Journalism Tech Review: Soo Meta

NOTE: Sooo Meta is sooo over.

History

Soo Meta is a browser based editing tool which according to the website blurb allows you to create multimedia stories in minutes.

How it helps you

As well as marketers and educators, this tool was created with journalists in mind "Viewers expect more and more visual content. It’s time to deliver short movies, rich-media stories in your posts! Your audience will love it!" Like with Popcorn Maker the idea is that you enrich your original media by adding more multimedia frills. The video demonstrates how to use the Google bookmarklet to collect words, video and images from around the web, this has the added advantage of allowing you to cite your sources.

In practice

It took longer than "a few minutes" to get to grips with this tool. This is because the demonstration video only shows how to grab material via the bookmarklet, yet it doesn't show you how to install the bookmarklet. Once I'd worked that out I was well into my story. When I attempt to install in Chrome it crashed, I finally installed it in Firefox but was unable to view the video in this browser. I had to complete the edit in Chrome then add the images again (so it carried across the metadata) in Firefox. More than once whilst hopping about I crashed my browser and had to step back.

Drawbacks

Aside from the browser malfunctions, there's very little support for this tool and you are pretty much on your own when it comes to working out what's wrong. Even more unhelpfully if you do try and Google "Soo cut" (the name of the bookmarklet) you get a load of "soo cute" images and chintzy Google apps.

Summary

A great idea which appears simple but can be frustratingly tricky in practice.

Rating