This Oct. 24, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer, where I blog regularly about mobile, tablet and emerging tech. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

While IOS 5 launched a couple weeks ago and has received much fanfare, Android announced their version 4.0 upgraded mobile operating system last week with several interesting new features for journalists. While there’s plenty of interesting interface improvements and futuristic-features like facial-recognition security, I’m going to talk about the two ways Ice Cream Sandwich (the Android project name for this release) is notable to mobile reporters and mobile and tablet publishers:

The most notable upgrade for mobile reporting is Android’s native camera app made some huge advancements:

• Near-instantaneous picture taking — there’s no lag anymore from when you click the shutter to when the picture is taken which is fantastic for sports and breaking news. The IOS5 upgrade also made similar improvements for taking quick photos.
• Single-motion panoramas are added to the options list along with photo and video for collecting visual content.
• Native video editing was available in Android 3.0, but now available across all devices, and photo editing too (much like IOS native camera app, you can now do basic editing in the app immediately after capturing the content).
• Google+ Hangouts with video are great for sending back quick streaming video reports and the new version of Android offers similar support to that of the desktop Google+ Hangout experience. TV affiliates have long used tools like Skype to stream back video from locations and organizations including CNN and KOMU in Columbia, MO have been leaders in using Google+ Hangout video for this same purpose.
• Wireless content sharing with other devices via Android Beam NFC technology or Wi-Fi sharing to send large files back and forth.

New publishing features in Android 4.0:

• The biggest change is Ice Cream Sandwich merges Android 2.x and 3.x operating systems, which were set up for mobile and tablet platforms, respectively. One of the major challenges that slowed developers/publishers to move to the new Android 3.0 platform was after Android 3.0 was just released this past Spring, Google had was honest and transparent about the fact that there was going to be a major upgrade, merging both mobile and tablet versions into one in Android 4.0 this Fall. Without an already established base of users, most developers held off developing for 3.0. Without the app developers, there’s been limited apps developed and that has also slowed consumer response and adoption of Android tablets. (Google recently said they had sold 6 million Android Tablets, Apple has sold 40 million iPads) With the platforms merging, in the future your app developed for 4.0 will be able to scale and function on all devices from tablets to mobile phones, hopefully providing a larger audience.
• Google’s web browser in Android 4.0 also added many features to support and extend HTML5 capabilities including advanced support for motion sensor APIs including the gyroscope as well as 3D transformations. The browser also has a performance boost, optimizing the experience speed by 550% in some tests.

So as the school year has come to an end I’ve had several requests form graduating seniors for advice on what gear they should purchase to add to their arsenal  to get them ready for the next step of their career. A long time ago I set up a gear guide to help people with this, but it’d been a while since I’d updated it, until this weekend. So take a gander if you’re curious, looking for some interesting summer reading or in the market for new multimedia, mobile gear or books, check it out.

I also added a couple more categories to better split out the topics into more clear buckets: Design, development, mobile/tablet tools, management & leadership, social media & community, video/audio/photo gear and video/audio/photo training. … Oh, and “Nerdtastic stuff”… my favorite category of quirky nerd tools and gifts.

Full Disclosure: That is an affiliate link, so if you make a purchase I’ll get a 4% kick back, which I’ll use towards hosting costs for the site. It doesn’t cost you any more, just sends a little cash my way for helping create the resource.

Flickr photo courtesy Stéfan Le Dû

I’m excited to announce that after 5 years of co-chairing the NPPA Multimedia Immersion, we’re back for another intense workshop and this year we’re going to have both Canon and Nikon as sponsors!

Here’s the official NPPA Multimedia announcement & more info on how to get in on the fun:

The 2011 NPPA Multimedia Immersion in Syracuse, NY will be an intense, five-day, hands-on training workshop for visual journalists looking to expand and grow their multimedia skillsets using the latest technology.

Our focus is on mixing photos, video and audio content and editing them into multimedia presentations.

Our previous students have ranged from multiple Pulitzer Prize Winners, Best of Photojournalism winners, the current White House Photographer, academics, editors, students, working professionals and freelancers all looking to supercharge their careers.

Looking back, it’s amazing to see how students over years have evolved and grown from the workshop. It’s really inspiring and humbling. We’re still working on the schedule and especially trying to recruit an awesome group of diverse coaches, but in the mean time, if you’re interested, you should move quick.

We’re limited to 40 students for 20 awesome coaches, so if you’re looking for the best multimedia training for your buck, do it to it.

[Headline fine print: * = Or keep your corporate video player and at least distribute your content on YouTube also.]

News media content management systems have a long history of getting in the way of innovation, audiences and in general, creating an enjoyable user experience.  Video content management systems are no stranger to these challenges and after years of using several different systems and comparing them to other options out there, I believe most news organizations would be better off abandoning their corporate brewed or vendor created video content management systems in favor of using YouTube for the following reasons:

1 – Search Engine Optimization.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? What about a video that no one can see or find — even when they’re searching for it? YouTube has been the Internet’s #2 search engine for almost two years and besides that, it’s given high visibility in results and high priority in Google Search (the #1 search engine). If you want your video content watched, it needs to be on YouTube.

