On the drive from Minneapolis to Fort Wayne, IN today, I had a short discussion
with Jeremy where we discussed the
declining
circulation numbers of the
Minneapolis
Star Tribune, the largest daily newspaper in Minnesota.



When I look at large dailies, the biggest problem I see is summarized by rew in
the comments on MNSpeak:

I’m not interested in wire stories in my local daily since it’s redundant
content to me. I’ve already read it online.



I look to my local paper for local information. In the case of the Minneapolis
paper, I read local news, sports, business, events, and opinions. I tend to skip
national and international news, since I get that type of news from other
sources (usually online, and before the paper arrives), and I turn to
yet
additional
sources for
hyper-local news, such as neighborhood newspapers.



The trend here is a diversification of news sources based on interest. In the
above example, the diversification is based on geographic relevancy of content,
but the same things happens regarding depth of news coverage.



One area where I’m particularly surprised by the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s
behavior is their handling of restaurant reviews. They’ve recently scaled back
the number of restaurant reporters working for the paper. Restaurant reviews are
exactly the type of content local newspapers should be able to dominate at. A
database of professional reviews of local restaurants is extraordinarily hard to
replicate. And the reviews are extraordinarily relevant to the appropriate
market.



However, as I thought about it more, it dawned on me that the largest growth
areas for daily papers in the Twin Cities are the suburbs. And suburbs don’t
have restaurants worth reviewing. It’s not like you’re going to send a reporter
out to the latest TGI Friday’s or Applebee’s in the 3rd ring suburb to compare
it to the TGI Friday’s or Applebee’s in the first and second ring ‘burbs.



Maybe newspapers are just following the money to the burbs and abandoning the
foodies in the urban core?



In response, the urban core is taking care of itself by blogging their own
restaurant reviews. Here are a few examples:

• The
  Skeptical Diner: Fogo de Ch√£o
• Lakeshore
  Grll Review
• Il
  Vesco Vino: Good for a glass of wine and an appetizer
• Fugaise
  - A Real Diamond
• JP‚Äôs
  American Bistro – Minneapolis MN

If people are passionate enough to write about an issue, they’re certainly
passionate enough to read about it. In fact, they’d probably write about what
they read.



Do you think restaurant reviews an important piece of locally produced newspaper content?

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New products and services for bringing television to the Internet are appearing
every day.  This week’s new entries include two with very similar sounding
names –
Vudu and
Zattoo.  The former is a Silicon Valley startup building a box very similar
to the Apple TV but driven by a peer-to-peer network.  Vudu has reportedly
cut distribution deals with all the major movie studios with the exception of
Fox (by far the most technically conservative company) and will be offering
primarily movies when it launches later this year.  Notice I didn’t say
“movie downloads,” because what Vudu does certainly includes the distribution of
digital content, but it isn’t in a strict sense “downloading” since the end-user
doesn’t come away with a true copy of the movie unless they point a camcorder at
the TV screen.  This is the feature that evidently appealed to the studios.



Vudu, led by the very impressive Alain Rossmann (who did most of the actual work
of Apple Evangelism in the early Macintosh days when Guy Kawasaki was getting
all the press) sells a closed box that connects to  a television, not a PC,
and is therefore supposed to be more secure.  The only things that appear
to be missing from the product are live programming  and true HD content
(the box apparently uses line-doubling techniques to scale SD content up to HD
resolutions), which isn’t as good as real HD.



But the most impressive aspect of Vudu isn’t the box, itself, but the fact that
the company managed to raise $21 million and spend two years in development yet
hardly anyone (including Microsoft and me) had heard of it until this past
weekend.  How do you do five movie studio deals without anyone noticing?



Zattoo, on the
other hand is a service, not a product, and appears to be like NeoKast — a
peer-to-peer distribution system offering live content and promising publishers
a 10-fold improvement in bandwidth utilization.  The service is presently
available only in Switzerland, Denmark, and shortly in the UK, but is planned
for a global roll-out.  Here is an early look at Zattoo from a Swiss nerd
who has been playing with the service:



“Firstly, the don’t have, nor have they indicated any plans to create a
publisher client. So, all streams are generated by Zattoo. This limits their
ability to serve large numbers of smaller broadcasters.  It is doubtful
that you’ll distribute your webcam through Zattoo. Secondly, their protocol
efficiency is in question. Although I ran tests on their client with several
users I noticed little to no sharing. This means that they are not significantly
more cost-effective or scalable than other CDN-based solutions. Thirdly, there
are some questions about their latency. They claim it is very low and they
stream live, but simultaneous tests indicated significantly different delivery
times. This means that packets delivered at time X to one user are delivered at
time X+Y to another user, where Y is substantial (even up to 20 seconds). This
unpredictability indicates their protocol does not respond efficiently in
real-time to current network conditions.”



Yeah, well it IS beta code, so what do you expect?



