It’s all in the videos.

Emerging Skills of Tomorrow’s Journalists- The 3 minute gist.

My pre-panel interview

Full Video

Hear me schill for Stanford’s J-program at 33:00.

They do classic Italian style crust and baking (brick oven and all) but fold in some of the fresh, local ingredients that have made the Berkeley food scene so famous.

I didn’t catch it in the video, but they are also mixing some seriously excellent original cocktails.

Didn’t know what it was back then, but I shot a quick video of one of Google’s autonomous Prius (Prii?) before it drove away from in front of Joya in Downtown Palo Alto.

Looks like the sensor pod on top has a fixed and rotating component, as well as what I’m guessing is a stepper-motor style rotation counter on the left rear wheel. I also see what appears to be a GPS antenna (no surprise there) on the rear dorsal section of the roof.

I’m going to talk to some friends at Stanford’s vehicle lab and ee if I can pull apart what sensors are actually bolted on here.

I’m currently on a road trip on my way to become an intern at The New York Times somewhere between the tech reporting and social media desks. Predictably, I picked up a new iPhone 4 on release day, with the hopes that the new camera and editing tools would make it a formidable news gathering device.

We traveled from New Orleans to Mobile Bay to speak with people affected by the coming oil. What they said surprised me.

How they are adjusting surprised me even more.

How it went:

Shooting the video went as one might expect. I had my friend Trenton act as camera man for the pieces where I’m in front of the camera. He and I both noticed how much more visible camera shake is with the HD camera, than with the iPhone 3GS.

We shot the stand-up as one piece, with the intent of cutting t later and inserting the b-roll. This was a mistake for editing reasons that I’ll get into later. Suffice to say, my advice would be to shoot lots of shorter clips, rather than keep the camera rolling and cut later.

The other major issue was obviously noise. I was nearly yelling at that distance, and the wind was nearly overpowering my audio. In the future, I’ll likley use a lav or shotgun mic when shooting like this, but I was hoping to see how the iPhone did on its own. We eventually put a handkerchief over the mic to cut down on wind pops.

I then shot a bunch of b-roll, which I combined with drive-by b-roll I;d shot earlier in the day. This, and some still images (the oil booms and heron) capped the rest of the video.

The pictures were beautiful, at least from a technological standpoint, though I’d seriously recommend trying to move closer to your subject, rather than using the digital zoom. The heron didn’t seem to mind.

My Thoughts

Let me start by saying that this is not meant to be a technical review of the device. If you want that, I’d strongly reccomend the one over at Ars Technica. Jacqui did it right.

I’m focusing on the work-flow a mobile reporter might have, and where I thought things broke down.

Shooting
The good: the screen is bright and viewable, even in sunlight. The device is easy to hold, and the lens is wide enough to take in a whole scene, or push in tight for a head-shot.

The bad: Shakiness, metal bands make for slippery holding and the light is pretty useless for fill light at any daytime distance. That last one is not a serious gripe, but it was something I wondered.

Editing:
The good: iMovie was fast. Way faster than I imagined— the kind of fast that a program is when it is both well writtne and running on the right hardware. The interface was clean, and I was able to use it in a matter of minutes, even though I’m not a regular iMovie user (I DO use Final Cut extensively.) All the edits were non destructive and the program never crashed once, not even after dropping in 10 minutes of clips and trying to add overlays to many of them. Each time I returned to the app, everything was right where I left it.

The bad: its all linear. If my piece looks weird, its because there is no option to add a second video track, for cutaways and b-roll. For the map cutaway, I had to manually ad the main clip on either side of the map, then shoot the map and put it between. Finally, I had to cut the clips so that all thee matched. One more video track would make the whole process 100% easier. There is also no way to do a voice over. You cant even add a voice memo as part of the added audio track. You might be able to is you recorded the audio, synced the iPhone to iTunes and then linked your voice memos to your iTunes library. That would have defeated the purpose of my little experiment though. Finally, the whole process of editing this admittedly complex three minute piece was about an hour and a half sitting in the car. Also, single biggest issue… when trying to get to pictures to drop in, the gallery begins at the first image, not the last. Scrolling through images is the slowest part of the editing. Galleries viewed in iMovie should pick up at the last picture taken.

