Much like book covers, you cannot judge a Web service by its vowel-less, silly name. The truth is, the best web services — Flickr, Google, digg — often sound like nonsense, making many newsrooms disregard them. Yet, what they fail to realize is that these services are tools, despite whatever the tag line describes itself as. Here are a few web services that deserve a spot on your news tool belt…

Breaking News - Summize.com
If you’ve ever heard a tidbit of breaking news and want to get more I’d suggest consulting Summize, which is a search engine that collects conversation from twitter updates. Reporters may find it useful when trying to find additional clues at the very beginning of a breaking story. Of course you’ll still need to verify the info but its great for generating possible ledes.

Locative Journalism - Seero.com
Seero is a Mashup that combines the power of video with Google’s Maplet technology. The service works by plotting the location of the video on a map and then following any change as the video plays. After watching a car chase scene from a movie on Seero, I’m convinced it has practical reporting uses. Reporters charged with maintaining a timeline of events could use the map mashup to give a sense of reality to their reporting. It’s just one of many ways this service can be used though.

Virtual Newsroom - FriendFeed for Smart Phones
Newsrooms are busy places. So for reporters who are out of the office for extended periods of time on assignment, it could prove difficult to stay in the loop. Using a program like friendfeed on your smart phone could change that indefinitely. If you have to coordinate with a few folks and are not always at your desk, it could be a very valuable tool for your news tool belt. However, this is somewhat less practical because it would require many people to use the service for it to truly be effective.

Finding Contacts - Twellow.com
Yet another twitter-based service, Twellow.com collects a directory of people by their profession. Off the top of my head I might consult this service more for initial research on an enterprise story that I did not know much about. It may even lend itself to finding good sources specific to what your writing about. At the very least its like having a busy trade show for every profession imaginable right at your finger tips.

More News Tools:

Vozme - A text-to-speech web app
CitySense - Search for large crowds in real time using GPS
BrightKite - Location-based social network