Turn your device sideways if it helps you see the images.

Next, go to my ‘Twitter 101 for Journalists’ Cheat Sheet

Then, take it to the next level. Wan’t to post a picture, share a link, add your location or look up recent #hashtags you’ve used? It’s all easy. Click the ‘Extras’ arrow adjacent to the character count on the ‘compose a tweet’ screen. It will give you oodles of fun options to try.

1. Confirm you are tweeting from the correct account.

2. Keep it to < 120 characters

3. Get others’ @usernames to mention in tweets. Ask for their “twitter name” or “twitter handle.”

4. Lead with the important info.

5. Finish with only one correct #hashtag

6. When tweeting from a shared account, finish the tweet with your initials, like this... ^DM (after the #hashtag.)

Tips

1. The audience is different for each account.

2. Add value by tweeting the fun bits that wont be covered elsewhere.

3. If you make a factual mistake, just tweet again with a correction. (The twitterverse loves honesty)

4. If you begin a tweet with an @username, only followers of you and that person will see it. To hit all your followers, instead tweet “.@username says….”

5. Retain your own voice.

Examples

Also check out Twitter for iPhone in 5 Minutes.

I encourage you to read the official post and browse the photos over at the City Room blog. Read the lede… I’m pretty sure they even referenced my cuddling newlyweds.

Have a look at this interactive map of the city’s waterfront. Great for planning where you might like to shoot.

ORIGINAL POST: The weekend of July 31, The New York Times’ City Room blog is asking you to help them cover New York’s waterfront, in a crowd-sourced storytelling adventure.

Below you’ll find all the info needed to submit some images and descriptions. Some of the best will be featured at nytimes.com and likley in the print edition of the paper.

They don’t have a post with instructions about it up yet, so I’ve pasted most of the email sent out about the project here so everyone can join in the fun.
________________________________________________________________

Cover the Waterfront : A crowd-sourced photo project to run on City Room (the blog of The Times’ New York report, nytimes.com/cityroom) and in the Sunday Metropolitan section.

THE GOAL
To get as many people as possible to submit as many pictures as possible from as many places as possible along New York City’s 578-mile coastline, thus showing how the waterfront is really used.

YOUR ROLE
To seed the submissions, and help us guarantee range, by going to far-flung and well-selected spots along the waterfront to see what you can see.
And, to tell all your friends (Facebook and otherwise), followers (Twitter and otherwise), colleagues, contacts and people you see on the street to join in.
And, to write up beautiful (or haunting or funny or poetic or insightful or charming) vignettes from what you see to be posted on City Room next week to help keep the buzz going.

WHERE TO GO
We’ve passed out lists of 32 interesting places selected by Andy. We’d love to get people to these places, because together they create a wide spectrum, geographically and otherwise. So if you’re game to take on one or more, you’ll have a chance to sign up during today’s meeting. If you’ve got other spots you know and love, or somewhere you’d like to explore, by all means, go there. You don’t have to tell us.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR
Anything, and everything. Surprising things. Iconic things. Strange things. But don’t be like my mother, and send in all 158 photos of the twins eating ice cream. Pick a handful from a place, and send those.

Besides photos, you’re looking for quotes, anecdotes, observations, interactions, moments that could turned into great vignettes — mini stories/blog posts/postcards. These should also be surprising, iconic, strange, telling. They should feature characters. They should have action, or decided inaction — check out Andy’s fun list of ING words for inspiration. They should, by all means, be brief — no more than a couple hundred words. Again, be rigorous — we cannot possibly use more than a couple from each of you.
Always note exactly where you are and what happens when.

WHAT TO DO WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT
Use the handy form just posted by the nytimes.com City Room blog. You’ll find it 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.

2010
iPhone 4
Operating System – iOS 4.0
Processor – 1 Ghz ARM A4 CPU, 512MB Memory
Graphics – PowerVR SGX 535, uses system memory (28 million triangles)
Screen – 614K pixels
Data Transfer Speeds – .04-20MB/s (3G-WiFi)
Storage – 32GB Flash Drive
Dimensions – 4.5 x 2.31 x .31 inches
Weight – 4.8 ounces

What will the device be like in 2020?

I just clicked on an innocent looking Facebook ad asking for beta testers. What followed was a page explaining how Facebook was launching a new product that involves getting users to ask and answer questions that will be published to Facebook as a whole.

Drake’s Note: I’ve copied and pasted the beta user offer from Facebook at the bottom of this post. Decide for yourself if I’m reading this right.

For those with only a moderate level of tech obsession, the service Im talking about is one in which users interact with each other, posing and answering questions, that can then be searched by all. Sort of what user forums are for software.

