Is that a complete news studio in your pocket, or...

Have you ever been witness to some piece of technology, earlier dismissed, that now proves to be a an obvious chunk of awesome?

Count me in on the streaming live video front now.

As the McCain/Palin ticket graced the fringes of the Twin Cities metro on Friday I had a unique opportunity to witness some of it live. Not in person, not on the television, and not on a mainstream media news site. Instead, it was on www.theuptake.org.

The Uptake is an aggregation of citizen journalists, using a central site for coordination and distribution. We can now say that citizen journalism is nothing new. However, the critical difference is now that technology allows them to stream live video from their compatible devices [ a hacked iPhone in the clip I viewed, as the cameraman described it to an interviewee. ]

These streams are available on theuptake.org live as they happened, and also in archived form after the fact. They use the service Qik for the live video back-end, and blip.tv for archived/produced pieces.

I have been aware of the technology since Qik's release, but thought that it might be an answer looking for a question. The tech itself seemed sound enough, but the missing link to me was in notification to potential viewers. How would people that wanted to see the video know to visit The Uptake to partake?

The answer was now simple, as it was how I found out. One of my Twitter followers, @noahkunin, is a correspondent for The Uptake. He sent out tweets that preceded the event, and while it took place.

Now, the picture is complete. The tech to harness the moment live to teh Internets is in place, an aggregator like The Uptake is in place to coordinate the coverage, and, a suitably viral method to notify people about it is also in place. The archive in is place; it is the last and oldest piece.
What does this mean?

It means that now things will be covered in a way that they haven't yet been covered. Citizen journalists are not only equiped with a phone/camera/video camera in their pocket; now they are packing what is just shy of a complete news studio. And that is a big deal.

Microsoft Midori: the melon-flavored Windows replacement

I had to read that a couple of times. Microsoft Midori.

Microsoft is now looking into the world, post-Windows. This BBC story tells us that MS has become aware that many people are no longer tied to a single machine; rather, they are promiscuous with the devices they use to consume data.

To cope, they are set to create an OS that will accomodate such behavior. And the project shares its name with a melon-flavored liqueur. Midori. [it also means "green" in Japanese, tells me the Wikipedia entry.]

Microsoft names projects after alcoholic drinks, and the BBC tells me that I am promiscuous. Somebody had a good weekend. Wow, it really is Monday morning...

Cuil = epic search fail

With much enthusiasm I have each day tried to use cuil.com the shiniest newest-est search engine around. Friends have told me about it, doing their requisite vanity searches.

Not me.

Can't get any further than the opening page. All attempts at doing a search end in a timeout errors / page load errors.

Am I doing it wrong? Epic fail on my part or theirs?

At any rate, not a good place to start out...

Twitter has endured a number of outages and service interruptions, much to the chagrin of the user base. Are we seeing a new trend here? Is there so much focus on the concept that not enough emphasis is placed on simple considerations like bandwidth and capacity issues?

If we thought ideas spread fast before, now it is truly instantaneous. Witness yesterday's earthquake. Seconds after it happened, some of my Twitter friends in LA posted about it. Moments later, a new internet meme was born. It was Tweeted and re-Tweeted all afternoon.

What normally would have taken a few days to make the rounds in the world of email a few years ago, now takes seconds in some communities.

As go memes, so goes the internets. If you are launching something, pad those numbers for bandwith & capacity. I can speak from experience that cutting corners here is a bummer for most involved.

Amazon: Video on Demand

[ image courtesy of moneboh / Flickr ]

Our friends at Amazon.com this week announced a Beta of their video on demand service. It has been described by the EVP of Amazon, Bill Carr, as an outgrowth of their Unbox video download service. People were bummed they had to wait for the video to download to begin viewing.

Netflix just announced that their streaming video service, originally offered on their website and then through a dedicated set-top box, will now be available via the XBox 360 this fall. This of course means that Netflix and Microsoft are now in partnership. That seems like kind of a big deal.

