6 Cool Usable Tools

My list-making gene is expressing itself again.

Part of the reason is that the News Director in my newsroom (ahem…my boss) asked me to compile some online journalism search tools for my colleagues.

In the process, I found all sorts of resources that anyone — Yes, even voice actors — could use to their advantage in their business.

Some of you really liked Storify, which I most recently blogged about last month.  Another couple of tools much like Storify are: KeepStream and Curate.us.

Yeah, that’s great, Courvo…but we’re not journalists, we just humble voice actors, and except you nutty bloggers, most of us VO’ s don’t see much of a use for online tools like this.

I hear ya.  I feel your pain… so here’s one of the coolest tools I came across that we can ALL use:  TheNameEngine.  This site “…provides the correct name pronunciations of athletes, entertainers, politicians, newsmakers, and more. Even well-known names are often pronounced in different ways, leaving you to wonder what the correct pronunciation is. You’ll find the right answer here. Better yet, you’ll actually hear the right answer…”

Another site that will help tell YOUR story as a voice actor is SlideShare.  Slide share lets you create share-able slide presentations.  That’s an oversimplification, the visual presentation you create or import is embeddable all over — your blog, your FaceBook page, your LinkedIn profile, and much more more. It accepts nearly any possible presentation file format you could imagine (PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.).  SlideShare is not new, actually, but it may be new to you:  “SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. With 50 million monthly visitors and 90 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 250 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.”

Finally, for a little fun, try Wordle.net.  Wordle creates a “word cloud” from available resources…documents, websites, blogs, pdf’s…you name it.  This is actually a neat visual tool you can use in promotional materials, your home page, newsletters, email, etc.  Wordle gives great prominence in the graphical representation to the words that appear more frequently in the source text.

Here are two examples.  I did a Worlde word cloud for Bob Souer’s Blog and this blog.  Here’s Bob’s:

Wordle for Bob Souer's Blog

As you know, Bob has a lot of friends, and frequently introduces his blog articles by saying “My friend XXXXX,…”  and his Wordle reflects that.  He also must use the words, “voice”, “post”, “video”, “blog”,  and “things”.

Here’s the Wordle for this blog:

Courvo's Blog Wordle

Apparently, last week’s interview with ACX’s head honcho influenced these returns, and surprisingly, the response to BranchOut ( an article I also wrote last week) had a similar effect.

With Wordle, you can orient the word cloud sideway, vertically, change the colors, mix up the words horizontally/vertically, choose different fonts…and…well, you get the idea.

I’ve written a lot of blogs about online tools that are applicable to a lot of different endeavours.  TOOLS.  It’s how you use them.  Be creative.  Use the ones that work for you, and say “so long” to the rest.

CourVO

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