shelbinator.com

For those of you joining us from CNN, that means “citizen journalism,” something you’ll want to reflect on with much consternation as you prepare to launch your new dedicated iReport website. Great, just what Street Team ‘08 needs: a Street Army of even more amateur amateurs sucking up all the footage and posting it before we can edit it. But I look forward to some lively critiquing, so let the games begin!

From Super Tuesday on, well, Tuesday, to the Atlanta Press Club panel Thursday, and on to SoCon08 Friday night and Saturday, I’ve been left a little stretched thin on the new media front. Which, sadly, left me going into a conference all about blogs and videos with no new blog posts or videos on my wallflower of a website.

Toe-to-toe with the MSM

Here’s what’s fun for a wallflower: sit next to a CNN.com producer at a panel when the moderator asks you all to describe the purpose, content, and average traffic of your website. But since Walter Jones had introduced me as “the only one here who can do math in his head” by virtue of my background, I just obliged them by reporting that my site generally gets about as much traffic per day as CNNpolitics.com got in one tenth of one second on Super Tuesday. And then I punted to GriftDrift.

We dealt with the usual media navel-gazing: how do you trust bloggers; how do you quash falsehoods brought by comment floods; what defines a “citizen journalist;” and does all this internet whozamadoozit really translate into votes, a point one questioner was fundamentally skeptical of. It certainly turns into millions of dollars, and when you say that a wacky looking off-the-wall guy like Ron Paul “only got 5%” or so across a number of states in spite of his prolific online efforts, you’re ignoring the fact that Ron Paul actually got around 5% all over the place in spite of the MSM juggernaut doing their best to marginalize the “second tier” candidates. When you’re talking about victory in the margins, like Sens. Clinton and Obama are seeking as they divide the country (literally and figuratively), then activating a few more percentage points of young voters is all you need — and we’re online.

If you want a little more, you’ve got a nice blurb and photo from the Loaf here and the full panel audio at the Georgia Podcast Network.

From the MTV bin

I’ve also covered a few more points of both the APC panel and SoCon08 in a sleep-inducing 1760-word tome written to cover my weekly MTV obligation. Points covered: the N95, Scoble, Qik, Twitter, and political engagement.

The MTV blog also features my Super Tuesday recap, embedded below for your viewing pleasure. It’s a 10-minute whopper, so don’t expect a quick distraction. Without going into too much detail, the Super Tuesday live-streaming experiment involved a special suspension of our normal production protocols, and as a result, this week is our only chance to re-publish the archived cellphone footage before it’s lost to the basement storage vault of serverland. I wanted to get as much of my day into a single video as possible — and I succeeded, with 3 seconds to spare before bumping the upload limit.

That’s pretty good quality for a live stream from a handset, no? And that’s not even indicative of what the thing can record — which Reuters has been experimenting with. It was a great day for me and my (temporary) N95. Did I mention I want to make the babies with this phone? Is anyone from Nokia reading this? Hello?

Some general stats on our Super Tuesday N95 onslaught: We ended up covering 21 of the 24 states awarding delegates; West Virginia was a write-off with its weird closed convention, Illinois never got her phone due to logistical snafu, and Idaho only got one snow-bound video out over the potato-state’s lackluster cellular data network — and the file got corrupted in the process, anyway.

The rest of us shot an estimated (based on encoded data size) total of 9 hours, 43 minutes of footage — which would have been even more, according to some of our Street Teamers who say a handful of their pieces never made it to the web. Judging from my experience, this was probably the fault of the U.S.A.’s pathetic capitulation on cellular technology to Europe in the interest of granting a few shiftless corporations a fat megalopoly, and not any particular fault of Flixwagon’s.

The producers at MTV News were monitoring our content and repackaged some choice moments into twenty-six on-air packages that were aired from about noon till midnight. I hear I made it into two of ‘em, and the style of presentation sounded really cool, but I’ll have to wait for the DVD to see for myself.

A total of 443 video clips were shot for an average length of 1m 19s and an average of 21 videos per person (high: 62, low: 2, median: 16). I personally shot 22 clips with an average run time of 2m 15s. I managed to provide Twitter-warning of impending broadcasts seven times (covering twelve or thirteen of the video clips), and twice more after the fact. I was also glad to have a network of people available for feedback via SMS; by nightfall, when a number of our reporters were discovering with shock and anger that a number of their broadcasts never got over the network, I couldn’t help but think, I told ya to sign up for Twitter…. To quote Leonard Witt from my MTV article,

“Reporters can quickly notify segments of their audience or their editors where they are, what they are working on and with whom they are talking — and ask for help or advice, all in 140 characters or fewer.” Mr. Witt said. “How else could you quickly notify so many people without really intruding on their space? So, yes, I am paying more attention to Twitter, and I think folks in the news media profession should also.”

Better luck next time.