We’re often asks questions about what to use, how to use it, when to use it and how to do it. We run new media bootcamps to get people going. But we’re also inclined to shoot people emails.

Here are some questions from a New Jersey newspaper that’s trying to start in on providing audio and video on their site.

The basic question is: what should we outfit our reporters with?

It was nice talking with you today. As I mentioned, I am putting together a wish list of tech tools for our paper’s new tech team.

My list will include things like dual monitors and faster PCs. I have ideas about other items, but am especially keen to ask other journalists what gear they find indispensable.

Like everyone else, we have limited resources, so the key is finding the right stuff at reasonable prices.

So true. So let’s get going with some gear.

Can you recommend: A decent portable video recorder, suitable for video blogging, reliable but not too pricey.

We use Focus Enhancements Firestore camera to hard drive recorders. They’re great.

Easy, fast and reliable video editing software

Depends what you’re looking to do so I’d need more information. The standard is Final Cut Pro and once you learn how to use it you wouldn’t want to use anything else.

If you just need to chop clips, iMovie if you’re on a Mac (more on Mac’s below since I think from your email your on a laptop PC). iMovie’s free (with a Mac), Final Cut’s not.

A portable digital audio recorder suitable for podcast interviews.

A few options: Marantz PM660, M-Audio Microtrack 24/96, and the Fostex FR-2 Field Memory Recorder.

I’d go with the Marantz if your reporters are covering events where they need to plug into a soundboard. It’s bigger than the M-Audio, but also more flexible. If you just need to do interviews, the M-Audio is fine.

My brother reviews them all here.

Portable mic (if needed)

Yes, you need a mic. The cheap and easy is a Shure.

It’s used by bands and reporters around the world.

However, you may want to get a directional/shotgun mic, it really depends on the what you’re recording, and the environment you’re recording in. The Shure I recommend above is omnidirectional so it picks up sound from everywhere.

Directional/Shotgun mics “let you “aim to a sound with out all the external ambience filtering in.

The BBC offers a good primer

I keep looking for the digital Swiss Army knife: A small digital camera that produces decent quality video and audio, too. So far, haven’t found the perfect compromise.

Panasonic and Sony both offer good prosumer small camcorders.

A laptop that combines power, light weight and affordability. (I love my old 3-lb Thinkpad T20—light yet rugged. But it lacks horsepower for multimedia apps.)

Get Macs. They now run on Intel chips meaning that you have all the Mac software which is the standard for audio/video editing but you can also install Windows on it if that’s what you need/use in newsroom.

The best system for staying in touch from the road. I have tried BlackBerrys, Treos and the Motorola Q. I’m not keen on the Microsoft system in the Q. BlackBerry’s email handling is the gold standard, and I am a longtime fan of Palm’s ease-of-use… The Sidekick is pretty cool, but TMobile’s service isn’t as good as Verizon’s. Another option might be subscribing to Verizon’s EVDO service, so we could just log on via laptops in our travels. Any preferences here?

I’m not a phone jockey but use the Treo. I have the 650 and have seen the 700 which is better. Better still would be something with larger keys because if you’re trying to write notes on the fly, bigger will better (even if it’s not as sexy).

Have you ever had success using portable keyboards with Palms, or other handhelds, to eliminate lugging laptops on the road?

When I was reporting in Saudi Arabia one of my colleagues used a foldup keyboard with his Palm. Worked like a charm. But, if you’re doing all the audio/video stuff above, you’ll need your computer.

An optimal hi-def system. From time to time we will be testing gaming consoles, HD players, etc. I am wondering if a hi-def projector makes more sense, or whether we should find a bargain LCD or plasma monitor.

I’d go with the hi-def projector but that’s more personal preference. In our studio we have a Samsung 40+” LCD which is great.

I also am pondering how to make an argument for buying the new gaming consoles. Probably a hard sell, but might as well shoot high, right?

Always shoot high. Don’t know what you won’t get unless you ask.

Hope this helps.

Back in June I wrote about the sweet spam I’m privy to on a daily basis.

I have various strategies to help me cope with it, many revolve around my delete key. One that’s helpful is getting my mail on my Treo and rapidly deleting it from there which, in turn, then removes it from my mail server.

It’s one of those collective bonding things though. I get spam, you get spam, can’t we all be friends?

I occasionally read the Dreamhost blog. They’re funny people. Snarky people. And wise asses too.

And since they’re one of the largest hosting providers around they deal with spam too.

