Roll your own interactive media

Big money operations like the NYTimes and Wall Street Journal are producing interactive masterpieces of the sort Edward Tufte would laud. A couple of cases in point:

• Casualties of War
• Making Tracks

How can you convey meaning with similar WHOOMP! without the tony tech staff?

Last week, I chatted up some journalism students at the University of New Mexico on just this issue. Here's the presentation and here are some quick links to the free tools we talked about:

Charts & Graphs

• swivel.com
• Google spreadsheets

Photo Essays

• slide.com
• flickr.com
• Google presentations

Interactive Maps

• Google MyMaps

Content Management Systems

• wordpress.com
• drupal.org
• typepad.com
• pligg.com
• joomla.com
• plone.org

And there's more.

Social Networks

• ning.com
• kickapps.com