Twitter is a great tool to promote your stories and enhance your online identity. Treat your Twitter account as your business card. It should look professional, individual and cool.

That’s why it’s important to customize your Twitter page. If you have a personal blog, see to it that the colors are alike and that you use the same profile photo.

And yes, it is absolutely imperative that you upload a good-looking photo of yourself. Standard red and orange eggs aren’t likely to make a good impression on your audience. If you want them to mind you, you first have to mind them, right? So upload a photo.

There are different services to create individualized maps that you can embed in websites or blogs. One of them is UMapper, which allows a number of features like setting markers, adding text and photos. You’ll find step-by-step instructions on how to get started with UMapper in this video.

Unfortunately, you can’t add video to markers with UMapper. But you still may want to check this site out because it offers a lot of other interesting features.

For instance, you can create a map quiz using UMapper’s “GeoDart Game” template. Or you can create a twitter map that shows latest tweets containing a selected hashtag or keyword. To see how that’s done, check out this article.

Creating a personalized Google map

The people at Google have summarized the basic steps of how to create a map and embed it into a blog or website very well, so I’ll just copy and paste their instructions here. I hope they won’t mind.

To create or edit a map:

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Click My Places > Create new map. If you want to open an existing map, check it in the left panel and click Edit.
3. Add a title and description for your map. You can make your map public or unlisted.
4. Use the icons in the the top right corner of the map. These include:

Select button Selection tool. Use this to drag the map and select placemarks, lines, and shapes.

Placemark button Placemark tool. Use this to add placemarks.

Line tool. Click this button to select a tool to draw lines, shapes, and draw lines that automatically snap to roads.

Note that these tools do not appear until you create or edit a map (see step 2).

Once you are finished, click Done.

If you prefer, you can also watch this video that will take you through the process.

Embedding your map in a blog or website

When you have created your map, you need to embed it in your blog.

* Click the embed symbol in the top right corner of your map.
* You should now get a pop-up with HTML code you can copy and insert into a new blog post
* If you would like to customize your map so that it fits the width of your blog’s text column, click “Customize and preview embedded map” below the box with the HTML code
* You should now see a new pop-up that offers different map sizes and a custom option.
* Click “Custom” and change the width and height as you like it. You can see how the preview of your map changes accordingly.
* You may want to zoom in or out using the arrows until the map in the preview window looks just the way you want it to appear in your blog
* When you’ve got the preview looking exactly right, scroll down to the HTML code.
* Copy and paste the code to embed the map in your blog or website.
* Done. Congratulations

By Thorsten Karg (with a little help from google)

Every multimedia workshop differs from the next, but the lessons learned by the participants are always very similar. One thing is certain: You need patience and perseverance.

It also helps to stay calm and collected when learning to use the tools and technologies. It’s much like long-distance running. You start out full of confidence and high expectations, then lactic acid builds up in your muscles. Suddenly you feel like you’re reaching a dead end, frustration and exhaustion make you want to throw in the towel. Rage rises up, causing you to ask yourself why you even bother. But in the end, when you’ve achieved your goal and you click that “publish” button, you feel a rush of satisfaction.

Like any kind of creative activity, working with multimedia can stir up emotions and fray your nerves. But it doesn’t have to be stressful. Follow these tips to stay nicely on top of your multimedia work without losing your head.

Don’t overdo it!

The Internet has unlimited possibilities. The temptation is huge to exhaust all those possibilities. That’s not always to the benefit of the user. And the user is the main point to keep in mind.

Multimedia projects are often overloaded, bursting at the seams with (sometimes sub-optimal) video, audio and photographic footage. Driven by their excitement about the technical potential, authors can easily lose sight of the actual story they’re trying to convey. Just think of the endless audio-video slideshows with thinly told stories and so-so orchestration, the masses of blurry photos and unsteady video clips.

Bear in mind your own capabilities and keep an eye on your time management.

Sound clips make a story livelier, more interesting and more authentic. But not all voice clips are good and make sense. Before you use a sound clip, you should consider whether it will truly provide users or listeners with new insights.

In practice, some “golden rules” for using voice clips have evolved:

1. Voice clips should be unique.

Sound clips make sense if they contain at least one of the following:

* Strong feelings
* Expressions of opinion
* Humor/wit
* Something about the personality of the interviewee
* Eye witness reports
* Historical sound documents

2. Voice clips are not for conveying facts and background information. These essentials should be part of your text, not part of the voice clip.

Blogosphere photo by DaveBleasdale at FlickR, courtesy of CC license.

Blogs literally make publishing anything online a breeze. Whether you’re a radio, TV, print or online journalist, a blog can offer a creative space to experiment, or a digital companion to your published or broadcast work – a sort of personal digital notebook. Or it can simply be whatever you want it to be.

Increasingly, many media outlets are using blogs in a more formal way – often giving journalists the freedom to explore a topic in more depth or take readers behind the scenes of their work.

But while technology makes blogging easy, starting out as a blogger and actually writing something worth reading can be a daunting task.

Blogging is a little bit like a digital writing adventure. And even though you might think someone is a good writer or a good journalist, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll instantly be a good blogger.

So, what follows here are a few tips to bear in mind for writing a good blog post.