shelbinator.com

Well, that was awesome. After what was a pretty crafty campaign to suck up a bunch of phone numbers for their SMS campaigns by promising to tell their supporters the inside scoop on the VP nom-noms, the Obama campaign rode the fail-whale all the way to Textland by playing the tease out too damn long. Even though everyone from here to Mars figured Friday afternoon would be a good time to send out the most coveted SMS since Willy Wonkas golden tickets, somewhere somehow someone on in the campaign figured they could milk it just a little bit longer.

You know, they figured that nobody would notice the Secret Service heading to Delaware to escort my boy Joey B to a chartered jet that had been sent from Chicago.

And then, as if to beat only the rooster, they started cranking out the texty goodness around 3am, rousting folks from their sleep like it wasn’t already old news. Well, that’s what you get for not thinking to text “STOP” to 62262 before you go to sleep.

It’s 3 a.m. and your phone is beeping…

(Quicktime)

I’ve been meaning to write over on Blog for Democracy about a certain Republican Congressman who is really showing us up on the new media front, using Twitter and Qik — personally, not just via a younger, hipper staffer — to communicate with his constituents (okay, let’s get real about TX-7; with the national cadre of poligeeks) in ridiculously real time.

And then Rep. John Culberson had to go and screw it up by being hysterically partisan, in 140 characters or less at a time.

Yesterday Rep. Culberson began some Chicken Little tweeting about the sky falling, claiming “I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc - outrageous and I will fight them.” The problem is, he was basing this on a memo he saw from — and a conversation he may have had with — Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA) about some proposed updates to the antiquated rules governing “official” House communications. These updates Capuano was proposing were intended to expand the ability of Representatives to use external social networking sites (specifically video hosts like YouTube) and not to restrict the use of Twitter et al any more than they were already being restricted by rules written by people whom my mom could out-internet blindfolded with a gimpy mouse.

As “evidence” of this Dem conspiracy to choke off free speech, all Rep. Culberson could produce was this memo (excerpted below) of 6/24/08 from Rep. Capuano to the Committee on House Administration. Capuano’s intent was basically to say, 1. The current House system for hosting and playing official videos on house.gov websites sucks, hardcore. 2. Current House rules of official communication prohibit Representatives from using sites like YouTube for better hosting of such videos. (Capuano apparently told Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-IN, in conversation that scores of Representatives do it anyway with a wink and a nod, and it’s just time to update the rules to reflect that.) 3. The House really ought to let Representatives use external hosting sites for videos, because these communications are a good thing. And 4. In order to keep up with the “decorum” of the House, they ought to find a way to do so that doesn’t get too tangled up in commerce or political campaigning due to free market forces (i.e., if you watch a Representative’s “official” YouTube video, it might be unbecoming if the three “related” videos that pop up in the YouTube player after it’s over were a racist anti-Obama ad, a pitch for Viagra, or candid footage of Britney Spears’ crotch). Not unreasonable suggestions, I think.

Apparently the guv’mint was already talking to YouTube about finding a way to do this, and YouTube was willing to create a “clean space” for official civic communication, according to this WaPo article. But Rep. Culberson grabbed Rep. Capuano’s language about how the updated rules should handle the hosting of video content — including a “this is official House bizniss” type notice at the front and the non-commercial entanglement concerns — and ran with it, screaming bloody murder, as if House Democrats woke up one recent morning and decided to enact a “rules change” to crack down on his Twittering and any other innovative use of new media.

But again, the problem with Congressional use of new media is that the rules already don’t allow for the use of commercial third party sites that might commingle the official with the unseemly. Rep. Capuano’s attempt to expand the ability of our Representatives to use the YouTube might be, at worst, a rather narrow-minded and poorly-worded proposed change to the rules that would create no extra wiggle room for people like Rep. Culberson to do things like Twitter (which are already against the rules as they stand anyway). But hey, I guess it’s not as easy to say, in 140 characters or less, that “ZOMG! House Dems are going to update the rules to expand Congressional use of social media in a very limited and non-forward-looking fashion, but still an update that House Repubs never got around to considering in 2006!” than it is to claim the House Democrats are taking away your Twitter because they hate free speech. (Sure enough, the right-wing screed blog Hot Air ran with the headline for Rep. Culberson’s plight, “Why do Congressional Democrats fear free speech?”) But even that kind of “non-forward-looking” allegation wouldn’t have been fair to Rep. Capuano, given this particular chunk of his letter:

While the above recommendations will help CHA as it seeks to provide House Members with the ability to post official video materials on the Web in an efficient and economical way, further changes to CHA regulations and practice may be necessary to account for the continual emergence of new technologies. I encourage CHA to view these recommendations as the first step in a process towards modernizing the regulations that govern communications of Members.

