Five tips for on-location podcast recording, via Mark Moran, news director for NPR’s public radio affiliate in Phoenix:

1. In every environment where you do an interview, just switch on your recorder and get 15-30 seconds of ambient sound at that location.
2. Ask for your subject’s name and title at the top of the interview.
3. Include your voice only if you’re asking a question or making an important clarification.
4. Think with your ears.
5. Avoid yes/no questions. It’s helpful to direct your interview subject to answer questions in sentence format and in a declarative way.

via BusinessJournalism.org; image: John Oxton

This video captures a demo of a Sin City style motion magazine feature about “Your Worst Sex Fears”, created for Viv Mag – an all digital magazine.

The demo, by Alexx Henry, Cory Strassburger and Ming Hsiun, is another example of how designers are re-imagining magazines for the iPad and other tablet computers.

It’s an interesting demo.

But like most of the other futuristic magazine concepts we’ve seen, the focus seems to be on eye candy – on how the magazine should look.

Publishers are going to have to do more than sprinkle designs with eye candy if they want their magazines to survive. They’re going to have to re-imagine what a periodical is – and figure out how to make periodicals relevant in the context of the Web.

Adobe already has trouble on its hands over Apple’s decision to not support Flash on the iPhone and the iPad – and the general public’s “meh” response.

Now Adobe’s got bigger Flash problems.

The Open Video Alliance, which includes Mozilla, Kaltura, Miro, and Yale Law School, are joining forces to bring video to Wikipedia – Flash-free.

Today, the Open Video Alliance launched a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia:

• They’ve published a tutorial on How to Post a Video to Wikipedia;
• They’re supporting a number of community-based projects to support collaborative work; and
• They’re working with Participatory Culture Foundation to release a free video conversion app for Mac and Windows.

Unfortunately for Adobe, though, the projects are all based around the open standards HTML 5 + Theora.

While the popularity of Apple’s devices is marginalizing Flash, Apple is at the leading/bleeding edge.

As Google, YouTube and now Wikipedia commit to supporting open video, the days of Flash being the de facto standard for Internet video are numbered.

YouTube released a mind-boggling statistic today – users are now uploading 24 hours worth of video every minute.

This is up 20% from May of last year, when YouTube announced they were getting 20 hours of video uploaded every minute.

Microblogging site Tumblr has announced plans to make video sharing “crazy simple”.

According to Tumblr:

We’ll be rolling out crazy simple native video uploading to all accounts.

This is designed to be an easy alternative to full-blown video sites when all you want to do is post a quick video to your blog.

Tumblr notes these features & limitations:

• You can upload up to 5 minutes of video every day. You can break this up across many videos.
• Tumblr will immediately post most H.264-MP4-AAC videos without transcoding, including Photo Booth videos and iMovie’s “Export to iPod/iPhone”.

If you’re looking to post longer videos, customize your player, or host HD videos, Tumblr recommends using Vimeo or other full-featured video sharing site.

Blogging – and new media in general – has often been criticized as being derivative.

Here are some stats, via the Nieman Journalism Lab, that may put that criticism in perspective:

• 9 out of ten mainstream news stories are copied. In the stories analyzed (from publications like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The New York Times and NPR) only 11 percent contained some amount of original reporting.
• Only six percent were primarily based on original reporting.
• 12 of the new stories mentioned no source or did provide attribution.
• Google News ranks original reporting fairly high in its list. Google says they rank stories based on criteria such as the reputation of a source, number of references by other articles, and the headline clickthrough rate and this appears to work fairly well.

As people ponder the fate of news organizations, these sort of statistics are going to become extremely important.

If 9 out of 10 mainstream news stories are basically copies, there’s a massive opportunity to do things more efficiently.

And the ubiquity and instantaneousness of the Internet are forcing the issue – hard.

Image: Explorer Björn

Web video distribution and analytics TubeMogul today introduced PlayTime, a new Internet video ad platform that they call “the advertising industry’s first 100 percent transparent video ad network.”

According to TubeMogul, PlayTime delivers unprecedented transparency, by letting advertisers compare performance metrics across placements in real-time.

“PlayTime is essentially AdSense for brand advertisers, bringing the performance metrics of search to online video advertising for the first time,” says TubeMogul’s Brett Wilson.

With TubeMogul PlayTime, advertisers can know:

• what sites Internet video ad views are coming from and in what numbers,
• whether views are click-to-play or auto-play,
• how long viewers watch before clicking away,
• what search terms they are using to find a video, and
• whether the video is shared or embedded

This data is presented in a self-serve dashboard for advertisers, with tools for export, sharing and collaboration.

The number of unique viewers of online video increased 10.5% year-over-year, according to The Nielsen Company. While still impressive numbers, the explosive growth of a few years ago appears to be gone, replaced by slower, but still respectable organic growth.

Other highlights of Nielsen’s stats:

• People are watching more video – the number of streams watched is growing faster than the number of views;
• People are spending more time with online video – time per viewer grew 7%; and
• People are spending more time with long-form videos, time at Hulu is up and down at YouTube.

Details below.

The Government Accountability Office has introduce a podcast that highlights its recent investigations.

GAO’s Watchdog Report features five-minute interviews with auditors and investigators on new investigations.

“Podcasting enhances the service GAO provides to Congress and the public by offering an alternative means for people to learn about significant issues and new GAO reports and testimonies,”said Gene L. Dodaro, head of the GAO.

iTunes alternative doubleTwist has been updated with podcast support.

doubleTwist users can now subscribe to podcasts, search for new shows and  sync those podcasts to a variety of media players.

Other updates:

• library sorting issues fixed (sort by original track number)
• id3 tag discovery and display enhancement — not a full featured id3 tag editor but progress has been made on a more stable display of id3 tag info from iTunes and WMP media.
• Support for networked drives added
• Status and progress of application loading (status of iTunes, WMP scanning, playlists importing)
• ability to reload iTunes and/or WMP playlists at each launch
• Ability to not scan iTunes for changes at each launch