A little over 5 years ago I wrote two posts titled “Winds of change” (I and II). The first post highlighted a video from Kodak titled “Winds of Change“. The video has since been removed by the user who posted it, so I’m republishing it below because it was terrific then and it still is terrific. And now at the same time tragic as well. Kodak declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week. They exuded confidence 5 years ago that they were going to conquer this digital thing. Heck, they invented the first digital camera! But, obviously they didn’t conquer it – at least not in their current form. Kodak is one of the true icons of American culture. Kodachrome is lauded in song, and phrases like “Kodak picture” and “Kodak moment” are still used today. Even though when those phrases were coined it referred to film.

The second “Winds of Change” post was about Windows Vista, which I still argue was better than its predecessor Windows XP. But I wouldn’t ask my worst enemy to use it now. However, Microsoft is in a go-either-way position right now. Many are starting to write them off as has-beens. Others are saying just wait, it’s Microsoft’s year. Microsoft can keep trudging along for years before they are in Kodak’s position, but they do need to start innovating again.

The point of this post was originally to just get you to watch the Kodak video again. But it’s also a helpful reminder of many things. First, things change. Constantly. No revelation here. How we manage the change will determine our success. I’m managing some change in my life right now. Some days are better than others. I’m also embarking on some new ventures soon. Some that I hope to write about soon. It involves writing, blogging, and posting more content. About stuff that I enjoy. I hope that it spills over into writing more on this site (or at least cross-posting). That would be a change for the better. This first post of the new year is me managing change – better late than never.

Here’s what you need. An iPhone, using its built-in camera. An app called AirMe, which you set up to upload the image you take, to an account of your choice. In our case we use the Flickr service. I’ll talk about the Flickr piece in a moment, but I don’t want to gloss over how AirMe works. I grab the iPhone and start the free AirMe app. It works on top of the camera app and it allows me to take a picture, if I like it I use it, or I retake it. I can also use an image that is already on my iPhone. As long as I’m connected to the AT&T network, it will instantly start uploading. In 30 seconds, give or take, it’s done.

Now it’s available on Flickr. So, similar to the audio recordings on AudioBoo, the image is instantly hosted on a photo sharing site. However, like we also did with AudioBoo we are going to republish it to a WordPress blog automatically. We again employ our good friend FeedWordPress. We use the RSS feed from Flickr using the tag iPhone. In no time at all the image is up on the blog.

I have a preset title of “Latest iPhone Photo” and it posts the thumbnail that links to the Flickr page for the photo.

Caution, of course, needs to be exercised because it will publish whatever photo you send. The current iPhone has even better quality than the one I own, and network coverage is getting better all the time. This will only get better and easier with time. I was hoping to have this procedure worked out in time for my MS Ride this year but . . . better late than never.

Now that I’m on the Mac I have found Blogo. It allows me to do many, if not all of the things that WLW allowed, and does it in the Mac drag-and-drop way. The best feature by far is the support for sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Simply go to the site page that your video or image is on and click the “Send to Blogo” bookmarklet in Safari or Firefox (instructions on how to create the bookmarklet are simple and available from the Help menu). A placeholder image appears in the editor window. You can preview how the video or image will look by using the Preview button. You can then see exactly how things will look in your blog, and then you can make any changes before you publish.

You can also drag-and-drop text from a text editor into Blogo, and you can even add blockquotes easily by highlighting text in a web page and clicking the Send to Blogo bookmarklet (it even includes a link to the source automatically).

Blogo’s interface is designed to let you take your mind off the details and just write.

link: Blogo: The blog editor for your Mac

You can enter tags and/or categories in a post. They are entered into a single field in the editor window, and you distinguish categories from tags by using a hashtag before the category name (ex. #newmedia). It will even pick up your categories from your blog and offer them in a drop down menu.

It can publish to many platforms including Blogger and WordPress, and you can set up multiple accounts to post to. It’s not free like Windows Live Writer ($25 US), but I think it’s quicker and easier, and it produces cleaner code in WordPress. One less reason to miss Windows (that was for the Bava).

July 2004 – First blog set up – awrush.com (now a legal search consultant website) at bloghosts.com (no longer hosting blogs).

August 2, 2004 – First official post. I mention that our new hosting service is like being a kid in the candy room at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. The rest of August I’m learning new terms like wiki and RSS and getting addicted to learning it all.

October 2004 – The name is official And He Blogs.

December 2004 – Goodbye Bloghosts. Hello Bluehost.

March 2005 – Very much in the Windows world, I rig up a podcast-catching machine by using a Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC combined with the Doppler software and inspired by this article. (Now, in July of 2009, I discover that Doppler is an RSS reader for the iPhone and it might well be my go-to program).

Late March 2005 – The MediaBlog begins its experiment.

Memorial Day 2005 – My first MoBlog (mobile blog) post, and then my first post about my first MoBlog post.

June 21, 2005 – The And He Blogs WordPress era begins.

January 29, 2006 – ELI Conference in San Diego. Lots of Web 2.0′wy stuff there.

April 2006 – Easy, Free, Videoblogging.

December 2006 – Udell. Microsoft. Bwah???

February 2007 was a good month, including YouTube in MediaWiki. Also, discovered one of the most important thinkers of web 2.0 academia – Michael Wesch.

April 2007 – The Bliki – AKA Play Misty For Me.

May 2007 – Somewhere around here I entered the Twitter era.

