March 19, 2011

SXSW: 5 More Great Sites for Progressive Media Types

SXSW Interactive: Austin Convention Center.Photo: Laura McClure

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Yesterday I blogged about 5 online bon bons and what makes them so sweet. But wait! There’s more in that digital candy dish! Forthwith, five sites and apps joining Storify, Tumblr, Readability, DocumentCloud, and MuckRock as my picks from 2011’s SXSW Interactive. (Read my first 5 reviews here.)

1. Freedom.

Tagline: “Freedom is a simple productivity application that locks you away from the internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to 8 hours at a time. Freedom frees you from distractions, allowing you time to write, analyze, code, or create.”

Sweet spot: Nora Ephron, Peggy Orenstein, and other great writers swear by it.

2. Ushahidi.

Tagline: “Ushahidi is a platform that allows information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping, allowing anyone to submit information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email, or web form.”

Sweet spot: This free, open-source crowdmapping platform makes lo-tech phones a smart choice for crowdsourced data viz. (See: Japan people finder.)

3. Scribd.

Tagline: “Millions of documents and books at your fingertips! Read, print, download, and send them to your mobile devices instantly. Or upload your PDF, Word, and PowerPoint docs to share them with the world’s largest community of readers.”

Sweet spot: Presentations, spread sheets, and how-to manuals of all stripes find a good home here.

4. Instapaper.

Tagline: “Save long web pages to read later, when you have time, on your computer, iPhone, iPad, or Kindle.”

Sweet spot: Instapaper shines when paired with the #longreads twitter feed.

5. Longreads.

Tagline: A free, daily dose of timeless, community/editor-curated “long-form journalism, magazine stories, interview transcripts, and even historical documents” from top magazines.

Sweet spot: The Top 5 Longreads of the week will change your commute. Even better: Each story comes with a time estimate of how long it’ll take you to read it, and you can search the site by 15-minute reads, 30-minute reads, etc.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

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