To wit: A guy calls them and threatens to go medieval on them because he believes they’re sending him tons of spam.

This is all left on voicemail. Which they’ve kindly put online.

When I first played the message to coworkers, some of them peed their pants in fear. One guy pooped and had to go home early. They were softies and needed to toughen up anyway. The Internet is serious business.

And then he called back and left another.

This is all well and fun. But because we’re collectively kind of snarky, an audio file ain’t just an audio file until someone downloads it, mashes it up and releases it to the world.

Which is exactly what this guy did.

And you can listen to his mix here

Bless these internets.

Diet Coke and Mentos are in the air. Maybe it’s an end of summer thing but I’ve come across and been sent a number of links in the past few weeks that lead me to think there’s something going on here.

Like a fad.

Or a phenomenon.

A phenomenal fad because it’s Mentos, the Freshmaker™? Maybe it’s a faddish phenomena.

Either way, if you don’t know the combustible background of these dietary supplements, watch the video below.

And if that piques your interest, additional links are provided by yours truly so you can observe what happens when the human element gets involved.

Ladies and gentlemen: Mentos and Diet Coke

And now, the promised linkage:

Mentos, Diet Coke and the Human Element

Re-introducing the Human Element… Gone Extremely Wrong

Two birthdays are floating around us this month. The personal computer turns 25 and the World Wide Web 15.

Other personal computers existed at the time but the IBM 5150 is generally heralded as the Homo Erectus to our contemporary Mac, Linux and PC Sapiens (and if I’m fiddling with a clumsy metaphor, the mainframe would be the Neanderthal, complete with the ongoing debate over whether it was a completely different species).

Think about that. Serious. The 25-year-old part, not the Erectus/Sapien/Neanderthal part.

Now it’s my turn.

Until 1981 PCs didn’t exist outside of geek labs. Mainframes were the name of the game. IBM sold theirs for $9 million or so and all you needed to have one was a huge air conditioned room and a swat team of technicians to keep it up and running.

And then, on August 12, 1981, IBM announced to the world that for a mere $1,650 you could have a personal PC with 16 kilobytes of memory.

Trusty audio casettes loaded and saved data. “Green phosphor characters for reading comfort” made the monitor a thing to behold. User manuals made it “possible to begin using the computer within hours.” That’s what the press release told us anyway.

Twenty-five years on the combined stock market value of hardware and software firms is over half a trillion dollars, according to the Economist.

Much of that value comes from our pimply friend, the World Wide Web. It was 15 years ago that Tim Berners-Lee posted his Executive Summary to alt.hypertext. He’d developed the Web at the Cern laboratory outside Geneva and his post started like this:

The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system. The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

The great inovation by Berners-Lee and those such as a Jeff Groff who worked with him was to overlay a level of simplicity on the internet. Essentially, they hid the technological complexity that prevented people from finding what they were looking for.

Two years later Marc Andreessen created the first browser for PCs (now 12 years old) while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and the rest, as they say, isn’t quite yet history.

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the authorities in the UK have stopped a massive terror plot to bring down 20 planes in the USA using liquid explosives in carry-on bags.

For the first time, we’re at “red alert” for a part of the country, specifically, places where planes from the UK are coming into the USA.

At 5:15 this morning, I listened to the CEO of Heathrow Airport describe the security measures they have undertaken. Read this closely, because this will become the norm for air travel in the very near future.

1. No more carry-on luggage. No computer bags, backpacks, waist packs, whatever. None.

2. No liquids, lotions, creams or other liquid-like substances. Exceptions are baby milk (which you must drink to prove it’s not toxic – a pointless exercise for a suicide bomber) and medications.

3. No electronics of any kind. No iPod, FLASHLIGHTS, Cell Phone, Key Fob Car Unlocker, Laptops, hip tops, nothing that uses electricity or has a battery. No radios of ANY KIND.

4. Allowed items are travel documents, identity papers, money, cards, medications (with prescriptions), sanitary items. All items must be carried in a clear plastic bag. All passengers are hand-searched. All shoes, belts, clothing accessories and so forth are x-rayed and hand examined.

5. Only airport-provided wheelchairs may be used.

Obviously, the next logical step is that you must fly naked & sedated, which would be fine with me. Or perhaps it’s time to get serious with this idea: http://www.focazio.com/pa/

In all seriousness, this raises some profound implications for traveling. Of course, my first bit of advice is, as always; don’t check what you can send. Pack it in a sturdy case, call UPS or Fedex, and ship it to your destination. It’s not as expensive as you’d think.

