEY USED WATER

6. “So-called” before some tech term

7. An uneasy calm descended on X (place, frequently war-torn) one day after X (violent event). Meaning: There’s no story today, but we have to write summat.

8. Drinking sprees that end in tragedy

9. Ttroubled

10. A neighbour said “He was such a quite man who kept himself to himself…”

11. ‘Gone to the dogs.’

12. (insert verb)-athon

13. Teens are always on ‘a rampage’

14. Every young person is a ‘hoon.’

15. Laceration (it’s a CUT!!!)

16. Moggy – see pooch

17. Local residents – AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

18. Terror – See Horror

19. Mercy dash (routine ambulance call out)

20. Sparking Fears.

21. Political correctness gone mad

22. “with links to”: Anyone who’s flown on the same airline as Al Quaeda operatives, or families, or acquaintances, or pre-school classmates is deemed to be one “with links to”: absent detail on said links, the phrase has lost all informative value

23. Wrote in an online blog (because there are so many offline blogs…)

24. Winter (or any other season) of discontent

25. In an inte, “what’s it like….” to…, when… followed by some reference which couldn’t possibly be “lik” anything else.

26. At the end of the day…..

27. All Caribbean, Australian etc etc waters are ‘shark infested’; nowt else, just ‘shark infested.’

28. “Beverages” when you mean “drinks”

29. Keynote speech… as opposed to a pointless one

30. Every mother’s/parent’s worst nightmare

31. “Licence fee payers reacted with fury”. Did we really…?

32. “Allegedly”: The magic word that allows any random speculation and wild guess be presented as a fact

33. Gruelling – in connection with any charity or sponsored event

34. Tragic tot

35. It  remains to be seen

36. Floral tributes

37. ‘Community leaders’

38. Loveable rogue (death tribute which translates as ‘bloody nuisance)

39. Only cute girls pass exams.

40. ” -gate”

41. ‘Plummeted’ meaning ‘was down a bit’

42. Detectives are piecing together

43. “Fuel fears of a double-dip recession”

44. Tour de force (in book res)

45. Fires that rage or blaze

46. In scenes reminiscent of [insert film/TV show here]

47. Grisly murders. Or brutal ones.

48. Rain/snow/gales ‘Brought Traffic Chaos’

49. Cats that are ‘feline purr-fect’ about anything

50. Articles involving music that include Striking A Chord headlines/intros

51. Pooch (It’s a damn dog)

52. Wantaway (any sportsperson looking for new club)

53. Fights described as fracas or rumpus

54. Wet weather failed to dampen the spirits of…

55. Anything happening in broad daylight

56. Non-biblical Good Samaritans

57. “Bravely battling” by doing what the doctor says

58. Raised eyebrows

59. Revealed

60. Centre Stage

61. “A grieving mother/wife/girlfriend today paid tribute…” (ugh. pass the sick bucket)

62. “Blinking back tears…” (often a attempt to add colour to a real-life story)

63. Horror (when used in a headline. Almost every day)

64. Tot (small child)

65. Plucky (especially pensioners)

66. Up in arms

67. Perfect storm

68. Only time will tell/bring closure

69. Outpouring of (grief/support/etc)

70. 70 Intro: “It is a truth, universally acknowledged…” (that a journalist without an intro will dust this down)

71. According to my taxi driver (clueless foreign correspondent arrives in country)

72. Fortress (insert football stadium name here)

First up, Twitter Counter. This was a bit of a headache. Sign up, sign in, connect with Twitter, crash, generate widget code, get ‘we’re doing maintenance – sorry!’ type message, and then finally a message saying “@LivEchoNews hasn’t been updated for a while” (I’m not sure what that meant – it gets updated all day, every day). Eventually I crunched the stats for the @LivEchoNews account:

And I see the Echo’s Twitter presence is in growth, that our rank and reach is growing, and the weekly average is 50 tweets. Interesting.

Meanwhile, on Twoolr (which is in beta but accepting new members) I checked usage statistics and network statistics once I’d connected Twitter to the application. It gave me interesting data in graph form:

What works is the level of detail you can get – which is particularly useful if you need to monitor your brand (or you – journalists market themselves and their work, for example) a lot.
Twoolr covers who you talk to most, the distance your message travels in terms of retweets, who retweets you,and it has a nice ‘cloud’ feature you can tailor to take out common words like ‘and’ and ‘I’m’.

Grader is a site I use frequently; it’s fast, simple and throws up little messages while you wait for it to work its magic. But mostly I use it because I like to see who’s interesting in my area.

It also shows the 50 Twitter Elite by Location for your area – the Echo is at no. 28 (although rankings change all the time):

You can track your tweets by Time of Day and Day of Week using Xrefer – I found this via Mashable and it’s interesting in that it uses Yahoo Pipes and Google Charts as a mashup. It also shows who you talk to most on Twitter. It’s probably not the most detailed breakdown of information you’ll get, but it does show that bar charts aren’t always the way to go.

Tweetstats is definitely worth a visit – it tells you when and how often you tweet (broken down in months but zoomable so you can pore over daily info too), aggregates daily and hourly tweets, graphs your retweets @ replies and interfaces too. It’s one businesses on Twitter should think about using regularly.

