Paper Li as a Production Tool

Launched in Spring 2010, Paper.Li (the Li is for Lichtenstein) turns your Facebook or Twitter feeds into a daily newspaper. Currently the service is being used in over 200 countries, with the main markets being the US, UK, The Netherlands and Japan. The site currently has software to support automated compilation in English, German, Spanish and French and there are plans for Dutch, Japanese and Mandarin. They have around 130,000 daily "newspapers" and the system is growing at a rate of 1000 a day. It will be curious to see how the public copes with this sudden explosion in on-line publications. I think the idea is great - although I am being very selective on the number of "subscriptions" I sign-up for. Even though they are free, they do take up valuable attention time. So keep to measured doses and follow people with important things to share. Frankly, I find the conversations are becoming stronger on Facebook - and that's reflected in my preference for paper.li for Facebook. A couple of radio producers and I are using to get reactions to the programmes formatted in a useful way. So its become a contribution tool rather than a distribution platform.

PearlTrees - The next Delicious for collaboration

PearlTrees Presentation
Originally uploaded by Jonathan Marks

I understand the rumours are still quite strong that Yahoo wants to get rid of the collaborative bookmarking tool Delicious. Frankly, after experimenting with it in about 2005, I stopped using it. I had problems with plug-ins on various browsers. It had a cutsy URL in those days which I couldn't remember. It probably wasn't the Delicious extension that kept crashing my browser, but when I got rid of a lot of them, out it went too.

Since then I have been looking for three things:

- a method to keep and sort stuff I find on the web in a logical way, especially related videos.

- a method to share those collections with others and share bits of it with others who subscribe to an alert service I run for clients.

- a method to dynamically display the results, so that any updates are also reflected. That's the problem with blogs. Once you have snagged a copy of an Excel sheet or graph and put it into a blog, it's frozen.

I stumbled upon what could be the answer at a bloggers dinner organised in Paris by a French start-up called Pearltrees.com. You first need to sign-up and sign-in, set up a free account and a simple profile. Then install extensions into your favorite browsers. Then, as you surf the web, you can bookmark your discoveries and send the links automatically to Pearltrees. Each website is a pearl and each pearl can be dragged and dropped into what I call an "interest tree". It's more like a virtual biscuit tin when you can store goodies, but also make very clear connections between the pearls rather like Mindmapping.

What struck me was the clever way in which you can then share this with other Pearltrees users. If someone else is working on a dossier about "community radio stations in Ghana", I can invite that person to collaborate on a document. That person does have the rights to change (and potentially destroy) the document rather like Wikipedia. But because you have only granted them access to that bit of your network, it is a great way to collaborate and build trust. I've found quite a few journalists and entrepreneurs working with Pearltrees - basically taking it for a ride to see what it can do.

You can also publish your trees and then embed them into a blog. Whenever you go to that entry, the website grabs the latest version of the pearltree.

Downsides? Not many. But you need to remember that what you're storing are links, not actual content. So if someone posts something like a video or a document which you capture as a pearl, it will disappear if that document/video ever goes off line. For that reason I am experimenting with downloading documents to my dropbox and then posting stuff from there.

Pearltrees was born at LeWeb2009. They have already come a long way since. It's a small team of 12 people working in Paris, but I got the impression its a tight-run ship and a brillian team of developers. I am expecting great things...(reposting now I finished the video).

Boost to the Broadcast Industry - instant mobile sites

I've been following the progress of a Norwegian mobile technology company based in Trondheim, Northern Norway that keeps coming up with ideas that bridge the mobile space with creative broadcasters. boost.no have built template-based software which allows journalists and copywriters to build websites that look good on smartphones. The challenge is that most standard websites look great on a big screen - lousy on a small one. Broadcasters are finding that advertisers are interested in mobile sites (more so than banner ads) but they want to see results before they sign anything. That reminds me of the radio ad business where creatives spent hours in the studio writing dummy ads simply to impress the client. Oystein Skiri was at last year's IBC in Amsterdam and the recent WAN-IFRA conference for editors and publishers in Hamburg. I asked him to explain the problem they have solved.