That said, now that you need to (gasp!) check your laptop, it’s time to talk about the reality of doing it right.

First of all, physical protection. There’s only one way to go when packing a laptop, and that’s the case-in-a-case method. My favorite laptop case is the Pelican 1490CC1. There’s also a 1490CC2, which is about $20 less, but lacks the storage space of the 1490CC1. They are about $149 (for the CC1) and $129 (for the CC2). Pack that case INSIDE another case (like another Pelican Case ideally, or another HARD-SIDE case.

You can’t lock your bags, unless you’re checking a gun, and the TSA-approved locks are a joke, so don’t bother with locks. So another thing you should do is protect your data.

The most basic thing you can do to protect a laptop is to enable a power-on password via the system BIOS. While this won’t stop someone from getting at the data on your hard drive if they remove the drive from your computer, it will stop the less-determined. The next level is to disable auto-login on your computer. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt to have to log-in to the system, but it’s another level of prevention. Before you fly, clear out all of your saved passwords, cookies and delete your temporary files. I use a product called BC Wipe (google it) to make sure files that I delete are really gone.

Finally, and this is a it of a radical step, consider encrypting your hard drive. On a Mac, this is as simple as using the “File Vault” option under the “Security” system preferences. This takes your entire home directory and makes it an encrypted data store. That means that without your password, the data on the file can’t be read, even if the hard drive is physically removed. On a PC, things are not as simple, but check out the software that came with the laptop – for example, the Acer TravelMate series includes a fairly decent encryption utility that comes pre-installed on the system.

The other option is to skip the laptop entirely and move your digital life onto a USB Keychain Drive. It’s amazing how effective this is. If you go to www.portableapps.com, you’ll find a universe of applications that you can copy to a USB Keychain Drive. I carry a Lexar Media 2GB Jump Drive Lightning, and on it I have portable versions of the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird Email, Open Office – an MS-Office Replacement, Filezilla FTP client, Clam Window Virus Scanner, GAIM, a multi-platform instant messaging client, NVU - a web page & site creation tool similar to FrontPage, GIMP, a photoshop replacement, and VLC, a media player application for video and audio. I fit all that in 747 MB, and that leaves me with lots of room to spare for files. All I need is a Windows computer with a USB port and I’m up and running. The nice thing about this is with a 2GB USB Drive, I can back up everything – applications and files – in a few minutes to a DVD (which holds 4.7 GB). Heck, 2GB is small enough that you can zip the entire drive and upload it to a web server somewhere as a backup. If I really, really really wanted to travel light, I could even forego the USB key drive and put all the applications and data onto a single 2gb SD card (http://usamemory.net/2gbsdcard.html) and tuck that into my wallet. It’s easy to find card readers anywhere you go.

In the end, air travel, which I remember as being glamorous and exciting when I was a kid, has gradually gone from being something desirable to being only slightly more pleasant than crawling on your hands and knees through a sewer while being yelled at by angry trolls who are throwing rotten tomatoes at your head.

Getting there is none of the fun, that’s for sure.

My last blog was a rather blatant attempt to trap Google into finding this blog…it worked.

But the main reason I posted the long list of people that we’ve captured for “on demand” events is to show in one place the flow of knowledge that passes through here. It’s daunting, even intimidating, to see so much great information whizzing by on multiple screens, and the stunned realization that you can’t keep up anymore.

That’s why I so intensely dislike the whole Web 2.0 community-created ad-supported content model and crave a Web 3.0 model where we’ll get intelligent, unbiased editors and writers presented online in an uncluttered, ad-free environment. If Web 1.0 was about presence, and Web 2.0 about participation, I hope web 3.0 is about integrity.

This is where Slashdot, Digg and a few other sites are really setting the standards in the the fight back against idiocy. Compare the commentary on Break.com to the commentary on Digg.com and you’ll see – finally – something approaching the kind of rational, reasoned debate and thought I used to enjoy online way, way, way back when I was just “martyf@well.sf.ca.us”

A bird turd fell from the sky the other day and splattered against the left lens of my eyeglasses.

Serious.

I don’t make light of such things. I got out of the subway, was walking back to the cave and flwip, a chunk of gunk smeared across my lens.

Color me lucky, although I have no idea how, where or why being crapped on was ever considered lucky.