This post at TechDirt nails the analysis on the head, as far as I’m concerned. The right-wing bloggers parroted Rep. Culberson’s rather hysterical partisan interpretation. Even the social media powerhouse blog, under the steady hand of Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins (whom I’m biased against anyway after he blew off our Street Team ‘08 Super Tuesday stunt), put the disclaimer “This isn’t a knee-jerk post” at the top of a knee-jerk post that used its headline to perpetuate Rep. Culberson’s partisan myth. And to think I was intrigued when my Twitterrific feed asked me, “Why are the only people spun up about House Net rules on the right? I’ve seen nothing from lefty friends? Where’s the transparency crowd?” But I quickly realized that the answer was, “We aren’t sucking down your spin because the story has no merit.”

It’s even funnier when you put Democratic and Republican memos right next to each other for comparison, as TechnoSailor does. First he presents Capuano’s “letter sent to the Democratic House majority leadership to silence [social media like Twitter and Qik.” He, too, parrots the Culberson mythology at first, calling Capuano’s memo “ridiculous.” He later posts “the GOP response to the [Capuano] letter,” from Reps. Ehler, McCarthy, and Price, which in itself contains language that totally highlights Rep. Culberson’s Twitterspasm for the partisan smokescreen it is.

Committee rules that apply to these [web-based] services and technologies, however, significantly pre-date their invention. In some cases, Members have begun using these services and technologies despite being in violation of existing rules.

Despite being in violation of existing rules. So sayeth the Republicans themselves. And yet Rep. Culberson has stirred up this tempest in a teapot (via Twitter! against the existing rules!) suggesting that somehow the Democrats are suddenly out to censor him with new rules.

The Republican letter goes on to suggest updated language that highlights another inconsistency on Rep. Culberson’s part.

Toward that end, we request that the Committee consider adopting the following updated policy language.

With regard to the Internet
Members may use technologies, websites and services (paid or unpaid) to communicate with their constituents via text, video, or audio so long as the content posted by the Member complies with House rules and Franking content regulations.

(Emphasis mine.)

And yet, one of the particular things that had Rep. Culberson all up in arms was his interpretation of Rep. Capuano’s language here, which is hardly different:

Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;

As for what “clearly identified” entails, there is nothing in the letter to suggest that Rep. Capuano and the CHA wouldn’t be satisfied with some language on the main Twitter profile page of any Representative using Twitter. It’s a stretch to suggest, as Rep. Culberson does, that they would be forced to include a “disclaimer” in each single tweet that would exceed the 140 character limit by default, because in the memo Rep. Capuano is talking about video content only. But Rep. Culberson also zeroed in on the “existing content rules and regulations” phrase in a response he tweeted to all of us who questioned his allegations:

@shelbinator Look at page two - note each Twitter etc must meet “existing content rules and regulations” that means prior approval/rewrite 05:41 PM July 08, 2008 from web in reply to shelbinator

Huh. If it’s the House Democrats who are “trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter” because of the “existing content rules and regulations” suggested in Rep. Capuano’s letter, then what the heck are the House Republicans doing so much better by recommending that “the content posted by the Member complies with House rules and Franking content regulations?”

Oh. Right. Absolutely nothing. Rep. Culberson is just acting like another extreme partisan trying to fan the flames of a fake fire so he can pretend to be the guy fighting the good fight. On his House.gov website — which apparently is unencumbered by any Franking Commission rules that might prohibit lies and bullshit malarkey^* — he alleges,

Democrats are looking at restricting Member content on websites outside the house.gov domain. Websites such as Youtube and other social networks would have to comply with government regulations before Members of Congress could post content on them.

He claims this despite the fact that (1) Democrats are looking at removing restrictions, as I detailed with self-admitted neophyte Capuano’s own language above (indicating that more evolution of standards will be necessary), and (2) the Republican letter to the CHA recommends the exact same compliance with regulations that Capuano’s does.