Mobile Trends 2020

Met Rudy at Leweb10. What a nice guy. Lives in Barcelona.

Mobile Trends 2020

View more presentations from Rudy De Waele.

My Plan for this site in 2011

Happy New Year. Currently working on a new series of presentations researching into the integration of social media with traditional broadcasting. A lot of international media seems to be collapsing at the moment, but the ways of storytelling on emerging platforms has never been more exciting than now. Would like to work with more creative companies working on the next steps for storytelling... I also really enjoy organising break-out sessions (2-3 days) to come up with a media strategy for the next three years. Trying to do more of that. I am using this site to share the stories that I find on my travels. It's kind of like what I used to do on Media Network, but more visual. So what are your plans?

Looking Back at Radio

I have been fortunate to be able to listen again to a great series of programmes I was involved in. The station was Radio Netherlands, the programme Media Network. I still believe it was an early "FaceBook" bringing together teams of passionate people to discuss what was happening in media and technology at the time.

I picked this recording out of the archives because it has a nice capsule summary of the major media stories from 1982. The highlight was, of course, the Falklands-Malvinas "conflict". But it was also the last programme in which Wim van Amstel appeared as RNW Frequency Manager. It was certainly not the last time he was heard on the programme, though. Again it is striking to hear some of the predictions - and how they were spot on. The call with Arthur Cushen in New Zealand is rather like making contact with the moon. Cannot believe how fast time has flown. At the time of publishing this podcast, I was also sad to hear of the passing of BBC correspondent and broadcaster Brian Hanrahan, who famous line when broadcasting under censorship from the Falklands Fleet was brilliant. Unable to reveal how many British aircraft had been involved in the conflict, he reported that after one sortie he "counted them all out and I counted them all back."

Confusions about Web Radio

Paris December 2010
Originally uploaded by Jonathan Marks

There is still a lot of confusion out there about the economics of audio over the phone. I was recently in Paris for the great LeWeb10 conference and passed by ads for the Samsung Wave. First phone I have seen with a prominent menu option for webradio. That means you stream the audio via 3G rather than picking it up from FM or AM. I remember Nick Piggot of the RadioDNS.org project pointing out at IBC that if you were to stream the equivalent of a month's worth of FM/DAB listening by the average Brit, then the download would be about 2GB. That is just not going to scale, nor would I like to rely on a 3G network during a natural disaster. We had a case of that on 9 December when it decided to snow and Paris came to a standstill.

And if you're travelling abroad, as I was, I note that KPN was planning to charge me 5 Euro for a MB of data - so I would have had a monthly bill of 10,000 Euro if I had decided to use my phone as a radio.

I saw colleagues trying to buy local SIM cards, only to discover you needed a French credit card or that it took 48 hrs to activate the data account. In other words, web-radio is great as part of an audio solution. In areas with an uncapped fixed price data rate, it is fine. But the operators are rethinking what they mean by uncapped - I see examples where 250 MB is regarded as the max for fair use.

So it's a bit early to be dumping broadcast networks, although I think AM will go away quite fast. DRM has failed to attract the interest of the receiver manufacturers and the cost per listening on shortwave was decided when oil was 40 dollars a barrel. But FM and DAB+ are an important part of a hybrid mix for audio.

Web Radio on my Android
Originally uploaded by Jonathan Marks

Panasonic steals the IBC Show for me

Woah - so glad I waited before picking out a new camera. Just come back from the introduction of a new flashbased camcorder from Panasonic called the AF101. They say its about 70 percent ready and will come onto the European market by December 2010 for a price just under 5000 Euro (excluding local VAT taxes). The AF101 is designed to answer back to the Canon D5 Mark II DSLR challenge. Frankly, because DSLR has not solved a lot of artefact problems and has really poor sound arrangements, I have decided to wait before chucking out what I have now and going for DSLR. I have decided not to go the DSLR route after what I saw tonight. The final model is going to look less boxy it seems, what's in Amsterdam are engineering samples.