Since the turd was blocking my vision, I removed my glasses.

This blinded me a little. I can only sorta kind of see without them. Which brings me back to what this is all about. And for those of you keeping track, this paragraph is a segue.

Adobe released Flash Player 9 two weeks ago and with it, developers started coding in ActionScript 3.0. ActionScript 3.0 expands on the core object-oriented programming syntax of ActionScript 2.0, but its real improvement comes in the changes made to the built-in Flash Player API.

I won’t try to go into it here, or anywhere for that matter since for me to explain it would be making a mockery of people who can explain it well, like say, Colin Moock who’s been writing the O’Reilly ActionScript books the past couple of years.

What I will get into though is that like my turd covered lenses and my partial blindness, I haven’t seen, or quite looked out at what’s going on in the Flash development world.

We use Flash here and there, and have used it with great success for our multiclip video players and Web Conferencing/Web TV platforms. (And I say “great success” so long as it’s out of earshot of the disgruntled Rails developers who’ve been harping on our multiclip video players and screaming bloody murder for video to be played in QuickTime).

What we haven’t done though is build Flash apps and if you asked me a few years ago, and especially before Web 2 Point D’oh, I’d have said that the next stage of Internet development was going to be rich Flash apps.

Some have been built, and OpenLaszlo and the good folk behind it at Laszlo Systems have some exceptional interface and applications going on.

But something funny happened on the way to the coliseum and that something was this thing called AJAX . And while AJAX isn’t a Flash killer it has changed the rules of the game, or if it didn’t change the rules of the game it definitely moved the goalposts.

For example, I’ve been dwelling on participatory content, and by participatory content I don’t mean the rise of user generated content.

What I mean is content you can interact with, content that you can tag, annotate and discuss with others as you tag and annotate. This is symmetrical, synchronous interactions with anyone, anywhere who’s looking at the same content object that you are (say, a video), and not asynchronous commenting like you see here on this and other blogs or message boards.

So that’s where my head’s been at. And because that’s where my head’s been at, and because Flash is not the tool to create the whole of that experience, I’ve been blind to what’s been going on in that community save for keeping tabs on FlashComm/Flash Media Server and letting a schadenfreudal smirk pass my lips when Adobe bought Macromedia and cannabalized a number of redundant product lines.

Anyway: Cheers to the release and cheers to the those who are working their way through ActionScript 3.0. I’m looking forward to your continued contributions to the Web app world.

ok, this won’t be long because i’m typing this from my cellphone. I just got a treo 700. very satisfying. I just went to espn to see that the red sox won and the yankees lost.

this is taking too much concentration to type on tiny keypads. late night dinners with tequilla and small keypads don’t mix.

One of the joys of doing a billion different things is that you get to do a billion different things.

One of the problems with doing the billion different things is that you sometimes forget what some (many, most, probably not all) of those things are.

I was sitting at home doing not much of anything last night when an email came my way. It was from a friend who wrote, “Nice article, this thing sounds cool.”

Didn’t really know what he was talking about so I went to the article and what do you know, it was by me and written for a magazine called BPM a while back.

It is a nice article if I may say so myself. Since I’ve been writing and dwelling on some interface issues in this space, I’ll share it here.

It’s about an aural navigation system created by Richard Etter, a graduate student at the Furtwangen University of Applied Science in Cologne, Germany.

He calls it the Melodious Walkabout, and the concept behind it is that instead of using your eyes and maps to follow directions, use your ears.

To make sense of that, check out the article. It’s a PDF with lovely graphics.

Mildly annoyed. Flight’s delayed. Was supposed to leave at 1:45. New departure is 3:00.

Got here early enough to watch Ghana beat the States in the World Cup. Too bad for us by yay for Ghana. They’ll join Nigeria and Camaroon as my quadrenial African bandwagon favorite.

I finish a greasy quesadilla and head over to my Gate. Another delay. We’re leaving at 4:00 now. Kind of a drag but I get to do something I haven’t done in ages: I buy a newspaper.

I used to read newspapers all the time. I grew up on the Boston Globe, and eased into the New York Times when I moved to New York. I even ended up in Saudi Arabia as an editor of a paper over there.

But I haven’t bought a newspaper in a while. Not even to peruse during Sunday brunch. I think this says just as much about my ability to laze away a day as it does my fondness for newspapers. But, to the point: I don’t read things that leave ink on my hands, and it’s not the ink’s fault.