Yeah. I think bullshit is being too forgiving, even of a Congressman from Texas.

And that’s so, so very disappointing from somebody who really displayed a lot of initiative and openness by embracing these emerging technologies to open Congress up to the world. Too bad he thought it was just another medium he could use to pull the standard Republican playbook move: make up a lie, then repeat it as loudly and as frequently as possible until people dumb enough to fall for it start repeating it for you.

* Hat tip to my boy Joey B.

UPDATES:
1. Rep. Capuano brought the smackdown too.
2. ZOMG someone in Speaker Pelosi’s office apparently read this blog and got her to link to it (fourth paragraph) in a response to Leader Boehner! Leader Boehner!
3. I think we’re all going to put down our partisan guns and get behind the Sunlight Foundation’s Let Our Congress Tweet push. I’ll defend Democrats against exaggerated partisan claims, but I’m not going to let them have the dumb if they can’t brain the internet.

Live mobile video is breaking out all over. Last week, Qik announced a new version of its video software for a couple of Windows Mobile devices, the Samsung Blackjack and the Motorola Q. This can really expand the pool of potential live streamers — and of course make us Nokia types feel a little less special.

But even more deflating for us anti-iPhone curmudgeons is today’s announcement by Flixwagon that they’ve developed a version of their mobile broadcasting software for iPhone. Great, now the iPhone fanboys will proclaim victory all over again, because some external vendor has been kind enough to fill in where Steve Jobs seems so egregiously lacking. I heard it before when those willing to hack their iPhone pointed to the “solution” of a really tragic, no-audio, sub-10 frames-per-second monstrosity of an app you could download and record limited duration clips with if you were willing to risk bricking your $400 investment and voiding your warranty. The Flixwagon app for iPhone also requires one to jailbreak the cloistered device — this is not something that’s going to be available in the iPhone App Store:

While we don’t condone or recommend unlocking iPhones, as avid iPhone users ourselves we wanted to experiment with ways to enable flixwagon on the iPhone, until the official SDK supports video. We’re going to continue working with the iPhone SDK in the future so we can offer this functionality to all users once video becomes a standard part of the iPhone.

And I guess since you have to beat the phone’s firmware into submission to squeeze some video out of it, the Flixwagon app, like its video capture predecessor, also has a framerate like molasses, somewhere in the 5 fps ballpark, as you can see below:

I know this is a market the makers of Flixwagon really want to tap into, but I wish they’d spend a little less time making software for a device that’s so dead-set against accepting it and a little more time on the next version of their Symbian software. I heard in the end of April, and then again in mid-May, that a new client would be coming “in a couple weeks,” the most notable improvement in which would be the end of the 15-second “hiccup.” Flixwagon uses a kind of local buffering approach to ensure the integrity of the video stream in the face of periodic bandwidth constraints, apparently caching the data in 15-second chunks; as a result, unfortunately, about a half-second of video is not captured every 15 seconds as the buffer turns over, and this can really screw up the intelligibility of whatever your interviewee might be saying. That is the primary, if not the only reason I started using Qik over Flixwagon, and I’ll be thrilled when the glitch is fixed, if we ever see this rumored upgrade to the client.

I can’t tell if the iPhone version of the app has the same hiccup problem yet, because it’s hard to tell with such a low frame rate if you’re actually missing something.

UPDATE: I obviously didn’t do my homework, because Qik also announced on Thursday that it’s releasing a client for iPhone as well. (But hey, Flixwagon wins the marketing points; that I missed this from Qik speaks to a rather muted release.) Can’t tell what the video quality is like because I can’t find the actual video from the iPhone, just this video of the iPhone. Hello, Qik, link plz! The iPhone isn’t listed yet on their Signup page, and I presume as with any other such app you have to lobotomize your device first. But hey, there you go.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Stacy Shelton previewed the Critical Mass bike ride last week.

Starting about 6:30 p.m., more than 300 bicyclists plan to take over several lanes of traffic, shoving King Car aside.

They call it Critical Mass. It’s a rolling message board that says “Bicycles have a right to the road too!”

