Emily – Those are great map-building resources, and your article has other good links as well. I don’t want to take traffic from your article, but you should consider adding them to the wiki, too.

A quick comment on blog software – blog software was initially designed for a certain way of organizing and looking at information, but be careful not to overlook the power in these simple sites. Hosted blogs are easy enough to maintain that just about anyone can publish using blog software and blog systems are becoming flexible enough that they don’t limit you so much in creating full-featured sites.

I bring this up because I believe news and journalism need to bring more reporters and journalists into online reporting, collaboration and publishing, regardless of technical ability or background.

As Jeff correctly pointed out above, you can get more flexibility out of a host on which you install and configure a CMS system (I am already experimenting with drupal after only three weeks of having a blog on wordpress.com because I want more control over my site).

But if that sounds like too much for you, or if you are intimidated by the technical work of hosting and maintaining your own site, don’t feel bad! It is a great start for journalists to create simple, easily maintainable blog sites on which they post carefully reported, well-written pieces that experiment with multimedia content.

And if the limitations of your blog software start irritating you enough that you start looking into hosts, that is great on a certain level, too! Once you react to limitations in software by getting irritated and trying to find a better way instead of by being intimidated or scared, you’re on the right track in my book. =)

It’s so important for journalists to know what kind of resources are out there — I shared a few of my favorite links here, in this recent E&P column…

In it, I mention two of my favorite mapping tools: MapBuilder.net and QuikMaps.com

Both are incredibly easy to use, and allow you to create a decent interactive map for your site or blog in a matter of minutes.

I’d recommend Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo, or even one of the PHP/Post Nuke content management systems if you want to have a little more flexibility with your website. These systems allow greater control over look and feel, layout, reader/user/author/administrator rights, and include more powerful options for comments.

For discussion forums, PHPbb is among the most popular free forums on the web. It is reasonably secure, easy to set up, and flexible.

One issue with discussion forums is that often a user’s account on the main blog site will not be the same account s/he uses to log into a discussion forum.

Gallery and Coppermine are free PHP based photo gallery packages that offer powerful picture management function, including automatic resizing, slideshows, voting and comments.

Lots of choices huh? One of the best ways to approach this problem is to find a web host that uses a 1) linux, 2)php & MySQL databases, and 3) automated installation scripts. Many hosts use a system called “Fantastico” which allows for simple 3 step processes to install any of the blog/cms/forum software packages above. No uploading files to a server or editing arcane script files. If you find a webhost with Fantastico or other scripting service, you can test install several of these engines to see which one meets your needs.

What we’d like to avoid, however, are people adding links to their software development shops. We’re looking for ready-to-use, few-or-no-tech-skills-required tools, not consultants. Thanks!