These two items in the same week? Good thing it wasn't last week, amid the destroyer-class hysterics of the iPhone. Which brings up a good point -- people are still going to go home to sit in front of a screen. Granted, wireless personal devices are going to be the major focus from here on out, as this article from Information Week indicates. But, not everything will be consumed on a personal device. From Apple.

Peerless Iowa Flood coverage

The floods of 2008 have been covered in a way that those of 1993 and 1999 were not. This has been close to my heart, as I have family that was affected by these floods. My grandparents' home was rendered uninhabitable by the flood waters, so naturally I wanted to know what was going on in the state.

I turned to the site iowaflood.com upon the suggestion of Public Radio International's mroning news show The Takeaway. Andy Brudtkuhl, a consultant from the Des Moines area, set up a site that drew upon the strengths of citizen journalism and user generated content [UGC]. [In two hours, no less.]

Rather than exclusively posting content of his own, he tapped major media sites [TV, newspaper], services like releases from government officials & the National Weather Service, and feeds of user-generated content from YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter to create a much more comprehensive resource. Other tools included Yahoo Pipes and WordPress. He gives the full details here.

This, to me, represents what citizen journalism can really be. In situations where people need up-to-the-minute coverage of events that change as quickly, custom aggregators like this have no peer. The local TV stations don't have the manpower or editorial jurisdiction to place unedited feeds on their sites. Conversely, the average Joe doesn't have a helicopter for those aerial views of the flood damage.

At certain times like this, the power and resources of the masses, with their cameras and mobiles, comes to the fore to complete the coverage. The media goes on about its business most of the time, with UGC trickling in to augment coverage, but switches gears when significant events deem necessary. I don't think one will not supplant the other; we have proof of a symbiotic relationship in iowaflood.com.

This may well prove to be a model to be followed for future catastrophic events.

CNN Shirt [Beta]

Here is a novel idea -- take headlines, and put them on t-shirts, on demand. Clever, ironic, and just the thing for all of your news-following hipster friends.

I noticed this on the CNN website for the first time today -- there is a little t-shirt-shaped icon next to some of the stories with intriguing headlines. The only other icon there is the video camera denoting video content. There is a list of all of the shirts they have come up with so far here. Some highlights:

"Robo restaurant a hit with diners"
"Food zips on rails in automated eatery."
"Look out! Your groceries are shrinking!"

As you can see, these are the lighter stories, as I am certain CNN does not want to immortalize certain things in shirt form with their logo. Other things, they will.

The design is simple: the headline, and in a smaller font below, the phrase "I just saw it on CNN.com" followed by the date and time that the article was posted.

This, combined with their Twitter feeds, will have them in with the cool kids.

MySpace gets a face[book] lift

[ image courtesy of Robotson / Flickr ]

It is about bloody time that MySpace gets a face lift. The Internets are abuzz about what this will actually mean for the almighty 'Space. This comes less than a month after the announcement that Facebook was about to have a freshening.

I know many people that have accounts in more than one place; the MySpace/Facebook dichotomy seems to be one of the most common. They have different uses for them, different contacts on each service. The one thing that these 2+ members say is this: MySpace sucks.

Even on a professional level, colleagues have noted that it is:
1. a wasteland
2. for teenagers and pedophiles
3. a lost cause

MySpace read the writing on the SuperWall and put into place their version of the wildly successful Applications, and are now set to refine their navigation and layout to make things easier to deal with and less dissonant.

These sites seem to be going in a common direction, but Facebook appears to be leading the way. Being the underdog in terms of page views is not necessarily a bad thing when you actually have an operational strategy in place.

That is not to say that MySpace doesn't do anything well -- they are still one of the best places to keep up on your favorite bands. FB has tried to emulate some of this; they have the tools in place. However, there is no replacement for that instant cognition that people of a certain age have when in comes to seeking more info on a musical act: look at their MySpace page. No amount of clean interface will get you that.
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