During last month’s ride, a few bicyclists “corked” the intersections at every traffic light, blocking cars for the mass of bikers as they pedaled through a couple of light changes.
…
The event is both political statement and rollicking street festival, with some civil disobedience thrown in. … There’s no organized leadership.
…
Critical Mass started in San Francisco in 1992 and is now replicated in hundreds of cities worldwide.
…
To help defuse hostility and spread the joy of their preferred mode of transportation, riders during last month’s ride shouted “Happy Friday!” and “Thank you!” to waiting motorists.
…
Rachael Spiewak, 27, a regular Critical Mass’er and executive director of SoPo Bicycle Co-op, a nonprofit bike shop in East Atlanta, said the rides are an important tool for empowering bicyclists and making drivers more aware of them.

Sounds a lot like the general storyline of my video report from April’s Critical Mass that went out over the Associated Press Online Video Network. Why, she even singled out the same local bike enthusiast, Rachael Spiewak, that shows up in many of the thumbnails of my video (seen left) on various syndicated sites. Whaddayaknow.

I don’t know why that coincidence came to mind this morning as I read Jeff Jarvis’s latest thoughts on cross-pollenation in journalism:

This leads to a new Golden Rule of Links in journalism — link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff. This emerges from blogging etiquette but is exactly contrary to the old, competitive ways of news organizations: wasting now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories so you could say you’d done it yourself. That must change.

You know, just as an aside.

I don’t care what it’s called, I would totally subscribe to that guy’s blog or bring him on board projects and campaigns. Just look at how amazingly citizen journalismy he looks! And sweaty, too!

If you feel like turning this into a caption contest, knock yourselves out, but this image will definitely be incorporated into whatever re-branding goes on around here. Many thanks to @leslieann44 for snapping the image — no, I was not posing, that’s an action shot, baby.

So this is the internet, huh? Well who do I need to shag to get ahead around here?

Alright, I don’t think I need to go that far. But I wonder if I need a better brand. The last few weeks have been pretty good for me and the internet, but my successes also just seem to serve to highlight in stark relief how much further I have to go.

Last week I went to the Intel ISEF’08 to shoot some video and do some of that citizen journalism stuff, after being contacted by New Media Strategies. The big old-school PR firm Burson-Marsteller (a name it took me all week to remember) was doing the bulk of publicity for ISEF’08, but NMS got pulled in by Intel (as I understand it) to make sure all the web bases were covered as well. Now, I was thrilled that NMS thought I was one of the right people to talk to for the job (hi, rocket scientist). However, had they not been referred to me by our local media commentator SpaceyG, I might have missed out entirely. Many thanks to SpaceyG for the referral, but the puzzle for me is, at what point do I escape the risk of going totally undiscovered save for the favor of the well-connected?

Now that ISEF is over (though my video-editing work is not), there are the thanks and the pats on the back and the connecting with each other on LinkedIn after a project well executed. And on LinkedIn you have that whole Recommendation thing going on — something I’ve never enjoyed yet but is starting to look pretty handy. Say, I think, maybe if I can get a Recommendation from NMS on LinkedIn, the next time someone’s looking for an aerospace geek to shoot video (naturally), I might show up on their radar! And that’s when I realized I had this problem:

I need a brand.

Where might NMS put a recommendation for me on LinkedIn? In case you haven’t messed around with LinkedIn at all, their system likes to file recommendations under the associated job title that the recommendee was operating as at the time. So if I wanted to recommend my primary NMS contact as a new media PR firecracker, I would select that NMS job title on her profile as opposed to the one she’s got listed for her other job on the side, with jess3.com.

But on my end, the only remotely relevant job title I’ve got listed is the MTV Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 gig. And frankly, I don’t really want to have any and every recommendation of my new media work filed under MTV. I was already doing this stuff and already had a style well before I ever encountered the sea of paperwork and red tape that is Viacom. The pieces that I produce for them are necessarily less creative and fun (for me and you) than I would naturally produce, so I went to ISEF primarily as shelbinator and not the guy from Choose or Lose with the stack of release forms and inability to turn on my microphone in the presence of ambient music.

That’d be an even bigger conundrum should my friend Emily want to promote my services. On a tight schedule and zero budget, I knocked out a basic but passable web presence — including video — for her campaign to be an Obama-pledged delegate to the DNC convention. She didn’t win the district-level race, but she’s in for an at-large position, due in part, it turns out, to the key guy at Obama’s HQ in Chicago being thoroughly impressed with her video and website. Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I’d like to start keeping track of, but again, there’s even less of a category on my LinkedIn profile for that to be filed under.

