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NV07: Mobile Photo and Video Blogging

I’ve been watching Roland Tanglao post various video blogs all over the place, so this is kinda why I thought it would be interesting to hear what he’d have to say on this subject.

There is talk about the lag that it takes to video blog, so I’m sitting here, creating a little experiment. I just shot about a minute of video with my Nokia6682. The quality might suck, but here’s what Roland is speaking to.

My phone ain’t the best, but you know that the technology is bound to get better with time. Regardless, the possiblities for the near future is going to be impressive. Doing this isn’t easy for everyone though. I’ve done this a handful of times that I’ve got the steps down pretty well. Content is just another piece of the story. (And my speakers are still not working on my PowerBook, so I have no idea how good the quality is there.)

And if you want more examples of this, look at all of my Northern Voice posts from today. Every single picture is from my cellphone. Why? I find it quick and easy. When time is the concern, this works a lot better than connection my digital camera via USB, download through iPhoto, upload to Flickr, and add it to a blog post. Like I said, I have this down to a pretty good science.

However, it’s still been about five to ten minutes since I’ve uploaded my 60 second movie to YouTube. There is some of the lag that has been discussed.

Update: Ok, fifteen to twenty minutes, still nothing from YouTube.

Update: Yeah, that took nearly 45 minutes. I get it. Lag.

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NV07: Stats, The Forbidden Love

Oh the stats debate. As a blogger, you either love them, hate them, or don’t know about them. Once you know about them, you love them or hate them. Some people obsess over them. Personally, I’m half and half.

20070223(028) It’s nice to know, but knowing what you see is a whole other story. Then, what do you do with that information? It’s tough, but in the event that you want to make some money off your blog, sponsors want to know this information.

Interesting to note, if you use FeedBurner, they made some recent changes that caused a lot of people’s stats to go through the roof.

Honestly, Rebecca can speak to this matter way more than I can. She’s the one who has clued me into the power, and downside, of stats. You can find out how people are finding your site, but then you can also see what other people are saying about you, good and bad. Not the worst thing in the world because that opens up an avenue for discussion.

Recently, I had something I noticed off my stats, and it’s happening still today. So first off, let me say hello to all the people that are coming to my site for this post from this post on BuzzFeeds.com. My stats spiked the other day from their site because of something I wrote in December, but they linked to me as of a few days ago. Good or bad, that’s traffic. And more traffic is always nice.

There are a variety of tools that you can use for your site. Here’s the list, but you’ll have to Google them yourself: Sitemeter, Google Analytics, Hittail, Crazy Egg, Podstats, 103bees.com, MyBlogLog, AwStats, StatCounter, Reinvigorate.net, Clicky, Mint.

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NV07: PhotoCamp

Let me preface this by saying that I haven’t had lunch yet. I got too wrapped up with being social and the time escaped me. So I’m sitting here in the PhotoCamp session, but my attention is all over the place.

20070223(020) One thing that I realize is that I’m already experimenting with the tips that the presenters are talking about. Now, by no means do I take the most amazing photos in the world. I view my photo-taking, because I hesitate to call it photography, to be not the worst thing in the world. I approach it from the same frame of mind as podcasting. You make do with what you got, and then you try to make the best of it.

Still, it’s hard to not have a lot of envy in this room, but I take comfort in the fact that I’m not alone. My little PowerShot isn’t the worst thing in the world, even though it’s nearly four years old. Its time is coming to an end, but I keep praying that it lasts me a little while longer.

I’m completely cellphoning it today. You can check out my flickr to see what I’m uploading as I go along, but there is no post-editing going up. Point and shoot, but there will probably be some of those classic “John shots” that I apparently take. Low-level, angled shots from weird perspectives or some junk like that. I don’t know why or how I do that. I just do.

This is all really great information though. In another life, I swear I was a cinematographer or something. If there was more time in life, I would love to do that for a living. Plus, taking neat photos is pretty freaking cool.

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NV07: Getting good levels in your podcast

Hanging out in Room #1 for this session, Getting Good Levels in Your Podcast with Bruce Sharpe. He has connections to one of the first podcasts out there, IT Conversations, and he wrote Levelator. I’m curious to hear about the theories behind this concept. Mainly, it’s a topic in support of Levelator, which I am a big fan and user of already.

Quick side note, just got out of my second session of the day: New Rules for New Communities. Lots of good discussion, but so much in so little time to really digest here right now. Number one thing taken away: don’t put the geeks in charge of the community, put those with people skills.