Filing:
The bad: Uploading had to wait until I had wifi, as it took so long over 3G, and I would lose connection before the whole thing uploaded and it would reset. Admittedly, I was driving through rural Georgia while that was going on.

This was overall an amazing experience.. which that took me over 3 hours to complete. I’m looking forward to a few minor improvements that I hope to add to more practice to turn the iPhone 4 into a reasonable reporting tool.

I recently got turned onto DSLR cameras (Canon 7D & 5D Mark II) after a long run with 35mm adapters. I used these fantastic image making devices to DP my new music video for the band. The video concept was really a dream made reality, in which we recreated an Iconic scene from the classic 1980’s film “The Blues Brothers.” a scene in which Ray Charles performs the song “Shake Your Tail Feather” with Dan Akroid and John Belluci.

I chose the Canon 7D, primarily because this was before the 5D firmware finally came out and I got sick of hearing the rumors so I just went with the 7D to shoot the video. (a week later the firmware actually was released this time). I used an array of old 80’s Nikon AI Prime Lenses to shoot the entire video, to really try an emulate the look and feel of the vintage film.

For comparison, here’s the original scene from the Blues Brothers.

Hey, I can’t do everything at once.

Note: some videos are password protected for contractual reasons. Sorry for any inconvenience.

AllThingsD- iPad Announcement Day at Stanford from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo.

AllThingsd- iPad Campout from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo.

AllThingsD Chatroulette Exclusive from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo.

Almost Famous: Chris Messina from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo.

A minute with Chris Messina of Google. We talk Buzz, Facebook and the future of openness at Google.

Warning: Sordid details ahead.

Scoble is here, Ben Parr stopped by, and as soon as my intrepid camera man Miran arrives we’ll start rolling with some awesome video of our own. In the meantime, here’s some streaming clips from my iPhone.

This is just one performance test, but frustration runs high when you touch it here and it opens something there. Click through to see the video.

Robot Touchscreen Analysis from MOTO Development Group on Vimeo.

MOTO Labs tests the sensitivity and resolution of current smartphone touchscreens such as the iPhone, the Google Nexus One, the Motorola Droid, the Palm Pre, and the Blackberry Storm 2.

For more on this story, go to http://labs.moto.com/robot_touchscreen_analysis/

Almost Famous: Chris Messina from E. Drake Martinet on Vimeo.

A minute with Chris Messina of Google. We talk Buzz, Facebook and the future of openness at Google.

In a feature of “Almost Famous” we’ve dubbed “Need to Know,” All Things Digital talks with top players inside tech companies–much as we talk to emerging and innovative entrepreneurs–who are perhaps not as prominent as their influence suggests, but who should be.

Warning: Sordid details ahead.

This week: We took a trip to a little company called Google (GOOG) to talk with Chris Messina, Google’s open Web advocate. Openness? Google? We couldn’t pass this up.

Who: Chris Messina

What: Open Web advocate

Why: Chris has been in early on all kinds of pioneering open Web projects. He helped run Spread Firefox–Mozilla’s community marketing effort–co-founded the BarCamp user-generated un-conferences, and single-handedly invented the Twitter hashtag: #. No joke. He just made the move to the search giant.

Where: Factory Joe (blog); @chrismessina (Twitter); Googleplex (analog place)

Who Else: Open standards are Messina’s forte, but he’s been preaching the gospel of openness to many Google teams.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: You know, I’ve led a pretty padded life, but I guess my worst one was when I was a janitor in a print shop while living in Switzerland. I was living in an attic in this tiny town to attend this Swiss design school–which I didn’t like at all–and this is how I made my meager living while there.

Has a Geek Crush on: I first started learning Web design by reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s book. There are lots, though. More related to the stuff I’m doing now, I think John Panzer is a big unsung hero, he’s the one pushing the Salmon stuff (Google’s open comment project) forward.

Gadget of the Moment: I still love my first-generation Apple (AAPL) iPhone. It doesn’t have 3G and it’s slow as molasses, but I really like the form factor, the metallic finish, everything. It also allows you to take screenshots, which is the one thing really missing from Android.