So why isn’t shelbinator.com on LinkedIn?

Tessa of DriveaFasterCar.com has her website listed on LinkedIn, with herself as Editor & Blogger, but that blog is in essence her business (after hours, anyway): it promotes local music and other artistic happenings. Similarly, Rusty and Amber list themselves as co-founders of the Georgia Podcast Network, so if they help you record an event, for instance, you know where to recommend their work. But shelbinator.com, well, it’s kind of a mess.

First of all, there’s my love-hate relationship with the name itself. Let’s face it: it’s kind of immature. It sounds kind of like that tool at the office, “makin’ some copies.” And I’m not entirely sure it’s all that appropriate — or that I even want — to be promoting it as a professional brand. I’d eventually like to do Very Serious Things with my career beyond online messaging, and if you have just as hard a time imagining Deputy Asst. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Shelbinator as I do, well, you know what I mean.

On the other hand, Robert Scoble is arguably among the most influential tech bloggers out there and Scobleizer is just as douchey a handle as Shelbinator. It’s also hard to just cast off the existing brand investment: I’ve been writing under this handle for almost nine years now, starting from badly hand-coded HTML on the defunct Xoom.com. It’s been cited by a presidential campaign, much to my shock and chagrin, and I think it’s finally picking up some currency.

Okay, not that much currency. I’m still incapable of standing on my own without the gatekeepers of internet greatness. That long, geeky tutorial on connecting an external mic to the N95 brought one of my biggest traffic spikes in ages, but I can still hardly take the credit for it. Not that there was much to take credit for: that Finnish Bloggerguy had the right approach in his video, but he wasn’t too clear on the particular connectors and apparently his Scandinavian cable used a different color-coding scheme. I just corrected and clarified his approach for the US market, something I can’t believe no one else managed to do the whole time they were clamoring for a fix from Nokia. (Like they say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, but it helps.) Mobile Jones wrote a post about her long quest for a solution finally coming to and end at my blog, and what happens? MobileActive.org Twitters about how Mobile Jones has the answer on her blog, and a mobile-tech blog carnival does pretty much the same thing. Steve Garfield, the rather prolific videoblogger in Boston, republished the solution on his blog giving thanks and a link to my original post — and his commenters come along with kudos for him, “Great stuff, Steve!” Even the Nashua Telegraph, whose web team hopes to use the N95 for some mobile journalism, links to my post, MoJo’s, and Steve’s in quick succession as “a few tutorials on the web,” as if they are indeed a few tutorials and not one tutorial and two posts about it.

Pardon me while I have a brief Tracy Flick moment. I’m sorry, but it’s been four months since I took you live inside an Iowa caucus (and ten since the YouTube debate) and I’m still getting my internet ass kicked by a life-caster who didn’t realize that Super Tuesday had already happened when talking about the MTV-Flixwagon connection.

So, the word shelbinator doesn’t exactly conjure up anything, and maybe that’s part of the problem. ISEF was also covered by Geek Dad over at Wired.com, but right away you kind of know where he’s coming from. There’s also the “proper noun” problem: shelbinator is me more than it is the body of my work, and part of my branding issue is that I’m trying to pimp that work as much as (or more than) myself. A couple other MTV Street Teamers used to add their brand to the end of their stories, but they had studio names separate from themselves: Corduroy Media and a Xolografik Production. That model just doesn’t seem to work with my current eponymous brand, so maybe I need a studio, someplace you would think to go for video and related communications work.

I took a decent step in that direction, brand-wise, when I stepped down from the Communications post at Young Dems of Atlanta. I wanted to keep working in online communications for progressive candidates and nonprofits, but I made the mistake of thinking I could learn enough Drupal to launch a major multi-user community website while still working on grad school and having a life. Thus, smarterasses.org was aborted in the first trimester, but its logo lives on in the corner of my homemade business cards:

That’s a fairly self-explanatory brand name with a logo to match, wouldn’t you say? Unfortunately, it’s also not something I feel like saying if I’m calling someone important on the phone. “Uh, Senator, it’s some…uh… smartass person calling about your web video?” That was meant to be a site for scrappy bloggers, not someone who wants to work on presidential campaigns. Next idea!