Whatever its efficiencies, Zattoo is shaking-up the market everywhere it has so
far appeared.



Of course the big boost to TV over the Internet will reportedly come when
Joost, from
the founders of Kazaa and Skype, leaves beta and becomes broadly
available.  The company has lined up an impressive list of broadcast
partners.  Based on the same p2p code as Kazaa and Skype, I have no doubt
that it will work, but the question yet to be answered about Joost is how much
damage will it do in the process of working.  Skype, for example, is a
notorious abuser of bandwidth privileges.  Joost is supposed to be better
than Skype in this regard, but Joost and Skype have the same p2p code
base.  These facts are inconsistent, and with the vastly larger bandwidth
footprint of one-to-many video versus one-to-one audio, the impact of Joost is
likely to be 10-100 times as great as Skype.  It should be interesting…..

 

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Technology Evangelist is covering the 2007 Killer App Expo in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We are not only bringing our standard 1080p high-definition gear but we’re also streaming the event LIVE! On Monday, April 30th we’ll be driving from Minneapolis, MN to Fort Wayne, Indiana with our cameras and EVDO access in the truck. You can watch the entire ride down, assuming there’s enough upload bandwidth on our WAN cards. On Tuesday and Wednesday we’ll be streaming our interviews live from the show floor all throughout the day. Make sure to check back often to see updates, HD videos and live streams.

For the latest status make sure to subscribe to the Technology Evangelist twitter account. We’ll let you know what live interviews are coming up and the status of the trip. Should be a ton of fun!

The experience begins below with our UStream.tv feed. Make sure to join the conversation by jumping over to the UStream.tv Technology Evangelist page and jumping in to the chat. If you prefer run a IRC chat client you can join us in chat1.ustream.tv in room #technology-evangelist. We love to chat and we’re stuck in the truck for over 10 hours. Please help us keep our sanity by joining the IRC chat room!

UStream.tv stream removed and sent to top of page.

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The Technology Evangelist team will be driving to Fort Wayne, Indiana for the Killer App Expo on Monday and streaming the car ride via UStream.tv. This will be an interesting experiment to see how well EVDO and Ustream.tv can deal with a cross-country drive. I’m thinking bandwidth won’t go so well, but we’ll see (that 1xRTT coverage is going to hurt us pretty bad). While we’re at it I thought I would mention the technology we are using to make this all happen. This is one huge test, and the tech that goes behind it is… interesting. To stay up to date with everything we have going on, subscribe to our Technology Evangelist twitter account at http://twitter.com/te.

We start with a Logitech QuickCam Ultra Vision. This is mounted on the dashboard of the car and pointed back to the passengers. The camera is offset towards the passenger side of the vehicle since the driver should be concentrating on driving, not video streaming. From there the camera is plugged into a MacBook Pro in the back seat via a USB extension cable. We use a program called CamTwist to add the lower third banners as well as switch between the USB camera and the built in iSight. This switching allows us to have a conversation in the front or back of the vehicle without having to bring an expensive hardware video switcher. CamTwist also allows us to roll in video segments while we’re stopped or simply don’t want to chat.

Steve, the author of CamTwist was nice enough to write a quick Quartz effect that allows me to bring in a scrolling RSS feed and place it anywhere on the screen. If you have CamTwist 1.3 and would like to add this functionaltiy you can download the effect here. Simply place the file in your ‘effects’ folder beneath the CamTwist application (/Applications/CamTwist/Effects for most users). Click on ‘File’ then ‘Refresh Effects list’ in CamTwist and you should see a new effect called ‘RSS Ticker’. Add the RSS feed of your Twitter account and you’ll find all your scrolling info from twitter on the screen. Uber cool! When you’re broadcasting live on UStream.tv select the ‘CamTwist’ input under your camera option. This is what will allow UStream.tv to see all the effects you have added to CamTwist. Frankly this is one of the coolest pieces of software I have seen in a long time and I would encourange everyone to help Steve out in any way possible so we can continue to see great developments come from this. I should mention that Steve wrote a quick build update for me to help with a glitch in USB cameras, so we’re running a build not avialable on the web site. When Steve updates the CamTwist software (after some more testing) it will include this USB camera fix as well as the RSS ticker by default.

Audio is messy. The MacBook Pro has a built in Mic which seems to work great, but it’s only going to be good for the rear passenger. The front passenger would have to use the mic built in to the Logitech cam. And what about the audio from the videos we want to roll in? To deal with all this we have a copy of Audio Hijack Pro which will re-route the audio to a virtual mixer called Soundflower. I hijack the mics I want to use, re-route them all to Soundflower. I then take the system output and re-route that to Soundflower too. This means that any mic coming in to the system as well as any noise the computer makes (such as a QuickTime video playing) will all go to Soundflower. From there I simply select Soundflower 16 as the input source in the UStream.tv broadcast window and we’re golden! The problem I’m seeing so far is that the audio off the Logitech mic has a lot of noise in it whereas the audio from the MacBook Pro’s mic is very, very clean. Need to figure out what’s wrong with the Logitech audio before I can roll that in to the mix. My fall back plan is to have a cheap Mackie 1202 mixer next to the MacBook Pro that’s broadcasting, and use our wireless lapel mics that we have for the HD video cameras. Not as sexy, but video is 80% audio and that may help us if we can’t get the Logitech mic to work.

