As chain-smoking scientist Ray Arnold in Jurassic Park says:

Hold onto your butts sound bite Samuel L. Jackson sound bites

6/10/10 UPDATE: So this whole mysterious QR Code has been a rather unsuccessful experiment, only proving that no one knows about or actually uses QR Codes except maybe 2-3 percent of the population. I did a similar post on our internal intranet at work and only a handful of folks knew what to do. Eventually it’s spread virally and well… most people were more annoyed than delighted to learn about a new technology. Which should be a good lesson for what I’m doing:

I’m taking off from the Post-Dispatch in August to head west for a year-long fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (located at the University of Missouri). I’ll be researching and independently studying mobile web development, specifically focusing on using mobile geo-located devices for news, social and multimedia content creation and consumption. I’ll be studying some traditional news orgs, some non-traditional news orgs but mainly a whole lot of non-news orgs to learn about the emerging technology and learning best practices, applications and new developments.

If you have any suggestions of folks I should definitely talk to in the mobile technology space, if you have questions yourself that your news org is struggling to deal with about mobile, if you have ideas about how this fellowship could help journalism, or if you have anything else you’d like to share — please don’t hesitate to contact me at will {at} journerdism.com. This is literally going to be an academic year, free for me to work on an fully ‘independent study’ (no teaching requirements, no class requirements, no dancing the tango in Argentina like some other fellowships) so I’m hoping I can really learn a lot and share the ideas (both of successes and failures–like the QR code on this blog ;D) with the news industry to move adoption and understanding of the mobile web along much faster (especially compared to how long it took news orgs to really buy into the web).

This will be an awesome adventure. Please join me and share your thoughts and suggestions.