Video blogging tutorials: Johnnie Tech is video blogging short tutorials on how to use Treos. This reminds me of the suggestion Philip Torrone made recently at Bloggercon IV that people share a weekly “how-to” with others.

(Thanks to Robert Scoble.)

Update: Speaking of tutorials, I’ve been experimenting with some Mac-based tools designed for capturing and sharing screencasts. I’m not quite ready for prime time, but I’m going to start posting (not here, but elsewhere) some very short video tutorials related to posting content on Smallbusiness.com, which runs on the not-so-intuitively-user-friendly mediawiki platform. I’m using Snapz Pro X to capture the audio and video and after first thinking I would edit in iMovie, have determined it better to edit in Quicktime Pro. iMovie works fine if you’re shooting digital video, but if your using it to edit Quicktime clips you’ve recorded via Snapz, the clips degrade in resolution when being imported into iMovie. I’m sure there’s a technical reason for this — or, perhaps, I was too impatient to figure out what I was doing wrong — however, the Quicktime Pro version works better for me in creating the simple screencast-type of video that I’m interested in.

Technorati Tags: blogging, vlogging

My Wal-Mart Space: (From AdAge.com) “Desperate to appeal to teens with something other than pencils and backpacks during the crucial back-to-school season, Wal-Mart is launching a highly sanitized, controlled and rather unhip site at walmart.com/schoolyourway.” (or, schoolyourway.walmart.com)

My take space: Dorky, sanitized, controlled and unhip as it may be, Wal-Mart will learn more than other marketers who aren’t trying things like this. (Wait. Was that me who just said something positive about Wal-Mart?).

(BrandNoise)

Futurologist goes way out on a limb: This just in: “Publishers must embrace digital age: “A futurologist has warned the magazine industry that it needs to personalise content, embrace technology and tackle competition from non-traditional publishers to survive in the digital world.”

(Note, I work with a noted futurologist who has been making such wildly outrageous predictions [i.e., 'computers will play a more-and-more important role in our lives in the future'] for years.)

Cool stuff I can do with my phone: I just had one of those “this is the way things should work” experiences. On my first attempt, my PowerBook and Treo 700p connected with one-another via bluetooth — and then allowed me to access the Internet using Sprint’s Ev-DO network, which has a brand name that I can’t recall. In layman’s terms (and I am definitely a layman in these terms), that means I can use my computer to access the web at a decently fast speed (at least at a speed perceivably as fast as the wi-fi I will no longer pay for at the Nashville airport) without having any wires connecting my computer and phone. In theory, I can have web access while in a car (but I promise, not while driving). It certainly means I’ll never pay hotels and airports for wi-fi again. That savings (I’m in 4-8 hotels, airports per month) more than justifies the additional fee I am paying for Ev-DO — such is the way the invisible hand of the market works.

I’m now using Ev-DO for the first time ever to make a post to this blog. Over the coming weeks, I’ll try it out in different places and then make a post about my experience.

(Disclosure: While they are invited to send me free stuff, I actually paid — granted, at a deeply discounted price because of a corporate plan — for my phone and service. In other words, this is a disclosure that I have nothing to disclose.)

Update: Doc Searls has the same phone, but with a different service, and is having a “wait and bitch” situation today due to some false “coverage” claims by his provider. I would feel more pity for him if he weren’t at the beach.

Technorati Tags: puppy, treo700p

Actual office conversation: For some reason I can’t recall, the topic of weekend celebrity sightings came up at the Monday morning meeting at Hammock Publishing in Nashville. I don’t make this stuff up, but the following sounds like dialog from a comic strip:

Person 1: “I saw Nicole and Keith at Starbucks.”

Person 2: “Really, I saw Kid Rock wearing a confederate flag T-shirt riding his motorcycle down Murphy Road.”

Person 3: “I saw the governor of Tennessee, by himself and casually dressed, looking through the magazine section at Davis-Kidd.”

Person 4: “(Country music star)’s son ran over my grandmother’s mailbox.”

Technorati Tags: nashville