I do a lot of interviews and I cannot keep switching cards every 12 minutes because the card has reached a 4 GB file maximum. Canon is a still's camera company, and it is only now that they seem to be waking up to the needs of the videographer. On a closer look, frankly I can't wait for Canon to get it right two or three years down the road. Those cameras were designed to shoot great stills and a bit of video on the side for Web reportages. They do a great job in that. But trying to shoot videos the way I am used to will require too many work arounds, especially as a single shooter.

In a very funny but factual presentation in the NEMO Science centre in Amsterdam this evening, Us film and Video Producer, Barry Green took us though a washing list of what DSLR's cannot do without extra attachments. The horror stories of the work arounds with DSLR, rang very true. I have been disappointed that neither Sony or JVC have stepped up to the plate. Both have very lack-lustre stands at this year's IBC 2010 in Amsterdam. So Panasonic seemed to have got it right this time.

From the Panasonic Specs

The AF101 uses a Micro Four Thirds digital single-lens or cinematic lenses such as prime lens with a conversion adaptor, as well as professional audio input (XLR), giving it the degree of flexibility that professionals require. The camera can record video in full HD (1080i/p)/720p formats including 1080/24p native mode with Full HD Variable Frame Rate (VFR)*2 function. The video can be recorded on the bigger capacity SDXC memory cards in professional high quality PH mode (up to 24Mbps). Two SD card slots allow relay recording from one SD (SD / SDHC / SDXC) card to another to give large recording capacity of up to 12 hours in PH mode or 48 hours in HE mode.

The camera recorder is equipped with professional interfaces , including HD SDI output, XLR audio 2ch (48 V phantom power source compatible) inputs. Time code recording feature is also available to deal with professional video operations, something missing on all the DSLR's I have seen so far.

Path Finder 5 by Cocoatech

Got so frustrated with Snow Leopard's Finder, almost to boiling point. The Apple Mac is brilliant for video editing with Final Cut Pro, but Finder is not handy at all for building a complicated archive and combining files on several hard drives. I keep getting second windows disappearing.

So I have been playing with Path Finder 5 by Cocoatech. It offers two windows and the ability to drag and drop files and folders in a much more intelligent way. Turns out to cost about 32 Euro, but you can try before you buy to see if its worth it. It took me about 15 minutes to be briefed (video instructions included) and you follow what they do as the video plays. Absolutely no connection with this small company in California, but a lot of respect for what they code. It's going to save me hours.

Microdolly Hollywood

This stuff is good, though expensive.   But I note the Taiwanese competition is much heavier.Why do you need it? Makes great tracking shots - and with the DSLR cameras they can look spectacular. They need a spelling checker on the site though. The design looks straight out of 1998....rotating @ sign. Ok, so these guys are great techs and lousy designers.

The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte

The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte

One of the better twits in a long time. More recently Twit has become this week in telephones. But not this one.

Wow...

Not sure I need the 3D TV. This 2D is spectacular enough. And no glasses.

Getting Better Sound on Vodcasts

I have been advising small community stations in Africa to use the Kodak Zi8 flash based camera. It provides excellent quality images, especially if you use a tripod or monopod to keep it steady. I prefer it to all the offerings from Flip, not only because of the video quality but because of the SOUND. The sound on the Flip cameras is truly awful. The built-in microphones on the Zi8 are OK for ambience (in mono) and emergency situations. But I remember former Kodak PR guru Jeffrey W. Hayzlett explaining at the Zi8 launch at DLD-09 that the most common request from customers was for an external microphone jack. They did that. But which mike to choose? I have seen people using two separate lavelier micophones plugged in parallel via a headphone splitter into the Zi8. But now, I believe I have found a better solution. Darren Nemeth runs an audio business called Giant Squid. He builds small microphones exactly for the purpose. I'm interested because the cost of the microphones (65 US dollars complete) is in proportion to the cost of Zi8 (around US$180 in the US). For an extra 6 dollars he puts a Neutrik Right Angled Gold Plated Plug on the end of the mike cable (bottom of the photo in the insert). I agree with him that Neutrik plugs last longer and seem to fit more snugly into the socket on the camera. The gold plating helps improve the contact quality - because dirt and dust on the plug can end up giving you crackling noises after a while (especially in Africa). Darren doesn't make excessive charges for posting the microphones overseas either, and accepts PayPal. Altogether a good deal.