20070223(016) Back to podcasting, four keys:
1 – Record it well: If you put crap in, you’ll get crap out. My biggest thing with this is to work with what your budget can handle, then learn as much as you can about what you have. Cheap can still create great quality.

2 – Clean Up the Audio: Spend some time after recording to edit your content. Filters, noise reduction and lots of other digital editing lingo. I say, watch out for a learning curve here. If you don’t know much about editing audio, then be prepared to spend time with what you can do. As you progress, you’ll learn new things. It might be painful, but give yourself time.

Tip from the crowd: Sound cards are important, especially on PC’s. Investigate and invest in quality equipment to get quality stuff. Dell’s seem to be the worst, ThinkPad’s are mid-range.

3 – Edit out the not good stuff: “I’ll be right back”, “Ummm…”, essentially the nonsense stuff. I’ll be quick to say that this depends on the scope of your podcast. If you want to keep it personal, then do what you want. Professional realm of things? Consider this for sure. At the same time, this takes time to do. If you’ve got a few hours to chop up 40 minutes of audio, go for it. If time is of the essence, then you’ll have to make do.

4 – Get the levels right: It’s important to have a standard. Clipping sucks, and you don’t want to have things be too quiet. This is a very close examination of audio on the level of 1’s and 0’s. A good system of normalization is what you want to shoot for. This, once again, takes practice and time to master. It’s a combination of every step that Bruce has laid out.

Question about Mac, mid-range audio/podcast software, and I just gave a shout out to Ubercaster. It is in beta, but it has progressively gotten better over the last few months. Still, not in major release yet. GarageBand is a very good application as well.

The money shot: Levelator.

I’ll speak first hand that this has been a lifesaving piece of software. Remember step four? I can let Levelator do all of that digital manipulation for me to boost the audio levels to an optimum range for podcast to podcast. The Crazy Canucks has been saved by it numerous times.

No batch processing with this software just yet, so you’ll have to do this one at a time in the meantime. Tod Maffin asks if that will be added in the paid version with a laugh, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Oh yeah, Levelator is free. Also, this only does WAV or AIFF files, no MP3 support.

I’m taking it that a lot of people here have not heard of this software that are in this room. Also seems to be a lot of newbies to the whole podcasting realm in the room. It’s pieces of software like this that will piss off old school audio folks who have spent the hours and hours of doing steps one through four to apply this to audio for radio broadcast. Such is the way that the world changes.

Time for lunch.

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NV07: Wicked fast bandwidth in the mid-morning

One session in NV, and things are pretty good. The initial gathering of the MooseCamp session was much like BarCampVancouver. The fear is there just as much; there is no way I can get to everything that I want to see, hear, or do.

First session: Social Media Diaspora. Roland led this one, and it brought up a really great discussion about how we assume new and difference identities in the various circles that we become involved in. Essentially, I can break it down the easiest on a personal level. Even though I live and love Vancouver, there is only so much I can really say or do to consider myself a true Vancouverite. I can become involved with the community, but there is no way that I could ever speak for it, no matter how much I embrace it. Empathy rather than sympathy, and how that is viewed across the board.

Uploading pictures from my cellphone, the wireless here is wickedly fast. Spent time talking to David Drucker about Boston today. Even though I’ve never lived there, I like using the word “wicked” with everything.

Posting fast today, so I’ll try to add in some needed links later.

Wanna see the sessions for today’s MooseCamp? Go here.

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Ramping up to Northern Voice

Been a little crazy in the past 24 hours. We had our apartment inspected today, checking to make sure we’re not completely wrecking the place and everything isn’t falling apart in our home. I can say without fail, we passed without problem, thank you very much. Still, kinda forgot it was this afternoon. After cleaning up for their arrival this afternoon, I’ve been in a mad dash to figure out all the details for Northern Voice 2007.

Rebecca and I will hit the free food and free beer tonight at the Big Northern Voice Dinner kickoff event type thing. Should be a good time, but when you have all these things on your schedule for a couple weeks, you don’t think about times and locations. Well, not until this afternoon at least, not to mention the last hour or so.

My homemade map to Northern Voice at UBCI’m on my own tomorrow for MooseCamp, so tracking down my route by bus is one thing. Then there is that part where you have to walk from the bus, to the actual location of the event. Being that I’ve only been out to UBC two, maybe three times, I’ve got everything narrowed down. At least I think so. If you don’t believe me, check out the map I made for myself.

