So, it looks like Logitech has been watching a lot of uStream and a lot of Google Hangouts lately. Their new webcam, the Logitech Broadcaster ($199 US) , is a WiFi connected webcam that allows for secondary angles during your web stream. It can also record that second angle to be used for a later edit in iMovie. The Logitech Broadcaster can be controlled from an iPad, iPhone or your Mac and you can use a combination of all the available cameras in your stream or recording.
Here is a video from Logitech showing off some of the features.
The case of the Logitech Broadcaster does double-duty as a magnetic base for the camera, allow you to position it where you need. It doesn’t look like it has a traditional tripod mount, but that is a little hard to see from the video and pictures provided.
If you are looking to take your web streams and video productions to another level, the Logitech Broadcaster could be an interesting piece of kit to add to your gig bag.
Who doesn’t like some “cool” in their lives? Cool Hunting provides a regular dose of cool through its video series highlighting cool stuff in design, art, engineering and more. Cool Hunting is available both as a YouTube channel and a podcast via their web site. The videos are high-quality and shot with an eye towards the artistic while giving you insight into the people involved in the projects.
I highly recommend Cool Hunting as a refreshing bit of entertainment for your mind. Hopefully it can spur you to some “cool” projects of your own.
I came across this new iPhone app, Chirp, last night in my usual Internet reading and it got me to thinking immediately — couldn’t this app be used to create enhanced podcasts that automatically directed listeners to web sites, photos, notes and more at specific points in the show. This is my short demo on how it might be done.
This certainly wasn’t something that the creators Chirp.io were thinking about when creating the app, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t use it to our (i.e. podcasters) advantage.
The recording of our Thursday, September 20, 2012 episode of KitchenParty is now online.
I am part of the crew for this new foodie show sponsored by Bakespace.com. We are using Google Hangouts to hold a conversation based around some food topic each Thursday night at 5pm PDT/8pm EDT.
Google Hangouts are one of the newest New Media kids on the block and lots of people are taking advantage of them for both personal and more professional shows. Hangouts integrate directly with YouTube. This means that once your Hangout On Air completes, it is automatically uploaded to your YouTube Channel without any further action from you. For large files, like this one hour show, this cuts out a lot of the traditional editing and rendering required for a traditionally recorded show.
Hangouts give you a simple to use place to record conversations with up to 10 people at once, which is nearly perfect if you are doing a show like KitchenParty. One more tool for your New Media toolbox.
Please give us a “Like” on YouTube and tune in next Thursday at 5pm PDT/8pm EDT for our next show!
Tonight’s Topic: Kids back in school? Looking for good things to feed them? Fed up with junk food?
Join us as we discuss healthier food options for our kids this school year. Joining us will be J.M. Hirsch, the food editor of the Associated Press and Katie Workman, Co-Founder of Cookstr.com and author of Mom 101.
In addition, we’ll also publish our healthy lunch options cookbook. To add your recipe to our cookbook, submit it here: http://bit.ly/QdXNNr
Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame are joined by Will Smith and Norman Chan for coverage of “…anything that’s awesome!” Shows range from tips and hints to visits to Adam’s Man Cave and Jamie’s Warehouse for talk about movie props, welding and more. Additional shows cover uses for the MakerBot, a 3-D printer, product reviews and more.
Tested.com is another great hangout for geeks on the Internet. Check it out!
SO, WHAT KIND OF STUFF CAN I READ ABOUT ON TESTED?
The short, pithy answer is: We’ll cover anything that’s awesome. The longer answer is that we have many interests, ranging from breakthroughs in science, amazing tales of exploration, and discoveries in nature to emerging technologies and new consumer products that promise to change our everyday lives. Tested is the place where we’ll explore those topics in depth, asking the hows and the whys about the things that excite us the most.
The number one rule of Tested is simple. We want to make Tested the site that we’d be most interested in reading. If you think there’s something we should be covering, but aren’t, please let us know!
A hilarious collection of cat cartoons. As a cat owner, it all seems a bit too close to the truth. Simon’s Cat causes trouble for everyone, including himself in these short black and white adventures. This is the channel I turn to when I need a little laughter in my day.
There are also Simon’s Cat books with large collections of comics based on the character.
