Gmail has joined Yahoo! and Windows Live as an OpenID provider, meaning that you can now use your Gmail account to get a URL which will work in any site which is set up as a "relying party". To set it up go here and follow the instructions. Facebook is the last remaining big player not to join the party, reports TechCrunch, though that will be only a matter of time, it believes.

ITN has started geo-tagging stories and locating them for users on a Google Maps mashup, reports journalism.co.uk.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes a funny post on his top 10 comment-types with suitable commentary on each of them. Worth a read…

The Online Journalism Blog has an extended piece about Dave Cohn, founder of Spot.us. Dave’s idea is simple:

a journalist, a citizen, a community – pitches a subject to be investigated journalistically; the story is then open for funding, and whoever wants can contribute with a small sum; if the target amount is reached, a journalist takes the story on; finally it gets published.

So far it has worked quite well, too –

“We’ve raised 3000 dollars from about 100 donors, about an average of 33 dollars each.

“It’s like digital poetry”

 

Marshal Goldsmith, who writes the “Ask the Coach” blog for the Harvard Business Review, has some words of advice for those just starting out on their careers: “In this new era of uncertainty, we all need to think like entrepreneurs.”

He starts his thoughtful post on the pressures of globalisation with the following reality-check:

• It is tough out there, and it’s only going to get tougher.
• Forget about security.
• Like it or not, even if you start out with a large corporation, you need to think like an entrepreneur.
• Make peace with this reality, and your life is going to be a lot better.

Read the whole post for the whole dose of reality….

Thanks to journalism.co.uk’s tip of the day for pointing out that YouTube is host to a plethora of tutorial videos on everything imaginable, including on the popular video editing software which may be of help to journalists:

Final Cut Pro

iMovie

Movie Maker

All you need to do to find them is search for "tutorial" preceded by whatever it is you are looking for help on.

Why don’t we see political ads like this in the UK?

It may be that I’ve only just noticed it but Google Maps is now available in the UK with live traffic overlays. This section of the M25 should illustrate the point.

Technorati Tags: Google, maps

Techcrunch reports that YouTube have introduced a feature which allows you to link to a particular part within a video.

To specify a point, append a tag to the end of your video link with the following syntax: “#t=1m45s” (you can change the numbers before the ‘m’ and ’s’ to edit the minutes and seconds, respectively.

Apparently YouTube will also watch for specific mentions of time in video comments and automatically insert a link to the particular spot in the video being talked about.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, taggingf, video

Likehacker, the make-life-more-efficient website, has come up with a really creative use of tags. We’re used to using tags to see content about a particular thing; Lifehacker have introduced the concept of using tags to avoid a particular thing. For instance their “politics and election free” feed uses tags to provide a feed of their content without the political stuff. Using the “not:” operator they are enabling readers to compile feeds that exclude the stuff they are not interested in. Great idea, explained in more detail here.

Technorati Tags: taggingf, tips, tools