September 2007 – Microsoft Live Writer makes blogging easy, but ultimately just creates ugly code for blogs – think Microsoft Word web pages.

June 2008 – Edupunk? Seriously???

July 2008 – TweetDeck. Yeah, it was important!

December 2008 – What’s better than YouTube? YouTube in HD!

March 2009 – Mobile Computing. Demonstrating educational uses of the iPhone.

June 2009 – The New Media presentation of my lifetime, and instant mobile podcasting.

July 2009 – Is technology so ubiquitous that we’re bored with it?

I was getting nostalgic about my blogs (as nostalgic as I can get with something that started in 2004). I wondered how I could get an easy view of my blog posts, and review where I had gone over the last 5 years. I decided to use a plugin that I used at the New Media Center website called Dagon Sitemap Generator. Anyway, I stumbled upon a post from March 2005 called GroundhogChase.com. It wasn’t the site that I had originally blogged about. It was and is a site produced by the Pennsylvania Tourism Office, but the videos have been updated (in 2006 maybe?). It’s a whole remake of The Shining, with Groundhogs! It’s brilliant!

Now go see the site Groundhog 202. Any Shining fan will laugh out loud, especially the scene where “Wendy” interrupts “Jack” while typing out his “novel”. Why didn’t this get more play. Thanks to my blog, it will now.

I did find the original videos that were there back in the day. It was a series of 8 or so videos complete with both endings – if the groundhog saw his shadow, or not. Here it is in one all-encompassing video from YouTube:

Good stuff, but the update is fantastic!

AudioBoo Screenshot

I’m still not sure about this Internet time thing, but I think it was yesterday morning that Patrick asked me if I saw Cole’s post about mobile podcasting in regards to Penn State’s iTunesU setup. Since then I’ve gone from light-bulb going off, to frustration and the cursing of Atom feeds, to scaring Jim Groom that FeedWordPress was being broken (more about FWP later), to jubilation that the complete instant mobile blogging solution exists with an iPhone and UMW Blogs!

Sound intriguing? I think it’s a pretty big deal. As Cole says the “iTunes ecosystem” is coming together nicely, however, we at UMW do things in a “small pieces loosely joined” kind of way. This “ecosystem” is no exception. The epicenter of this instant mobile blogging system is a service called AudioBoo. They host the audio files, which are up to 5 minutes in length (so complete hour-long lectures are not feasible here). The other component of the AudioBoo service is the iPhone App (link is to the iTunes store). Essentially you start the app, hit the record button then hit Start, record your audio then hit Pause and then Publish. You have the option to include a single picture and the app will also geo-locate where you are recording from. After a short wait you have a page in your My Boos page that contains all those elements – recording, picture, and map.

Now we could just call it a day right here, because anyone can subscribe to the iTunes feed by clicking the button on the page where the recording lives. There is also an RSS feed button (actually an Atom feed) associated with the recordings as well. Now I need to do some additional research to see how many podcatchers out there support Atom feeds, or at least AudioBoo’s Atom feed, but I could not get it to work with Juice, nor could I get it to work with my favorite podcatcher on the iPhone, RSS Player ($0.99 from the iPhone App store). There are then several reasons to press on. One reason is that it would be nice to get a feed working with the RSS Player app because it will allow you to subscribe, with your iPhone, to a podcast feed that isn’t already in the iTunes universe. Yes, the regular desktop version of iTunes lets you subscribe to a podcast by clicking an icon, or pasting in a feed manually. However, the iPhone version of iTunes does not let you do this. Safari on the iPhone does not recognize URLs that begin with itpc:// and there is no place you can paste in a manual feed. RSS Player allows you to enter a feed manually, and if you create a feed with the prefix rssplayer:// you can create a link (or a linked image/button) to start the RSS Player app automatically from the iPhone’s Safari web browser.

The other reason we want to go a bit further is to re-publish the audio files in a space (or spaces) of our choosing, like say UMW Blogs. This is where Mr. Groom’s bestest, most favoritest WordPress plugin, FeedWordPress comes in. What we do with FeedWordPress is syndicate the Atom feed from AudioBoo into a WordPress blog. That will pass to the blog the author information, the picture, and the audio file. A nice Flash audio player allows the visitor to play the file from the blog. Setting FeedWordPress to publish “automatically” and “ASAP” allows us instantaneous (or virtually instant) podcasting. There is also a link to the nice AudioBoo page where you can see the map associated with the recording.

Now we take the RSS feed from the blog and plug that into the RSS Player app, and viola, we again have virtually instantaneous podcast publishing AND receiving. The great thing about the RSS Player approach is that there is no iTunes sync-with-your-desktop step to worry about. Once you refresh RSS Player, the file begins to download directly to the iPhone.

Now is where the imagining begins. For example imagine a class that goes out in the field (Geology, Geography, Biology, History, Historic Preservation, etc.,etc.) and does several recordings, and by the time they get back to class their podcasts are uploaded, published (in two, or more, places), and about to be/already received. This has the obvious side benefit of being drop-dead EASY. There isn’t much of a learning curve here, as long as you don’t need additional editing of the audio files. If you do there are several other audio recording programs available to the iPhone. I’ll be putting some screencasts together of all this stuff, but for now you can enter your weekend knowing that it all works right now, and it’s all very exciting thinking about the possibilities. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: The screencast, Produce an Instant Podcast from an iPhone, is up!