Finally, the other tool I use for work is Social Mention which is a useful brand-monitoring site complete with graphs, for those who like those things. It searches the internet – Twitter, blogs, forums, news sites and more – for your chosen keywords, and returns real-time results. Plus it assesses the ’emotional’ weigh of your brand (ie. whether it’s being talked about in positive or negative tones) who uses/mentions your site most, and sources. It’s not exhaustive but it’s good for discovering conversations about the Echo I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.

I’m sure there are other graph-tastic ways of measuring Twitter activity – just using Twitter’s API and the charts option on Google docs for a start (although I haven’t tried that I plan to try that next – I predict heavy wiki abuse) – but these are ones I’m aware of. I’ll update this as I come across more.

The latest one arrived yesterday courtesy of a tweet from The Pauls (Kinlan and Rawlings, creators of FriendDeck, among other things) who asked for testers for Friendboo – a new FriendFeed podcasting tool. In their own words:

FriendBoo is a super simple audio blogging application built for the users of Friendfeed. All you need is a Friendfeed account and a regular phone.

It’s in very early beta so a few gremlins were unavoidable but it’s looking promising. I reckon regional newspapers with FriendFeed sites could potentially use this as an easy ‘audio-comment under stories’ option for readers.
I like it because it’s a unique, dynamic addition to a site that is, for many users, a simply a nexus point for information from other sites. Probably more importantly for the developers Robert Scoble is also a new fan.
So, after a couple of tests I thought I’d see how it compared with other sites I’ve used.

PROS: Simple dial-in; available for UK and USA users; established commenting facility; cross-posting; fast, embeddable; sharing options, decent sound quality.
CONS: Early beta means inevitable hiccups; not the prettiest embed.
Friendfeed account required.

Undoubtedly the most popular site (for now – it’s amazing how faddy the web is) – is Audioboo which I tried out for the first time using an iPod touch with external mic (cost me £19.99 from Apple and works brilliantly with the Skype app). The embedded player looks lovely, and the sound quality is excellent but it’s really restricting its audience to App-olytes right now. I’ve synched my Nokia to the Audioboo account but I’ve never managed to get it to work properly.
*UPDATE: Sarah Hartley’s instructions on how to ‘boo from a Nokia are here

PROS: Ecellent sound quality; very simple; cross-posting options; photo-adding; rating and comment facilities, fast, free, attractive embed.
CONS: Unavailable for non-iPhone users (does work with iPod Touch with external mic); doesn’t feel as much of a social media option as the others.
Audioboo account required.

For non-Apple users, Ipadio is a good option. Discovered this back in May and although I’ve not had cause to use it since I have kept it at the back of my mind as an exciting new site. The sound quality is good and the embed is very nice, although I don’t like the ‘second phonecast’ text. What’s the point of it?

PROS: Simple to use, low-cost, good sound quality, embed and subscribe options, fast-loading site, short PIN, fast upload, cross-posting; free service (‘right now’ according to the blurb).
CONS: Dont like the ‘Another fine phonephlog’ cross-post text;
Ipadio account required

And, for nostalgia sake, I returned to Utterli, a site I loved right up until the moment they stopped taking calls from the UK because of costs. Using it with my laptop I recorded and uploaded an Utter in seconds (I think the limit is a 10 minute podcast) but mobile-podcasting isn’t an option so that makes it pretty limited.

You upload with text, video or photos if you wish, and others respond via audio or text. It’s a nice idea, and I wish the phone option still worked.

PROS: Free (from laptop); easily embedded, cross-posting, photo and video uploads supported, good social media opportunities, community-building.
CONS: Not available on mobile in UK; not always great sound quality.
Utterli account required

So, which would I use? Right now I’d say Ipadio is the most functional although – like Audioboo – it’s more about broadcasting than conversation. But I think Friendboo could be very good once it’s ready to launch and the threaded conversation opportunities are far greater. Look forward to seeing how it develops.

Within seconds Thom and Stuart Robarts at FACT had photos online via Twitpic and Flickr (Thom used a rather ingenious method of combining iPhone and binoculars to get a shot) before photographer extraordinaire, Pete Carr, heard about the news and headed off with his kit.
His photos are here.
The Echo and Post had great copy, a map, images and video on the websites but it was taking too long to cache, so we made sure the papers Twitter streams kept up constant breaking news with links back to our copy, while retweeting locals who had images on Flickr and other sites.

There was the inevitable ‘who needs newspapers’ tweet…

Need newspapers? maybe not, but a lot of those on my networks wanted journalists to ask the questions they wanted answers to. After all, everyone knew one fact – a crane had fallen onto flats – but it was journalists from the Post&Echo who were trying to fill in the details.
So you have…

followed by…

Scores of people were asking if anyone was hurt, were people trapped, just what had happened – and we were able to answer those queries only because we had reporters on the ground, in the office making phone calls to the emergency services, and talking to the HSE, among other. We managed to wrongly credit @FACT_Liverpool on the Echo’s changed front page but since the story broke as the print run was in progress, it was inevitable a mistake would creep through.

Anyway, it was a good way to combine as many different strands of storytelling as possible. Traditional print, mixed with online social media, staff video and photos, and broke the news, then kept updating the story, very effectively.

I also put together a quick Dipity Flipbook of a feed grabbed from Twitter Search, which should update itself in the future.

I could have made the search term wider but you’d be amazed how many tweets contain the word ‘crane’ without it ever being in reference to “Any arm which swings about a vertical axis at one end, used for supporting a suspended weight“, let alone collapsing ones.