Rebecca will head out on Saturday for Northern Voice, but then we’ll have to adjust for the weekend schedule of public transit. And talking to Dave last night during The Crazy Canucks recording, I got the green light to heckle him.

Just looking forward to seeing some familiar people, meet some new ones, and feed my brain, not to mention sharing some thoughts about new media fun stuff. And as a quick side note, we have RSVP‘d for the podcast meetup on Sunday. Yes, let the geekend begin.

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Being brave on Wikipedia

I can’t be the only one who hesitates to make their first edits on Wikipedia, can I? Because after pouring over the ins, outs, dos, and don’t-even-think-about-its, there is a lot to consider.

I have to say, it’s not that much different than doing IRC back in those glory days of 1996. You join the community, interact, edit, create stuff, and if you do something wrong, you could have all of your contributions deleted, banned, or even get yourself kicked off the system. Sure, the whole thing about Wikipedia is to encourage you to join in on the fun, but you have to get into taking the first steps. Intimidating, but there’s truth in not knowing until you try, right?

I actually made three, completely new entries, all for the radio stations that I used to meddle with; KRUI, WSUI, and KSUI. I was pretty amazed that there wasn’t something there sooner. Hopefully more people will come along to contribute, but I’ll try to add more as I have the time. There’s also that whole memory thing. I have to try to do this when something creeps up on me and get the facts down before I forget… again.

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The Crazy Canucks #22 – Instigating a fight for the playoffs

Recorded and posted last night.

Rebecca takes a healthy scratch on this episode while the rest of us, even Dave, gather together to take a look at the last four games against Minnesota, Chicago, Colorado, and Anaheim. Things have been looking really good lately, and we all feel incredibly excited at the fact that the playoffs seem more and more in sight.

Record as of this episode: 35-21-4
Northwest Division: 1st
Western Conference: 3rd

With 22 games left in the season and the trade deadline looming, there’s a lot to talk about, but none of us are really too sure as to what we can expect. Something is bound to happen, and we all have our own theories as to who might go or stay. A listener from London checks in with a question about a possible Canucks game next season in the U.K.

A lot of things are going well, but as fans, we know that we have to be careful to not get too far ahead of ourselves. However, listen to our episodes from early this season and the mood was incredibly different. Oh how things can change…

50:45 minutes
The Crazy Canucks

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William Elliott Whitmore show review in Ohio

I’ve posted about William Elliot Whitmore before, and he made an appearance on the last Six Song on RadioZoom[rz#126]. When I pulled down my feeds this morning, Benjamin Cossel made a raving review on BlogCritics.org about a recent show of Whitmore’s in Ohio. I think he hit the nail on the head.

Bob Dylan, New York City 1961. Tom Waits, San Diego, early 1970s. What must it have been like to see these legendary performers when they were still unknowns? When the gathered crowd was small and you were so close to the artist that you could make a request in a conversational tone?

It struck me, as I watched and listened to William Elliot Whitmore, Feb 19 at The Basement in Columbus, Ohio on the kick-off date of a national tour, that this was what it must’ve been like; to see a performer at such an early point in their career who, in your heart of hearts, you know is destined for greatness with only 20 or so others are there to share the experience with you.

In many an article about him, Whitmore is compared to such legends as Waits and Johnny Cash. I’m sure it’s more to do with the deep gravelly voice and genre fusions than actual stylistic similarities – one thing that does run parallel with the Iowa born and raised Whitmore and those who transcend mere greatness is the honesty in their lyrics. [blogcritics]

Keep reading the rest of his review for sure, but oddly enough, it was one of his songs that was the last things I listened to as I drove out of Iowa to make my way to Vancouver. I think it might have been his song “Midnight”, but it’s hard to recall now. He was doing a live performance on the same radio station that I used to work at, WSUI.

It was the very same program that I had the chance of shaking the guy’s hand and running his sound for as well, nearly a year or so before my departure. That live remote could have been one of the first live programs that I ran by myself, calling the shots on the technical end and managing the part-time student help. I could be completely wrong because my time there is almost like a blur now, but it’s crazy how music can trigger your synapses like that.

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Kings of Convenience – failure

There are certain songs that take you back to certain moments. This has to be one of them for me. It constantly reminds me that no matter what treks your life has forced you through, it’s going to be alright. You just have to keep your chin up and keep your feet moving. That and I really, really like this song.

Feel free to check out more Kings of Convenience. They have my seal of approval.