I have a LOT of interests and science has always been one of them. Of course, this means that I am always tuned in to what is happening at NASA and other scientific organizations. I even have a friend who works at JPL who helps to keep me informed.
You can keep in touch with the many scientific projects and discoveries at NASA, too, by subscribing to their YouTube channel. Below is a link to their latest video, detailing some of the first research targets of the Curiosity Rover. Subscribe now to hear about new discoveries as they are made.
Getting the most out of your Pinterest feed, without burying yourself in a lot of unwanted information, means following Pinterest Boards, not people. It would be rare for you to like everything that someone pins, but by selecting the appropriate topic boards on Pinterest, you can get just the information you want from each person you follow.
I have been moving away from mainstream broadcast and cable programming for a while and switching over to watching a lot of stuff on YouTube. My son, Joseph, has switched almost entirely to YouTube Channels for his entertainment viewing.
I realized today that I should be highlighting some of the YouTube Channels I subscribe to for my daily entertainment (and educational viewing).
Today’s new subscription is the PBS Idea Channel. This is a great collection of education and entertaining video on a variety of topics. I found the channel when I came across a blog post linking to their show on Minecraft, Makerbot and the Post Scarcity Economy.
Below you will find a link to a playlist of all their videos. I highly recommend subscribing on YouTube so that you will be notified of each new video as it appears.
Each of my blogs has a section on my YouTube Channel where you can check out and share the various videos you see here. You can find all the technology-related videos in this YouTube Playlist for the Careers in New Media blog and podcast.
I am one of those New Media producers who is without a cameraperson for most of my shoots. Something like the iPhone Swivl might just make things a bit easier. It uses a wearable sensor that allows the base unit to track you around the set.
I need to get one and try it out. I wonder if anyone could hook me up with a demo model. I will agree with the review below that $179 is a bit pricy for this product. I am also concerned that it only uses the, lower resolution, front facing camera of the iPhone when I would rather have it use the 720p rear facing camera. It seems I might be able to use it with my Flip video cameras, though, which would give me 720p. Hmmmmm….
The Swivl knows who or what you want to film by tracking an easy-to-wear and super compact 3-in-1 sensor. This triple duty gadget acts as a sensor for movement, a microphone for crystal clear audio and a remote for fine-tuned Swivl control.
Simply place the sensor on your actor (your BFF, your pup, an RC Helicopter, even yourself) and watch the Swivl keep up!
A noticed a new button had popped up when watching some of my own YouTube videos this evening…Interactive Transcript (highlighted in yellow in the screen shot below).
Clicking the Interactive Transcript button opens up a timecode synced transcript of the video you are watching. YouTube has been offering automatically generated captions for quite a while now, but this lays out the automated transcripts in such a way that the user can click on individual lines to just to that part of the video automatically. Machine transcription is far from 100% accurate, but with good audio Google’s algorithm can do quite well.
Thus bodes well for making video and audio searchable in Google’s index, something that is not really possible today. I would assume though that since they are creating these transcripts anyway, it won’t be a far step to slurping these transcripts into the Google indexing system so that people can find videos simply by searching on word used in the video. One missing feature is an easy way to export the transcript, even from your own videos, so that you could share it on your own web site along with the video.
Let me know if you are seeing the Interactive Transcript button on your videos. Google often rolls out tests to random users in order to judge the popularity and effectivness of new features, so it might not be available for everyone.
I have many facets to my work life, including my garden blog and podcast, A Gardener’s Notebook. Below is a playlist of the many garden videos I have posted to the blog in an easy-to-browse YouTube playlist. You can also find other content on careers and technology on my YouTube channel.
This is just one example of how I am using New Media to get the word out about my blogs and interests. It doesn’t take a significant amount of time, but it is important that you capture events and activities as you are doing them. Having to set up a special time and place to shoot your videos is often enough friction to prevent you from creating them at all. Capture what you can, when you can, and you will early create content for your sites.
I have been spending a lot of time woking on my YouTube Channel lately as I think that this is where a lot of attention is focused at the moment. My son got me interested in Minecraft and after watching how some of the most well-known Minecraft people use YouTube as their main social media presence (and income generator) I have been applying some of their lessons to my own channel. Using Google Adsense, you can monetize your YouTube views using both on-page and in-video advertising. It takes a large quorum of viewers to make more than a few dollars, but those few dollars could help you cover hosting and other costs for your blogs or podcasts.
