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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.

It really was information overload for a day and a half at the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Georgia Tech. I think everybody left with something to chew on and quite a bit of excitement for the uncertain and promising future of the field. Here’s Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation, Lila King of CNN and iReport.com, and Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, with a quick closing from an undoubtedly exhausted conference chair, Irfan Essa.

Quicktime source.

Way, way after the fact I thought I’d make note of some other Super Tuesday on MTV coverage on the internet.

• Local lifestyle e-zine eLife Magazine did a well-produced video piece on my role in MTV’s Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08, in which I spout buckets of horse manure about the youth vote when suddenly cornered on topics outside of the scope of what I was expecting to talk about. With only 12 YouTube views in the 8 days it’s been up, it should make all my fellow Street Teamers feel better about not having a firm grasp on our own viewership statistics. Still, it’s some pretty good video work by the interviewer, even if the web designer follows an odd practice of only color-coding URLs cited and not actually hyperlinking them to the target website.
  
• MobileActive.org is a very cool site for anyone who’s interested in the impact cellular phones have on social change, politics, and journalism. Naturally, they were pretty psyched about mobile handsets being used to cover Super Tuesday, and I was pretty psyched that Corrine didn’t use any of the buckets of horse manure that similarly spewed forth when I was on the phone with her (I blame it on my blog having just crashed, on the night before our big citJ extravaganza).

Other commentators on the project generally:

• Socialtimes.com thought this was yet another example of MTV pushing the edge of media even though that means they don’t so much play music videos anymore.
• ReadWriteWeb called it a coup for citizen journalism even though MTV’s previous technovation with Twitter was unimpressive.
• Michael Connery over at FutureMajority.com seemed a little underwhelmed with our cameraphoning skillz, but I’m a little underwhelmed with the comment traffic there, so no skin off our noses. And furthermore, pbbbbbbbbbbbt.
• Mark Hopkins at Mashable.com was “cautiously optimistic” and raised some interesting legal concerns among other things.

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.

Yeah, yeah, it’s super duper pooper scooper Tuesday, and we’re all very excited.

Well, if you’re not, go watch me occasionally at Choose or Lose dot com or even the big important MTV News main page, and maybe that’ll light the fire in your little voter-pants.

C’mon, I’m wearin’ my spiffy hat.

Just some video niblets to flesh out last week’s OMGNokia woody.

I never officially told the non-blog-reading YouTube subscribers about my new gig, so forgive the intro; but here is a little look at the N95 I get to borrow for the next couple days:

I’ve been messing around with the Flixwagon video streaming application to see what it’s capable of, and I can definitely live with it. There used to be another Symbian handset-based live streaming application floating around out there that I heard of from time to time, but a quick scan of the Googles isn’t refreshing my memory. So for now, it seems my two main choices for video streaming from the N95 are Flixwagon and the more talked about Qik. Neither is perfect, but I think Qik has a slight edge in features for now. Qik will apparently automatically Twitter your friends when you start a live broadcast, and it will also cross-publish the live video to Mogulus, a multi-videographer publishing platform from which you can assemble a whole team of reporters into one video stream.

Both Qik and Flixwagon have a chat window available through which your viewers can send you questions and comments while you are broadcasting. Too bad for MTV News fans, though, the Flixwagon commenting feature is not enabled for our Super Tuesday coverage, but that’ll be a key feature for the future full launch of Flixwagon once they’re out of alpha phase. And both Qik and Flixwagon have audio defects, in addition to being generally thin and tinny due to bandwidth constraints (the standard Ustream settings were the same way, unless you cranked up the sampling to 44 kHz); which additional defect is more annoying is up to the individual’s taste, I guess. All the videos of the WEF I watched on Qik have a crackle in the sound, like the input gain was set too high. Flixwagon, on the other hand, has a slight but frustrating time lag in the audio somewhere between a half and a whole second. As far as post-broadcast editing of footage for use on the network, the time-lag is far less of a nuisance to MTV, and anyone else interested in re-mixing recorded video, than the audible crackle would be: you can fix the delay in the editing, but the crackle is there to stay. Flixwagon has the edge over Qik there.

The N95 itself is capable of sweet video, though, so if quality is a premium over immediacy, it’d be well worth recording a video locally and uploading it over a 3G network to Blip.tv, which sadly isn’t part of the pre-installed upload connections on the phone (Flickr and Vox for starters…seriously, Vox?). The audio is pretty rich for a handset, and the video — well, just have a look for yourself.

Stay tuned tomorrow.

Hot off the MTV wire:

MTV’s Street Team ‘08 Has Super Tuesday Covered With Blogs, Video, Photos

Real-time reports will stream live online from citizen journalists representing 23 states holding primaries or caucuses that day.

On Tuesday — the Super-est Tuesday of the year — voters in 23 states will head to the polls to cast their votes, and 23 members of our intrepid Street Team ‘08 will be there.

Our enterprising citizen journalists will be on the ground, at the polling stations, caucus sites and candidate rallies, bringing you up-to-the minute news as it happens. The candidates aren’t going to be stopping on Super Tuesday, and our reporters won’t stop either.

Their real-time reports will be streamed live all day on MTVNews.com and ChooseOrLose.com, and throughout the day, MTV will break into regularly scheduled programming to showcase news featurettes and live reports from our Street Teamers.

Yeah, big deal, more live news, right? Hang on, here comes the OMGNokia part:

Armed with Nokia N95 mobile devices, laptops and video cameras, our embedded reporters will be bringing you the action from the 23 states holding primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday, and you will be able to follow along with an interactive map on MTV News’ and Choose or Lose’s sites. Each Street Teamer will also be blogging throughout the day on ChooseOrLose.com. An innovative application, provided by Flixwagon, powers the mobile-broadcasting technology by allowing anyone with a capable 3G phone to stream live video to the Internet and store it for later viewing.

That’s right: for a whole, crazy day, I get to fondle and drool all over a Nokia N95. And then, I get to cry all over the return envelope, ’cause it ain’t mine to keep. Alas.

So, what Robert Scoble and others pioneered at the World Economic Forum in Davos (using another company, Qik), MTV will be bringing you 23 times over on Super Tuesday. We will be covering election events all over the country, live, archived, and re-mixed, using nothing but a palm-sized smartphone — no laptop-webcam-backpack assembly required like I took to Iowa.

I will do my damnedest to let any interested parties know when I will start live-streaming (so you don’t have to sit, stare, and hit Refresh or anything) via Twitter, and if you really just don’t want to be my Twitter pal, you can track the hashtag #streetteam08, which I will hopefully remember to auto-add to each tweet. If you want to watch the other 22 Street Teamers, you’re going to have to do that the old fashioned way; I seem to be the only one of us 51 CJ’s that actually uses, or cares to use, Twitter, even though it’s apparently becoming recommended practice for journalists avoiding extinction.