immateriblog.de

Mobile reporting can be a frustrating experience. The worst part is lack of connectivity. G3 is just not fast enough to make uploading video files and even audio files a worthwhile experience, and when travelling the signal is to unstable to do anything other than checking email (with a client, no web mail) and Twittering.

Technical difficulties add to the problem: my – very interesting – short Audioboo interview with Thomas H. Kaspar, Executive Editor for Community at Chip, a community with 1.5 million members and outlets in more than 10 European countries and India, vanished from the face of the earth without the option to make a backup before publication. And the Qik videos my colleague Van from Vietnam supposedly live streamed this morning during our visit to jetzt.de never showed up on the website. I have no idea where they went.

During the session with Jochen the mic didn’t work but checking the sound was impossible because the phones outlet refused to provide anything but noise. So I found out afterwards that we cannot use it. The Zoom recorder switched itself off towards the end of the session with Thomas and right at the beginning of the session with Dirk von Gehlen at jetzt.de, even though I had just replaced the batteries. Luckily, Lauben noticed and let me know immediately. And finally, when editing in Audacity, the project crashed and ate up all the work in such a sophisticated a way it even made it impossible to recover the saved sessions.

So that’s probably one of the reasons why Twitter has become so successful: very short messages, very reliable (ok, when their server’s up) and just very fast. So have a peek at the IIJ’s Twitter feed (also in the right hand column on this site) and try to derive whether we had a good time or not.

Ok, I’ll give it away: we had a very good time. Talking to Thomas Kaspar saved every participant a couple of thousand Euros in consulting fees (have a look at a presentation very similar to the one he gave us, also available as a combined presentation/podcast but watch out, it’s big), and Dirk amplified Thomas’s words by giving us some good examples of the idea that journalism nowadays needs to be a conversation rather than a lecture. So some very nice discussions for us, but not to lot to show.