Zooming to Izyum, for Web 2.0 training

I am getting ready to give a workshop on Friday in Izyum, about two and a half hours by bus from Kharkiv. The workshop is for the Новини Ізюмщини (Izyum News) newspaper. I plan to cover advanced Internet research skills, introductory spreadsheet skills and a new module I've developed about "Web 2.0" -- fast and free ways to make news Web sites more engaging and interactive.

In the new program, I'll show reporters how to set up blogs, add "insta-polls" and post multimedia content (video, slide shows and so forth).

In prepping for the Web 2.0 training, I'm using Google's Russian-language interface -- because that's what we'll use on Friday. It looks and feels just like the English-language version.

My plan is to have each participant create a blog and populate it with content: perhaps the summary of a news article that the participant has written (with a link to the full article), and maybe a poll.

There are several online tools that will create a poll for you and let you embed it in your own Web site. These tools ask you the question and options that you want in your poll, then spit out some code that you can paste on your Web page -- the same technique that YouTube and SlideShare use.

Here's a poll I just created using a tool called BlogPoll.