Douglas E. Welch demonstrates how to edit a tape sync (or double-ender) recording of an interview for podcasting. A tape sync allows each party to record their local audio and then merge them together in the editing process, retaining the highest quality of recording for each participant.
Learn more about social media with my ebook, Social Media Self Preservation available in the Amazon Kindle Store (http://j.mp/xMtrri)
Navigating the special difficulties of a high-tech career can be troublesome for workers, young and old. Career Opportunities, a weekly column for ComputorEdge Magazine in San Diego, California and Colorado Springs, Colorado, has addressed these issues for almost 13 years.
While simultaneously developing his own high-tech career, author Douglas E. Welch has shared his insights, trials, setbacks and successes with his readers. The High-Tech Career Handbook collects the best columns from 1997-2003 into a book for all high-tech careerists, whether they are just starting out, building their career or looking for a new career in the high-tech world. Topics covered in the columns include getting your career started, ethics, fairness and the benefits of doing honest business, personal development, professional development, and the tips and tricks for transitioning into a mature career.
While we often talk about one, monolithic, Reputation – with a capital R — I believe that there are a series of reputations that make up the whole. This book will focus on the combination of reputations that make up your one, overarching, Reputation. By examining each of these reputations in detail, I hope you will find specific areas where you can improve your work, your actions and your thoughts so that your overall professional reputation grows.
Why break your Reputation down into its constituent parts? It is often said that you can’t “do” projects, you can only do the individual tasks that make up the project and achieve the desired result. The same can be said for reputation. You don’t build your reputation as a whole, you cultivate the smaller reputations that create it. Each individual action builds your reputation in unique ways and each requires some thought as to how they relate to the whole.
Imagine if when you were born you were given a magical compass to lead you through your life. It would always show you the way. It would show you the right answers on tests, lead you to the right college and to the right course of study at that college. It would lead to your first job, your first (and maybe last) love and always show the path ahead. This isn’t some idle fantasy. We each have a compass to show us the way, if only we would take it out of our pocket and use it. This compass, of course, is our desire. Instead of a needle, it is a feeling, a pull, a tension — in some cases, an overwhelming flood of feeling that says “Yes, this is the way — this is the one — this is where you need to go!”
“I am deeply convinced of the importance and effectiveness of social media. Like the Internet itself, which made social media possible, social media allows you to expose your talents, your products, your creativity to a huge number of people all over the world. The “loose contacts” we make online are the beginning of what I call our own global family.This isn’t one unwieldy global online community, but rather our own personalized family made up of those that bring value into our lives. Our communities might overlap in some ways, but they will never be the same. They can’t be. We are all unique individuals so therefore our communities will reflect this uniqueness In fact, when our communities are too alike, we might be just following the crowd instead of building our own community.”
* Kindle books can be read on nearly any computer or mobile platform including, Mac, Windows, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, and Android phones and tablets. Download Free Kindle Reader Software
Douglas E. Welch presents on the Why, What and How of Blogging and why it is important to business, both large and small. Blogs should be an integral part of any web site. They allow you to easily update your web site without editing static pages, which means you will probably update them more often.
Learn more about social media with my ebook, Social Media Self Preservation available in the Amazon Kindle Store (http://j.mp/xMtrri)
From my video archives, here is a video version of the — typically audio — New Media Answers show I produced with Tracy Patton. In this episode we talk about all things video.
For those of us who can’t hire, or even borrow, a cameraperson for our videos.
Just a prototype right now, but an excellent example of what will be coming in the future. This would be a boon to any new media producer.
From the video description…
This video is my submission to Microsoft’s Robotics@Home Competition. I developed a robotic video tripod which I call the “SmartTripod”. It runs on a Parallax Eddie robot and Microsoft’s Robotics Developer Studio (RDS). There is another video on my channel which is kind of an “appendix” to this one–it contains a cooking video I created to demonstrate the capabiliites of the SmartTripod. You can find that video here: http://youtu.be/rhmcqUx4PHI
It is important for podcasters to start out on the right foot when setting up the RSS feeds for their podcasts. The RSS feed is their main connection with their subscribers and losing control of that feed can be disastrous to communicating with and maintaining their audience.