Bandwidth will be tricky. I have an ExpressCard|34 EVDO Rev A from Sprint in my MacBook Pro. This will auto-detect the fastest network. I fear that most of the ride will be 1xRTT and that won’t have nearly enough upload speed for UStream.tv. Heck straight EVDO hardly has enough. I’m not sure how well that will work out, but stick with us as we try and push WAN technology to its limit!

We have a lot of hacks and beta software in the mix here, but it should be a load of fun! Make sure to follow us on Twitter and watch the UStream.tv feed whenever available. We’ll also be lurking in the UStream.tv IRC chat room at chat1.ustream.tv in room #technology-evangelist.

Oh, and this is what the back looks like after we put the HD video gear in, but before our luggage. Cool.

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Facebook
recently announced a few changes to their status update system that closely
replicate Twitter’s
offering:

• Your friends’ three most recent updates on the
  home
  page
• A
  brand
  new page to see all your friends’ updates at once
• An RSS feed to put your friends’ updates in your reader of choice
• The ability to subscribe to a friend’s updates via
  SMS
• The ability to easily update status from your phone by
  sending
  an SMS to Facebook starting with the “@” character

Among my non-Twitter converted friends, the toughest group to convert after
Luddites is Facebook users. Their basic response is, “Why would I need a service
like Twitter do do what I already do with Facebook?” That together with, “all of
my friends are on Facebook, so what do I need Twitter for?” are the two most
common push backs.



When I look at Twitter, I see a crowd who was out of college before Facebook
came along. They see Twitter as a cool service, but only because they weren’t
already locked into Facebook through years of network building.



Considering that Facebook offers even more Twitter-like functionality in the
form of SMS subscriptions and status updates, their case for standardizing on
Facebook appears to be even stronger.

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Whenever I’m at a real estate conference, I suggest to agents that they should
consider starting a blog as a marketing tool. And there are usually a handful of
businesses on hand who specialize in managing blogs for real estate
professionals, so getting started is just a matter of signing up at one of the
booths.



However, what’s often missed is what to blog about. The impression I get is that
inexperienced real estate bloggers think they need to write marketing-type
content on their yet-to-launch blog, much like they’d write for a brochure,
postcard, or other form of print advertising.



When it comes to blogging, this would be a terrible mistake. A successful blog
generates loyal readers who subscribe to your content. A successful blog’s
content is quoted by other bloggers. Neither of those will happen with content
that’s making a pitch about how great the real estate agent is.



So, what works? Providing valuable information that demonstrates your expertise.
Don’t market yourself. Helpful posts written by content experts prove that
you’re an expert without coming out and directly saying it.



Here is an example of this type of writing from a mortgage broker based in
Minneapolis named Alex Stenback. He runs a blog called Behind The Mortgage where
he writes about the Minneapolis / St. Paul real estate market, interest rate
fluctuations, and other things real estate finance related that may be of
interest to his readers. In the post quoted below, he explains the dangers of
option-ARMs for people with poor credit:



Despite
Concern, Lenders Still Pushing Option ARMS

These loans, in
our view, are suitable for a only very small slice of the borrowing public;
specifically, those of very high credit quality with high net worth, who use it
as a tool to manage cash flow. An option-ARM should NEVER be used simply to be
able to afford a mortgage that under normal circumstances would be out of reach;
that is just stupid and asking for disaster.

Options-ARMs is a
topic he clearly knows something about, being in the industry. His post provides
valuable information to his readers, and he shares his professional opinion
about who this type of financing may be appropriate for. What he doesn’t do is
directly pitch his readers on why he’s the guy to call for your next home
finance transaction. And why should he? The content of the post speaks for
itself without blatant self-promotion.



In the case of real estate agents, things like market reports, updates on local
developments, real estate finance and opinions on other local real estate news
would set you apart from other agents in your market. By proving your expertise
on a blog, you’ll get more phone calls from highly qualified buyers and sellers,
more referrals from agents who get to know and trust you through your blog, and
possibly more media mentions from local reports who know they can turn to you
for a quote when writing on a subject you’ve previously shown an interest in.



Picking a blogging platform is the easy part. Picking appropriate content to
write about and actually doing it is the challenge.

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Fashion may not be a topic you would think goes with Technology, but that is exactly why we feel we need to bring it up. Our new feature, Fashion Friday, addresses fashion for the tech set.