Which isn’t to say I don’t follow the news. Maybe not as much as I did when I was a full-time journalist but I get my newspapers online, followed by various online magazines from the left, center and right and then general blogdom.

So I buy the Times and here’s my first thought: Cool user interface.

Serious.

Jump pages kind of blow. I’d rather not have to go from A1 to A22, and I especially hate going from A1 to, say, B4 but it’s all good. It’s pretty easy to wade through. Big old headlines with text and some images.

So easy, in fact, that I read pretty much every last bit of the paper which is more than I can say I ever do with the online version where I read 3-4 articles tops.

Then again, my flight’s now delayed until 5:55 (!) so it’s not like I don’t have the time. When I booked my ticket there was some factoid somewhere in the online process that told me the percentage of time that the Thursday 1:45 flight actually takes off on time. And this percentage is a lowly percentage. And this lowly percentage is 50%. Big cheer for Continental. Mediocrity is better than nothing.

Here’s another thing I do while waiting and reading: I listen to Podcasts. This is a relatively new development for me and my brain needs the occassional kickstart as the words I’m hearing and the words I’m reading collide. I just finished my third one-hour episode of NPR’s On the Media and have moved into The Wall Street Journal Report. I try to listen to Walt Mossberg talk about the WSJ’s All Things Digital Conference but keep spacing out.

It’s the usual video ubiquity theme without anything new or very interesting about it.

But here are my deepest thoughts from Gate 27 in Newark:

• One reads deeper into the print version of a given publication than its online equivalent;
• The corollary is that one reads from a broader group of of sources online than offline.

And these two points are perfectly self-evident from my highly scientific, in-depth, survey of myself. No control groups necessary.

There’s a slight twist here though. I’d argue that online breadth is not a shallowness, it’s a depth in of itself. What do I mean by that? That through a variety of sources I’m peeling the onion back on a subject. For example, the Miami Heat beat the Dallas Mavericks to win the 2006 NBA Championship.

I read about it on NYTimes.com. I read about it on ESPN.com. I read about it on Boston.com. And if I go to Google News I can see that they have 127 other sources that have current and related articles about the subject.

Online breadth is subject depth while being source agnostic. (Say that 10 times fast.)

Offline depth refers to a relationship with a source, not necessarily a subject. For example, I read a really amazing piece on Darfur in the New York Times, but only in the New York Times. That’s as far as it goes.

However, I also read their coverage of verbal back and forths with Iran, Indonesian volcanoes, some Op-Eds, some World Cup Coverage, you get the idea.

I think if I’m right with this, and I think I am right because I’m jerky that way, the ramifications are exactly the opposite of what we’ve always been told.

An example: we’ve been told to keep things short and sweet online. The shorter the better. People’s attention spans are short so don’t tax them with anything unnecessary. And as I just wrote, online depth is the breadth of sites that contain the information people are looking for so people jump around.

But for knowledge, for subject expertise, go long. Go way long. Why are people hopping off your site to move elsewhere? Because they’re not getting everything they need.

Online video plays into this. For example, ScribeStudio serves hour-long presentations in a number of industry verticals and indeed, people stick around for the whole thing.

We make it easy by chunking it into content chapters for easy access to the parts people are looking for (or returning to). We also offer the podcasted version to listen to and view later.

If the knowledge is there, people will stay. Think of how dedicated you’ve been to sites that give you everything you want. It becomes a interface play though.

There were a number of studies dones a few years ago. They became rules of thumb. And that rule of thumb was that of the 100% of people reading 3,000 word article X, 80% made it it to page 2 of that article, 60% made it to page 3, 40% to page 4, you get the idea.

This tells me a few things: maybe the article shouldn’t have gone 3,000 words; maybe the interface of dividing text into a number of different pages isn’t the best online strategy; and maybe reems of text isn’t the best media to employ online.

Someone with some dollars should do a study on this but what I’ve been pushing for for sometime is mixing our media. There’s no reason aside from the comfort of doing things the way we alway did to write a text-only article, or only have video, or only have audio, or only images.

Mash them together, throw them in a blender and mix liberally. This isn’t an ode to interactivity save for the fact that the viewer picks and chooses their way through the knowledge base. It’s a plea for usability in the exact sense that the viewer picks and chooses their way through a knowledge business.

The difference may be subtle but it’s significant.

Immediate irony I see here: this post is all text.

Second irony: after waiting all this time for my flight, my name’s being called to board.

Next stop, Chicago.