Multimedia and more

Over the last few months I’ve been listening to podcasts during my morning and evening commutes. I’ve never been much of a podcast listener, but now that I have a 45 minute commute via BART train, I’ve turned into an avid listener, even an obsessed fan. I can’t leave home without my earphones, and if I do, I feel like I’ve wasted a precious morning that could have been spent enlightening my life.

I used to listen to the radio when I had a driving commute at a previous job, but this time I get to choose exactly which casts I want to listen to and in which order.

Lately I’ve been listening to Slate, NPR and a few others. Just so many of the segments are incredible. I actually feel rejuvinated when hearing a great piece that opens my eyes to larger world we live in. Most of the time I’m left intrigued.

So why is podcasting still a small niche in the total number of audio listeners? Well, logistics plays a big part. You need an mp3 player and, software to aggregate the casts. But more importantly you need time. Time to listen. No one actively turns on a radio to listens to news. Its a passive form of news consumption. You listen to it while doing something else, like driving or doing the dishes.

This question came up recently during a Knight multimedia workshop we were teaching at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Someone described podcasts as “radio without listeners” and my heart sank. How could this precious piece of daily enlightenment simply not exist in the lives of so many people. I suspect once cars become further integrated with iPod, this form of news consumption will become more and more widely used.

If you still don’t believe me, I challenge you to listen to the following cast and not be fully intrigued. It’s a piece from NPR’s Driveway Moments about a man trying to come to terms with a lobotomy he had when he was 12. I know, the topic sounds a bit weird, but this bit of audio is one of the most incredible pieces I’ve heard. The quick cross edits, the haunting voices, everything about it is so riveting I forget I’m listening to a news story. It’s 20 minutes long. You might not have the patience to listen to the whole thing sitting here on this blog (the reason why radio doesn’t work online), so remember you can always download the podcast.

Howard Dully\’s My Lobotomy piece from NPR\’s Driveway Moment

Apparently a new feature from diet.com is making the rounds and becoming quite popular. The latest is that you can text message the name of a popular restaurant followed by a menu item to “D-I-E-T-1″ or 34381, and it will return all of the nutritional facts of that item. News of this feature has gone viral and has already appeared on several news reports, numerous talk shows and radio stations. I first heard about it on the radio, and now I’m seeing it on digg and other Web sites.

I have to admit, the service works pretty well. It’s free except for the cost of the text message your carrier charges (most carriers give an allowance of text messages). In a test I text messaged “carl’s jr. six dollar” and got back information that their Six Dollar Guacamole Bacon Burger was 1117 calories. That’s not counting the fries or the large soda. Pretty soon I was texting the name of everything I’ve eaten in the last couple of weeks. (I didn’t have the six dollar burger in case you were wondering)

This type of feature isn’t anything new. Lots of organizations are using texting services to get or return information, including Google’s new 411 service. Just text your search query to “G-O-O-G-L-E” or 466453, and it’ll return local info. (Ex. “sushi 94720″ will return sushi restaurants near UC Berkeley).

Local KITS Live 105.3 San Francisco uses text messaging to get responses from listeners to polls or song requests. The DJ will ask a question like “Text in your favorite place to vacation” and within seconds the messages come pouring in. It’s crowd-sourcing at it’s most immediate form.

It seems the only people who aren’t using a text messaging service are news Web sites. At least, I haven’t seen any. A few will provide “SMS alerts” but even then, I’m not sure I want give the power to a company to send me text messages all day about a range of topics I can’t control, dwindling down my monthly 250 text message allowance. I’d rather have the query-answer method any day.

Why is it that the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times can’t be the one to provide me with directions to restaurants or the latest movies playing via my cell phone? Google wins again.

The New York Times Research and Development Lab have come out with a really cool idea for getting the newspaper right on your mobile phone. They developed a product using hacked Radio Frequency Identification chips (RFID) whereby you can transfer data to your cell phone seamlessly.

The idea, once it’s fully developed, would work like this: Set your mobile phone on an area of your desk that has a special reader pad. The pad signals your computer and takes you to a site that would allow you to download RSS feeds, news stories, blog, personal notes and even directions to say a restaurant right to your phone.

The RFID part of it is more of a gimmack, the real beauty is in the software. Making it simple to, well, put the newspaper on your phone. There are a ton of programs right now that will technically do that, but none with the beauty and simplicity as this one. And one thing software developers are quickly learning these days is that User Interface is everything.

Their idea was so cool, they won the Yahoo Hack Day London 2007 competition. (I admit, I didn’t even know that was going on)

They are going to have the software ready “very soon” on their Web site ShifD.com.

Watch the video of them explaining their product far better than I could in this blog:



This should be really exciting. I know Brian Storm from last summer when he worked with us at a Carnegie - Knight funded organization called News21.

I like Brian because he is a visionary. He is not one of the ones trying to “catch up” but rather he is helping to lead the charge with innovative storytelling. He comes from a photojournalism background, and I suspect his workshop will be more visually oriented that others, especially given the nature of his business.

Other multimedia training workshops tend to go about training in different ways, I think. Here at Berkeley’s Knight Workshop, I feel like we are more technology oriented and we cater more toward journalists that are just starting out on the digital side of things. Our aim is to help “mid-career” journalists who are trying to catch-up.

The price of the MediaStorm workshop is pretty steep: $3,000 for an “observer” position and $4,500 for a participant such as a reporter or editor. I assume a news organization will be footing the bill for an employee, that’s usually how these things work. Then when they go back, they can help spread the knowledge.

He failed to mention Knight in the list of “others” on his FAQ however. (I should note that we are the first result to come up when doing a Google search on “Multimedia Journalism.”) Maybe he’ll give us a shout out later.

Read the details of MediaStorms workshop here.

EDIT: Brian Storm e-mailed me to tell me they added Knight to their list of “other” workshops. Oops, forgot about the trackbacks. A big thank you goes out to MediaStorm.

The Guardian reported recently that the BBC will be making its iPlayer software available on the iPhone and iPod Touch in the coming weeks. Many blogs/rumor sites are reporting that this is undoubtedly linked to Apple announcing its Software Development Kit (SDK) release at the end of February.

The iPlayer is simple enough. Stream all of the BBC content on the Web. Everyone is pretty much already doing this, except, the BBC is actually looking ahead to the future. They are trying to make their content available in as many venues as they can. Very soon everyone who owns an iPhone in Europe will know they can watch BBC content on their iPhones, and the BBC will undoubtedly see a jump in traffic. If they play their cards right, they will start offering other services to iPhone users like movie times, weather, stocks, etc. all through widgets or programs.

Now I use Apple’s iPhone as a reference, but I’m really speaking of mobile devices in general. I like to use the iPhone because I think it does serve as a rather interesting barometer given its popularity and capabilities (not to mention Google recently announced that iPhone searches on the internet are 50 times more than any other cell phone).

Pretty soon, the mobile computing platform will become ubiquitous. Some say in five years, others in two years. But no matter who you talk to, they all agree that mobile devices are the future. I’ve said it before, people today are in love with their cell phones. It’s their lifeline to the world, their method of personal communication. Now, it’ll be used as a platform for mass communication. The only question unanswered is who will be leading the charge? A Silicon Valley startup, or a news company?