Sennheiser, Beyer etc. make great stuff, but well beyond the budget of the stations I work with.

I see discussion in some groups that indicates to me confusion around the term stereo. The micrphones above are actually two separate mono microphones wired into a single stereo plug. So you clip one mike on the interviewee and the other one on the interviewer. The Kodak Zi8 puts each mike on either the left or right channel. The confusion arises because Sony makes a single point STEREO lavelier microphone, the Sony ECM-CS10 Stereo Lavalier Microphone. I have tried this but decided against it. You don't need stereo on a single lavelier. The human voice is a single source and this mike ends up adding a lot of extra atmosphere to the recording that does nothing to improve the intelligibility of the interview. In fact, in noisy environments, the internal Kodak microphone ended up doing a better job. The ECM isn't expensive (35 US dollars) but it is not what I want. If you are using a recorder without power built into the microphone socket, you may need to consider the Audio-Technica ATR3350 Omnidirectional Condenser ATR3350 which is mono but with its own small power supply in a small tube which can attach to a belt. This microphone has a really long cord (7 metres) and is powered by a watch battery. The only challenge is that you need to keep a spare battery handy. Although the battery does last quite well, when it goes it does so suddenly. There is no light to indicate the unit is switched on.

Next Steps for this Blog - Check the Urban Fox

Been pondering what to do with this blog. I'd like to share some thoughts with you.

I did some experiments elsewhere with Ning, but decided to discontinue the adventure because of horrendous Chinese spam and my personal uncertainty as to where the Ning platform is going. If they can change the policy to charge for maintaing access to content I have created, then even though the initial price is reasonable, I have no idea what they will change next. So like it or leave it. I left.

But back to this space. I initially used it for posting gadgets and stuff that Caught My Eye at IBC Amsterdam. Since 2008, the amount of relevant audio gadgets has dropped considerably. So I have broadened things to include anything of relevance to the blogger, vodcaster, podcaster on the move.

I'm going to comb through previous postings and select some for updating and revising. I will also add new content, since my kit has changed recently. Some comments, such as a recomendation for the HHB range of FlashMics is hopeless out of date and my in field experiences means I have changed my mind.

But what do you think? Still a need for this particular blog?

In the meantime, do check out the excellent musings from UrbanFox. Christina and David are actively testing kit for the documentary maker and offering some candid advice on whether or not to go the DSLR route. Christina also does some excellent, affordable training courses in the UK which I highly recommend. Look out for her too at the IBC 2010.  Great stuff. Honest, practical advice. All with a wry sense of humour that comes from working with stuff to a deadline.

Setting things right on Vimeo

Several people have asked me why I host videos on Vimeo rather than Youtube. The truth is I have experimented with both, but has found more in common with the writers, directors and videographers that are storing their stuff at Vimeo. You definitely need to embed videos elsewhere - just leaving material on Vimeo and hoping people will find it is NOT the way forward. Vimeo has made some recent changes to make it easier to post alerts to Facebook and Twitter and they have a file size limit rather than a time limit of 15 minutes like YouTube. Personally, with 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, I wonder when my stuff is going to get lost in the jungle of great stuff and sheer nonsense.

There is an excellent settings page on Vimeo which gives you the settings you need for best results with your respective video editor. I migrated from Sony Vegas to Final Cut about three years ago and noticed a huge difference in quality if you get the settings right. It is very important to limit the streaming to 5000K otherwise video becomes very jerky.

This is the link you need for Vimeo. I have found it also works for Youtube since they went to HD.