I’ve already rambled on so long now that I’ve lost any semblance of a train of thought, but I have even more questions yet to consider.

• Is it really a content problem? Maybe I just cant get out of double-digit subscribers because I suck. I contemplate that likelihood a lot, but then some complimentary schmuck has to come along and say they really like my work. It’s been suggested, on the other hand, that it’s just too much for one site: is it politics, or is it technology? Unfortunately, I’m not willing to concede on that front just yet. There are plenty of tech bloggers and plenty of political bloggers; I happen to be a quasi-rocket scientist in politics doing citizen journalism and I’m going to try my best to stand at — and report on — the intersection of those paths.
• Is it just a container problem? Would I be well-served by creating a new, clean space for some kind of “portfolio” of the things I might be able to contribute to your project or campaign? This might, at the same time, be a way to create a fairly dedicated channel for the citizen journalism and/or campaign messaging product around here (i.e., mostly the videos) — like, say, shelbinator.tv, or shelbination.com — while leaving the rambly and ranty at shelbinator.com. Granted, this would do nothing to solve my problem of not being able to crack triple-digit authority or get under a 100K ranking at Technorati as far as this blog is concerned.
• So then is there a new brand that would package it all properly? Do I just need to clarify the point of what’s going on around here and give it a proper name that would lend itself better to brand identification? Is the whole shelbinator concept a dead horse?
• What the hell am I going on about? Is anyone still actually reading?

Fear not, I probably won’t subject you to a follow-up post along these lines. But if there’s anyone still here, please do chime in.

This is just one of those things I need to put out there for the Google-bots to find and index for posterity. Despite there being one YouTube video out there that comes really close to getting this right, and despite the immense collection of geekery within the N95 user base, there still arises the constant question from users: how can I hook up an external mic like the Reuters MoJo tookit has? When even a cellphone guru like the author of MobileJones — whose Twittered quest for a decent mic alternative got me to record my first bluetooth trial (see end of this post) — could not reach a satisfactory solution based on what Google had laying around for us, I decided it was time for a weekend trip to Radio Shack. Because this is what my life has become.

The adapter is not something you can buy directly; the resident scientist from Reuters told us at the Journalism3G conference that they had to cobble up their own makeshift connection. But if journalists can do it, hell, anyone can do it! [Correction: According to @mojosd it was Nokia Labs who cobbled it up for Reuters.]

Like I said, there’s already one serious video about this out there, but Bloggerguy leaves out a couple details and gets one critical (but easily correctable, for the persistent) point wrong. Still, we knew it had to be possible, as vlogger Steve Garfield showed that the N95 video recording was definitely taking the audio from the headset mic, but that only gets you so far. N95 user Bitflung also demonstrated the bluetooth connection as a viable alternative, though the quality of bluetooth audio is pretty low.

So, once and for all, here’s your recipe, as I did it:

• The 1/8″ jack A/V cable that came with your N95
• Female-to-female phono plug connector
  
• 1/8″ phone plug to phono jack adapter (note that the “S” on either side of the jack indicates it’s looking for a stereo input)
  
• A self-powered — this is vital — external mic that terminates in a 1/8″ stereo plug. If your mic doesn’t have its own AA, AAA, or button-cell battery, the N95 isn’t going to hear it. **

The last item is the important part, because trying to connect a mono mic with a mono plug (note that some mono shotgun mics still have stereo plugs) won’t work. It has to look like this:

If you’ve got a lavalier or shotgun mic that terminates in a mono plug like this (note the single black band instead of two),

then you’re going to need an additional adapter to convert your mono jack into a stereo jack like this one, or you can replace the 1/8″ stereo jack to phono male plug adapter with this one which goes directly from 1/8″ mono female to phono male. Better yet, you could grab this dual 1/8″ mono female jack to 1/8″ male stereo plug and connect two mono lav mics to your getup. Go nuts.

You should end up with a layout like this:

Note that you use the yellow plug on the A/V cable, not the red one that Bloggerguy said in his video. If your phone asks you what you just plugged into it, select “Headset;” if that’s not an option, you screwed something up. In headset mode, the red & white cables represent the stereo output sound that normally goes to your earbuds, and the phone uses the yellow channel, normally for video output, as the microphone input.

