60 sites in 60 minutes

Ryan Pitts, the web boss at the Spokane Spokesman-Review, gave a presentation at the U-T yesterday as part of the News Train traveling training program. 

He zipped through a plethora - a myraid, a bunch, a blizzard -- of free sites that do everything from rate the news to turn voice memos into text messages and tons in between. Vimeo, Viddler VoVox and Meebo were enough to make some of the attendees Yelp (which was another site.)

Here's his list. It's worth clicking through if you have time, as it's always amazing to see all that's out there.

On the one hand, it showed how a clever amateur has access to tools that do very cool things in transmitting and presenting information that are more state of the art than those a big old media company like the U-T has in-house.  (I can hear the digerati saying, "Well, yeah, duh.") 

But while are a  lot of very useful tools on his list, the presentation drove home to me our dire need for modern technology that would enable us -- i.e. a big legacy (ew) newsroom -- to do all that stuff with one system, not a cobbled-together contraption of dot.this for this function and dot.that for that one.  We already have trouble shifting from one application to the next. ("Dang it, what's this site's password again? And where's that stupid button?") 

We should have a better and more efficient and effective publication tool than what a 14-year-old kid can piece together from free apps available online. The fact is, though, that we don't.