As one of a growing handful of online-only magazines in Canada, Orato was excited when Masthead Magazine announced its first annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards.

(Update Sept 15: finalists have been announced. Congrats to all the nominees!)

The awards, to be presented in Toronto on October 26, will recognize everything from Web design to multimedia features, online community, blogs and e-newsletters—10 categories in total, with separate judging for consumer and trade publications.

It’s a great boon to Canadian magazines that have been doing impressive online work for many years, and particularly valuable recognition for newer online-only magazines that have struggled to carve themselves a piece of the pie in an industry still focused mainly on print (though that is shifting rapidly of late).

With judging taking place this month, Orato Managing Editor Lisa Manfield and Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler were delighted to be asked to sit on two panels for the Best e-Newsletter and Best Overall Website respectively. Not only were we encouraged by the sheer volume of entries, but we were also inspired by some of the creative and well-executed online strategies from magazines big and small across the country.

And we’re looking forward to the unveiling of winners in Toronto this fall. Good luck to all who entered!

Orato is honoured to be among the first-round of selected panellists for the 2010 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, which takes place March 12-16, 2010 in Austin, Texas.

But with 2,212 other panel proposals up for consideration, we’re going to need your help to make the final cut.

Cast a Vote for Orato at SXSW

SXSW has invited the public to help it narrow down potential panellists for this world-renowned event. Public votes will count toward 30% of the final decision, with staff votes counting for 30% and the SXSW advisory board counting for 40%.

SXSW’s interactive panel picker lists all the panels up for consideration, with expandable description boxes and options to sort by company and category among others.

Make Friends with Cannibals Partners Print and Pixels

Orato’s panel, entitled Make Friends with Cannibals: Linking Print & Online Publishers, details the opportunities that exist for partnerships between online magazines and book publishers with limited online profile.

“Book publishers have titles and expert writers, but lose to discounts, returns, a short shelf life, fewer booksellers and poor search results. Online sites have good software, SEO and design, but lack high-quality content to draw readers and advertisers. This business model revives both industries by sharing content but preserving format, brand, and sales for a win-win second revenue stream for publishers and writers.”

Orato’s Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler, with 12 years’ experience in book publishing and 4 with online magazines, has a vision to marry paper and pixels, and unite readers of books and magazines online, all the while increasing profile for publisher partners.

With your vote, we’re hoping she can share this vision in Texas next spring. Simply set up an account on the site (a simple two-minute process) and click the thumbs up sign next to the panel title. The interactive panel picker closes September 4.

Thanks for your vote, and we hope to see you in Texas!

Orato is pleased to be working with Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University (SFU) this summer to provide training for publishing professionals in editing, marketing and publishing in today’s ever-changing publishing landscape.

In addition to teaching a 2-day workshop on Developmental Editing and being a panelist on a 1-day workshop on Writing the Memoir, Orato Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler will offer guest presentations in a unique three-day Web Content Management course covering everything from e-books to print-on-demand publications to systems used by sites like Orato that publish large amounts of content by multitudes of writers.

Meanwhile, Managing Editor Lisa Manfield led a one-day workshop on strategies for Marketing a Magazine online, highlighting low-cost social media promotions tactics to boost your online readership.

Both editors also work as instructors in SFU’s Continuing Education Writing and Publishing program, and will have writing and editing courses on offer this fall and next spring.

Also, if you’re in the Vancouver area and want to talk Web publishing, you can catch Manfield at the Magazine Writers’ Craft Fair on August 15 leading a panel on Web writing. The event is hosted by the BC Association of Magazine Publishers.

And this fall, both Gugeler and Manfield will discuss the fine art of writing for the Web at the Word on the Street festival September 27 at Library Square. We hope to see you there!

Including an image with your Orato article not only gives it more visual appeal, it also offers you an opportunity to enhance your keyword density with an optimized photo caption.

But finding a suitable photo can sometimes be a challenge, particularly if you’re reporting from afar and need images you can’t take yourself.

Photos enhance articles with visual appeal and keyword density. Photo by Mike Baird.

Free Photo Sources

Before using a photo you find on someone else’s blog, news site or company Web site, keep in mind that while it’s easy to copy and paste, you can’t legally republish photos from any other Web site without first getting permission (unless it’s a creative commons image). If you can get permission, please state that the photo is reprinted with permission from the source.

If you can’t get permission, there are many online sources of photos that are available to use license-free.

Our favourite here is Flickr Creative Commons. Use the Advanced Search feature to select photos under the “Creative Commons” and “for commercial use” licenses, and post away.

Other sources of royalty-free photos include:

• Morguefile
• Stock Exchange
• Wikimedia Commons

Uploading and Crediting Your Images

Use the upload bar to load your images. Then, add a photo caption that reinforces your primary and/or secondary keywords – the ones you’ve used in your title and subtitle. Your caption should ideally be a short sentence, formatted in sentence case and ending with a period.

This is also the place to credit your photographer. Add “Photo by [photographer’s name].” after the caption.

In the photo source box, paste the link to the site where you got the photo, unless that is not possible. If the photo is your own, you can include a link to its online home, or simply leave this field blank.

You can add up to five images to an article, each with its own caption. Keep in mind that articles without images won’t display on the Orato home page, and won’t be nearly as attractive as those with pretty pictures.

Orato writers and readers can now add us to their Facebook and Twitter networks.

Our Twitter feed includes daily links to featured articles, Web writing tips, calls for writers, and other news about the site.

Our Facebook group allows you to connect with other Orato readers and writers, discuss current issues in citizen journalism and get periodic news updates from us (but not too frequently, don’t worry – we all get too much e-mail).

In addition to connecting with Orato’s social networks, we encourage all of our site visitors – writers and readers alike – to share Orato content with your own social networks.

Orato contributors can add their article links to personal blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

And, to help you spread the word even further afield, we’ve added a social media toolbar at the bottom of every article page, linking you to sites like Delicious, Technorati, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn and dozens of other social networking and bookmarking sites that allow you to share links to your work and to the works of your favourite Orato contributors.

So share and share alike, and we’ll see you in the social media sphere!