I put it all together and demo several different microphones (stereo cardioid, mono shotgun, and lavalier) in this stunning Pulitzer-worthy video, which I’ll embed using Viddler so you can add your own comments:

Here’s the Quicktime file for podcast purposes.

For those of you inclined to interview serial entrepreneurs at loud VC cocktail receptions, you’ll want to skip to the comment I added at the 6:15 mark, where I demo the noise-cutting advantage of all this claptrap.

And if you’re in a real pinch to cut through the noise but you haven’t brought all this A/V gear, I’ve got another video for you that shows that obnoxious bluetooth headset is good for something after all.

**Update: MojoSD raised a point in her post that I hadn’t thought to test: a dynamic mic, like my cheapo AudioTechnica ATR20, ought to work as well even without battery power because it doesn’t require any power from the port (which the N95 doesn’t provide). I just tested that theory, and there’s a catch: if you plug a dynamic mic into the cable, and then plug the cable into the N95, you get “Accessory not supported.” I don’t know why. But, if you plug the cable into the phone first without the microphone attached, you will get the choice to select “Headset” and then you can plug the dynamic mic into the cord/adapters and record successfully from then on. However, the audio has a bit of a buzz to it, so I’d still highly recommend going with a powered mic of some kind.

Last week, two new players announced their intention to enter the mainstream-ized political citizen journalism arena a la Choose or Lose. First up, Rock the Vote:

Rock the Vote in partnership with WireTap magazine is searching for aspiring or established reporters for Rock the Trail. Sponsored by AT&T, Rock the Trail will capture today’s politics through the eyes and in the words of young voters. Rock the Trail reporters will deliver insightful and compelling blogs, articles and videos from the communities they live in, reporting on young people’s top issues such as jobs, the economy and college affordability. Content will be posted on http://www.rockthevote.com, http://www.wiretapmag.org , http://www.BET.com, and will also be available for viewing on AT&T mobile phones.
…
Rock the Trail reporters will be paid a monthly stipend and supplied with a laptop, cell phone and video camera to rock the 2008 campaign trail. Reporters will interview candidates, elected officials, campaigners, young voters and Rock the Vote artists discussing everything from the Presidential race to mayoral elections and anything in between.

That one will be interesting to field questions on at bloggergeek cocktail parties, because in my limited experience thus far I’ve found that a lot of people tended to conflate Choose or Lose with Rock the Vote. Whatever the collaboration in the past, I guess we’ll be “competitors” now. We’ll see whose guns are bigger: while their blog is “only” powered by Blogger, it at least has an RSS feed, so you’d presumably be able to subscribe to the videos produced with iTunes or the like. Our Flux-powered Think site still lacks this most basic and vital functionality, three and a half months after Professor Jay Rosen went slack-jawed at such an oversight. They’re only hiring five reporters who will only be paid a $500 monthly stipend, but (I may be over-speculating here) the suggestion that they’re getting cellphones makes me wonder if they’ll have a stronger focus on lower quality but more mobile content produced on, say, a Nokia N series phone. And if mobility and speed are of the essence, we’ll have to see what their editorial cycle and turnaround time looks like, once their selectees go through training and find out about the procedural roadblocks to funded journalism.

I also wonder how much actual music will appear in Rock the Vote news packages. Have you started to notice repeats in ours?

Next up, a much shorter-term collaborative effort between Voto Latino, Sí TV and CNN at CrashtheParties08.com. From a press release:

“Crash the Parties” kicks off with a nationwide search for two young Latinos to cover the Democratic and Republican National Conventions as reporters for Sí TV.
…
Contestants upload their videos at www.crashtheparties08.com, discussing why they should represent young
Latinos at the conventions. The videos will also be viewable on V CAST from Verizon Wireless. Public voting begins on May 7, and a panel of judges, including actress and Voto Latino co-founder Rosario Dawson, former U.S. Representative from Texas Henry Bonilla, the Latino Democratic Institution’s Ramona Martinez, CNN’s Rick Sanchez, YouTube’s Steve Grove, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, and MySpace’s Lee Brennan, will evaluate the top five candidates from each of the party submissions to select the winners. Rosario Dawson and actor Nicholas Gonzalez have recorded public service
announcements to help promote the project.