Google has tried it, Yahoo has tried it, and Quora, a tech-darling of the moment, is trying it. I’m a beta tester for Quora, and have used several ask-answer type services online. A missing link for many has always been scale of the user community.

We’ve all heard the, “if Facebook were a country statistics”… or, if you haven’t, heres a handy info-graphic (thats already 2 months old).

I include the graph only to say that Facebook has scale if it has anything, and even including the recent privacy hullabaloo, the 80% of users who could care less still add up to a ferociously huge user population for an ask-answer service.

Ok, ok. Yes. Google has scale. Yahoo, well, they once had scale. But both boast core services that are based on moving freely in and out of their pages. Nothing keeps users in like walled garden.

Additionally, there is something inherently social about asking questions that the early ask-answer crowd seems to have missed.

Yes, I want an expert to answer my question about how a catalytic converter works (or wikipedia), but if I want to know how to throw the best dinner party, I am just as likely to take notes on an answer from a friend of mine who throws great parties as I am from Paula Dean. Maybe more so.

Quora realizes this. They have built out a whole social networking component to their service, and encourage you to connect the other networks you are already a part of.

But what’s harder? Getting people to know one another, or getting wannabe pundits to pontificate about something they are interested in… on the internet? I know I’m an easy sell on the latter. Just ask me

Below is the copy and pasted text from Facebook’s, “so you wanna be a beta tester” questionnaire. Decide for yourself what they are up to.

Help us build the future of Facebook.

We at Facebook are preparing to launch a brand new product to the world. We think it will be as exciting as Facebook Photos and Facebook Events, but we need your help to make it great.

As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people — including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.

Ready to get started?
Before we can give you exclusive beta access, we’d like you to submit three great sample questions and answers. We’re looking for evidence that you can write clearly and authoritatively on familiar subject matter.

Here are some guidelines to follow when submitting your questions and answers:

Choose provocative questions. Write about things you know. Some examples:
How can I get over my fear of flying?
What are some fun family activities to do with two small children on the weekend?
What caused the U.S. stock market to crash in 2009?
What’s the secret to throwing a great housewarming party?
What are the main differences between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer?
What are women looking for in a relationship?
What methods has BP tried to clean up the oil spill?
What should I do to prepare for the Bar exam?
How did The Beatles find success?
Write detailed, articulate answers.
Where relevant, cite and link to third-party sources such as Wikipedia.
Your answer must be original. Plagiarism is unacceptable.

The Hacks and Hackers Unite meetup, generously hosted by KQED put together teams of journalist and app developers to rethink what it means to consume, touch and interact with news media on the iPad.

There were several standouts, including my personal favorite, Whosreppin.me, a web-app that delivers news and connections on the senators and house member who serve the area geolocated via the browser. It also allows the user to auto-tweet messaged of support or disdain, indexed to a particular news story.

I’m a fan of tongue-in-cheek humor, and the auto-generated tweets of disgust got me… Dianne Feinstein #myrepresentativesucksbecause: http://tinyurl.com/yg93n4p… and @Barbara_Boxer is a bag of douche http://tinyurl.com/37b7u77.

I like Diane and Babs just fine most days, but the real possibilities here, to harness auto generated hashtags and trending topics for political action was more than enough to warrant an award at the conference.

My group got the go-ahead to use a data set from The New York Times “Moment in Time” project, run by Jim Estrin, Josh Haener and the Lens Blog crew. We aimed to design a user interface that would reveal stories inside data rich images.

We failed. Not because out app was bad, but probably because we bit off more than we could chew in 36 hours of app madness.

The basic thesis was that there are stories that can be revealed by users through careful indesing and searching of this amazing trove of user generated images. As interactive storytellers, we need to learn how to structure information so that users can reveal the stories that are most significant to them. This is moving beyond curation, and was the ethos behind the app we designed and began developing.

Below I’ve included a couple of sample UIs we designed, as well as some thoughts and sketches.

This is a sample UI I designed to combine cover-flow with a map and daylight diagram. Since all the photos were taken at the same moment, photos taken at the same longitude and hemisphere share similar lighting characteristics. Essentially, its an attempt at a multi-variate data visualization.

We went with a post-card metaphor for image meta data. Every image in our app was seen uncluttered by data. however, the “reverse” of eash image could store the contextual data and allow users to share, interact with, explore, expound on and tag images they found interesting.

The whole exercise, while frustrating, was immensely educational, and made me appreciate how hard good news and information design are. I plan for this experience to be a first prototype on the way to something tangible and useful.

Its a fight worth winning.