2 – It plays on anything, anywhere.
Mobile, tablets, desktops, just about anywhere you can get an Internet connection on a computer from the past 12+ years, you should be able to watch YouTube video. Most mobile phones come pre-installed with a YouTube app. Some older browsers beyond Internet Explorer 6 might lose some features, but you’ll still be able to experience the content. Even with the newest revolutionary devices that refuse to support Flash, YouTube will work because they offer non-Flash versions.

3 – It can stream just about any speed, offers virtually unlimited bandwidth.
YouTube encodes multiple speed streams of each video and can adjust on the fly if your connection slows (this is something Flash video does remarkably better that other video formats). This feature is critical for mobile video viewing, which has to deal with shoddy wireless networks. Google’s international content delivery network also isn’t going to buckle under your video streams, no matter how viral it spreads. So your granny, who’s still on dial-up, will be able to see your triple rainbow freak out video when it hits the big time.

4 – YouTube can display at amazingly high resolutions.
This summer YouTube announced their support of 4K video resolution — that’s 4096 x 2304 pixels (That’s 4 times standard 1080p resolution).

5 – Loading speed.
Google won the search war because of their speed, not just their search results. They know how critical this is to users, how it effects user abandonment and it’s why they’ve bought up thousands of miles of dark fiber (unused fiber optic cable) around the country and it helps speed their network along. It’s why they also use speed as a search ranking metric.

6 – Metadata.
One of the challenges with video content is the information contained within is difficult for many search engines to dig through. Putting your content in YouTube, gets it in their meta data format. It also opens the content up for…

7 – Transcription and accessibility.
YouTube offers these services for video and once they can transcribe the audio of your video content, Google can tell what the content is and rank it more accurately and higher. Everyone wins!

8 – Annotations.
They can be incredibly annoying used poorly, but there’s also some opportunities to add context and more information to videos (as well as icons to click through to your website, increase followers, get people to like the videos, etc. Here’s an example of what we’ve been doing at the Post-Dispatch to add context, information and fact check political campaign videos.

9 – Customization and branding.
This might be a draw, depending on what video content management system your using, but YouTube definitely offers a lot of opportunities to customize your design, even embeddable player sizes and colors.

10 – Rich analytics.
Google has an amazing “Insight” analytics suite attached to YouTube videos. Along with the basic user data, you can track how long users watched each piece of the video with specific “Hot Spots” to show where people focused or re-watched the video. This kind of granular analytics can be fascinating and depressing, but maybe it’ll finally teach you to lead with your most interesting part of the video as Colin Mulvany, Richard Koci Hernandez and any excellent multimedia trainer will tell you. [Ed. Note: The screen grab to the right shows the "Hot Spot" analytic for a quick video I did from a flash mob some friends and I organized. The upswing at the end is likely because of a URL on the video and not normal web viewing behavior.]

11 – Partnerships for monetization.
YouTube is being turned into a cash cow for Google and they’re looking for content partners, their ads and ways to monetize quality content.

12 – Copyright protection.
YouTube’s made huge strides in reviewing their content and reacting to copyrighted content on the service. Their fact-stripping copyright-stripping robots scan for musical copyright violations and automatically remove the offending audio. If you have an account for your organization, it’ll help pick out copyrighted content faster than if you had your content in a separate silo on your site and someone posted it to YouTube. You can also flag and get the offending content moved faster.

13 – Social snazziness, sharing and embedability.
YouTube is the de facto standard of embeddable web content. Users know how to use it and do frequently. You’re creating content on a platform that is optimized for, not just locking it up in your ivory CMS tower. YouTube also pioneered video social features including following users, liking and favoriting videos, commenting and video replies. And social media is supposed to save journalism, right?

14 – Google TV & other emerging “leanback” platforms
Google’s making big moves to revolutionize TV (along with many other major players including Apple and several hot startups). YouTube’s new “Leanback” experience is just a taste of what’s to come. This new experience bringing web video to the living room, tablets and other devices will lead to an explosion in video viewership. You want your content to be available and optimized for this, right?

15 – It’s free.
Perhaps the most important issue for resource-starved mid- and small-market news organizations — the cost. Video content management systems are not cheap. Depending on the deal and features you negotiate, it’ll cost at least 1 full time staff reporter’s salary a year for subscription/license fees, all the way up to six-digit figures for some of the most robust, feature rich systems.

—

YouTube drawbacks:
I’m not going to say YouTube is all peaches and cream, it’s about 80-90 percent awesome. Here are some issues that bug me:

• There’s a whole lot of ‘noise’ to quality ‘signal’ on YouTube. Maybe this is an advantage? Your professional, interesting video content will be valued, shared and watched more? (That’s assuming you have professional, interesting video content.)
• I’ve seen comparisons where YouTube’s encoding can be a slightly rougher on quality than other providers, but part of that is providing an optimized speed stream so that you don’t have to wait. I consider this a draw.
• Putting all your eggs in one basket can be dangerous in this rapidly evolving environment. I doubt Google’s going away soon though, but maybe they’ll turn evil or something.
• I haven’t done a side-by-side case study of the monetization running on YouTube’s network compared to a news site, but the results there would vary immensely based on your staff’s ability to sell video ads, how they package the deals and it’d include all sorts of proprietary information that I couldn’t share publicly. It is pretty clear (from the points above) that you’d likely get a lot more views on YouTube, which if all ads were created equal and worth the same on both networks, you’d come out ahead with YouTube’s viewership/bandwidth/cross platform/SEO/social boosts.

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.