Sanchez will also mentor the young reporters, providing media tips and expert advice on interviewing the party nominees and others. They will report from the Conventions, live and online, offering their perspectives on the candidates, election, and issues.

The Choose are Lose plans for Convention coverage are still TBD.

As suspected, there was nothing particularly earth-shattering presented by last night’s panel on new media and ethics in journalism and business. What highlights there were — mostly coming from the Georgia State University professor of journalism (with a special focus on law and communications), Greg Lisby — seemed to be two steps forward only to take one step back a paragraph or two later when yet another unbelievably clueless assertion about the web was made by someone who’s had enough time to get to know better. Lisby came prepared with facts and figures and historical insight, and he had lots of us at the kids’ table looking at each other with raised eyebrows, nodding, and Twittering in unison that we liked what he just said.

No, there was no knife fight between a blogger and a PBA radio newser or anything remotely as exciting. I think the highlight of tension for the evening, in my mind, was around the 2:30 mark of the video below. A fellow asked a question that left the AJC Interactivity Manager nearly apoplectic, along the lines of, “Okay, so maybe most blogs are crap, but at least I know they’re crap, and as your content, which is supposed to be so refined and exclusive, starts sliding toward the crap end of the spectrum, why shouldn’t I just go read the people who specialize in crap from the get-go?” It obviously wasn’t that blunt, but it might as well have been for its effect, because as far as I could tell the AJC rep’s answer was, “But — b’gack — you — hey — we have blogs! And it’s not — we — that’s like, your opinion, man. And uh — I — somebody help me out here.”

Okay, so I don’t have the same detailed summary and analysis of the event as everyone else, but I provided the live video, damnit (though the acoustics of the large room leave plenty to be desired). Steve was much kinder to the AJC than I have been and has some other summary points from the panel, if you’re interested. GriftDrift is downright optimistic about how much better the conversation went last night compared to nine months ago. Sara is closer to my level of general “meh”-ness; same old story, still just admiring the problem.

On the inevitable “how do we standardize bloggers” issue, scroll to the 1:20 mark on this video for a Q&A about whether such a set of standards might possibly arise organically (but still very systematically and with structure) from the blogosphere itself — or rather, from some arbitrary subset of “ten or so” bloggers. Right, let’s start caucusing for the ten standard-bearers now.

Leonard Witt brought up his concern about media consolidation and offered up the blogosphere as at least a partial antidote to that winnowing of voices. But the panel came right back at us (the one moment where we disagreed with the good professor) with a study that said we’re less welcoming to opposing commentary than mainstream media sites. Given the crap that litters the comment sections of the AJC, I’m not yet worried about this point. Shortly after that is when the older gentleman got up and warned us that there were “forces afoot” at this “nascent stage of the blogosphere” who would want to take over the web and “use it for profit.” As Sara already said, Welcome to the twenty-first century!

As mentioned elsewhere, tonight a bunch of us blogger-terrorists are going to descend upon the Atlanta Press Club again to hear about “Ethics and New Media: How the Blogosphere is Affecting Journalism and Business.”

Please join Georgia State University’s Center for Ethics and Corporate Responsibility and the Atlanta Press Club as we discuss how bloggers are redefining journalism and presenting new challenges for businesses and other institutions. The discussion will be led by representatives of business, journalism and the electronic media. Assurant is the sponsor of this program.

Are we presenting new challenges for businesses? You mean, like, talking amongst ourselves in a very public way about how you should quit screwing us over, a la Comcast Must Die or bloggers telling Target what sucks?

Well, that’s not my primary interest anyway (though if Bob Garfield is at all successful in making Comcast less obnoxious, God bless him). Let’s see what the Press Club has to say this month about journalistic practices on the blogosphere. I missed the original panel on this subject, but they were nice enough to me and Griftdrift during our panel last month. Things might not be so quiet this time around, though, as I know Spacey has a tyrannosaurus-sized bone to pick with one particular member of the local media who has yet to embrace any sources within the digerati.

Point being, if you want to see a journo-media girl fight, stay tuned to Twitter for news of a live feed from the N95.

We can hope, anyway. Otherwise it’s just gonna be a boring hour or so of watching some guy with a Technorati rank of 9 million (wonder what it was before this panel brought him his third link?) fight for attention on the panel.

I made sure not to shave for 3 days and dress for lab work today so I look extra unethical.