For those taking their first tentative steps towards making an interactive documentary, Klynt is one of the latest tools. Klynt enables users to create an interactive documentary incorporating a range of media - video, stills, text, audio, content pulled from the web, and hyperlinks. The interface is straightforward enough for anyone with reasonable Mac skills to be able to use, there’s not a line of code in sight.

The SXSW Interactive Awards Finalists have been announced and Aussie projects, including two by SBS, have a strong showing.

Cowbird is a new online storytelling and diarising tool for those fully embracing the publicly lived life through social media. It’s a site where users can post diary entries with stills, audio and text, and in doing so become part of a community of others doing the same.

Getty Images have thrown open their video and music archives for mishmash -- a remix competition.

The winners of the inaugural AACTA Awards in some categories, including documentary, were announced Sunday. Mrs Carey’s Concert, directed by Bob Connolly and Sophie Raymond, won the award for Best Feature Length Documentary.

Ira Glass is a rock star. So say Sydneysiders, who queued around the block to get in to the sold out event at the Sydney Festival last night. A second show immediately afterwards assuaged all those who missed out in the first ticket-buying frenzy. I couldn’t help beaming as I surveyed the crowd, all of whom were here to see not some pop star with an album to spruik but this unassuming, nasally-sounding guy who does radio. Radio!

Video editing is not my favourite pastime, but there’s a definite satisfaction in watching nuggets of stories emerge while attempting to wrangle footage into something coherent. At the end of a long day in a darkened room, though, it can be tempting to wish there was a machine you could feed footage into and have a film pop out the other end.

Google Earth demonstrates its fantastic potential as a documentary tool in this virtual tour of some of the world’s dams. Narrated by the chair of Friends of the Earth International, Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey, the tour flits across the globe, diving in and out between large and smale scale. It begins out wide overlooking the earth, but also plunges into the Amazon to the level of individual trees. The unique characteristics of Google Earth are used to great effect, sweeping back and forth across the globe and showing similarities between diverse locations.