Biggest Difference Being at Google: Even more email, if you can believe it.

Design Geekiness: My favorite font ever is Pennsylvania by Christian Schwartz. I also like Bello, Flama and Tungsten.

Bio in 140 Characters

Born an New Hampshire, he trained as a communication designer at Carnegie Mellon. He left for California and has been into the open Web ever since.

The Five Questions

What does being an open Web advocate at Google mean? Does it feel like you are working for “The Man”?

Generally what I’m doing here is a lot like what I used to do, actually. I have contact with a lot of different developer teams, and I talk to them about how they can use open standards in their work. Right now though, mostly I’m working on Google Buzz, doing developer relations and helping design the Buzz APIs. We’re trying to create these technologies based on stuff from the grassroots communities where these things already exist, as opposed to inventing our own standards. We document everything on the Google code site and then we just talk about it. It’s a little bit of an evangelism role, in the sense that we have to go out and be a part of the community and be a router for information back into Google.

Big companies seem to have their own agendas and needs to be met, and what I’m realizing now is that a lot of times, they also don’t have time or a way to go out and find the places where these needs are and these tools are already being developed. There are a lot of people who are really hungry for this information, but maybe just didn’t know where to go.

So how do you see Google Buzz as a part of the social Web landscape, now that you’ve been on the inside?

We approached it from a “pieces that are loosely joined” perspective so that we can spit out smaller communities that are self-sufficient, rather than one big monolithic project like Facebook Connect. We built Buzz so that Google can be one place that hosts the underlying technologies, but the capabilities can be spread and used by anyone who wants that social functionality.

The goal is to create a much larger social Web that is dispersed, as opposed to another monolithic silo that sort of sucks in a lot of activity and doesn’t let anything out. Facebook is just the most recent silo, there have been lots in the past. AOL (AOL). Prodigy. A lot of times they don’t mean to be that, but it just happens.

How do you see the competing philosophies of openness and proprietary technology and information at play on the social Web?

I think the way that I look at it is that facilitating choice is actually a good way to ensure you remain competitive. Also, right now, the social Web is in such infancy that competing on what is available now seems so premature. I’d rather see us spend the next five or 10 years building out the social Web so that we have good standards for identity, good standards for authentication and open ways to bring your friends with you to any site on the Web.

Because we’ve never had this social data before, there’s this mentality that it’s solid gold, and we should be hoarding it keeping it from everyone and only letting out little bits. In reality, I think markets work best when there is a flow of data. If I can’t take my data out of one network and move it into another, like I can move credit card balances from one to the other, then I think we are inhibiting the types of things we should be building, which will be much richer.

I already sign into 10 Google products a day with the same account. Is my Google account going to become more like Facebook Connect?

Well, the technology is there, but it’s more a question of motivation. It’s actually a problem I’ve been working on for the last two or three years. The first question is, how do you provide choice to people when they want to log in (what do you ask for)? The other question is, why would they use any one service or other, given the choice?

Facebook has solved that problem by just eliminating the choice. You just choose Facebook Connect, click a button, and it will be fine. And it works pretty well.

A barrier for us is that our tools are built on standards like openID and OAuth that were designed by people who cared a lot more about privacy. As a result of that, a technology based on openID doesn’t automatically come with all the social data that make modern applications work. We are actually working with Facebook on this problem, because it turns out the hardest thing to figure out is just what to put on the user interface–how do you quickly ask people what they’d like to share? We want to avoid making Web sites look like the side of a Nascar.

Google’s push into mobile is based on open standards. How do you see that proliferating?

You know, even the iPhone is actually just a platform that interacts with a bunch of open standards and accepted systems. It relies on 3G, sends email, SMS, takes pictures that are compressed and connects to other devices via Bluetooth–they are all open standards and protocols that have enabled these great tools. I think people are going to want more. I’m intrigued by Android, and it, plus the devices it runs on, are really getting there.

History of the Internet from Melih Bilgil on Vimeo.

“History of the Internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.
The history is told using the PICOL icons on www.picol.org. You can already download a pre-release of all picol icons on http://blog.picol.org/downloads/icons/

You can see the credits and more information on this movie on

http://www.lonja.de/motion/mo_history_internet.html