Monday, July 17, 2006

Catching up with the Giraffe Files: Videoblogging & Multimedia Now that I'm back at my office network connection, I'm finally able to download videos of some conference sessions I missed, and upload a very bad video clip of Steve Garfield interviewing me. Steve's topic at the Media Giraffe conference I just returned from was multimedia blogging, and he demonstrated tools for doing a podcast with a simple mobile phone call, or creating a video podcast with a low-cost digital "snapshot" camera, much the way the KnoxNews RandomThis team has been doing. As part of his demo Steve interviewed everyone in the room, myself included. I tried an experiment, using my own four-year-old Canon Elph to video Steve interviewing me. His version was shot by a colleague across the room with a higher-quality video camera on a tripod while Steve hung onto his professional-style wireless microphone; my version (attached to this page's RSS feed as a podcast) was done by holding my 2x3" camera at arm's length and trying to get us both in the frame. Conclusion: If I'm going to do that often, I'll need a wider-angle lens... or longer arms, but I do enjoy some of Steve's facial expressions in response to whatever I was saying. (And -- clear sign my "jorn-alist" roots are in print, not broadcasting -- as soon as I heard myself say pioneer weblogger Jorn Barger's name, I decided my pronunciation was wrong.) 8:29:39 PM     Blogs about words from the newsdesk frontlines Pam Robinson, who used to help rein-in my verbosity at The Hartford Courant, goes by the name  "Editoress" as keeper of the Words at Work weblog, where she is "blogging about blogs" lately -- particularly ones by copy editors, teachers and others interested in language. My answers to her e-mailed questions already qualify me as a member of OnAndOnAndOnAnon, so I won't say much here... except that other bloggers who answered her questionairre, such as the authors of Writing Coach and Language Miniatures, do a better job of sticking to her main topic than I did. Along with those journo-blogger interviews, Pam's own blog points to interesting things about language that I haven't seen elsewhere (or in a long time)... And unlike a "this just in" news blog, Words at Work is full of items that should remain interesting for a long time. 10:37:26 AM

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