It’s one of the cardinal rules of startup life: stick to your knitting. Don’t get distracted by all the cool things you could do, at the expense of the thing you already do well.
At Xconomy, we’ve followed that rule pretty well: We’re journalists who write about technology and entrepreneurship for a living, and we publish text, lots of it. Beyond the occasional in-line photo or slide show, we haven’t ventured much into multimedia. We don’t produce a daily podcast, we don’t stream our conferences and events live on the Web, and we don’t have a TV studio in the back room, like TechCrunch or CNET.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy audio and video content, or that we don’t think from time to time about how our form of journalism might translate into other media. My recent cross-country drive from Boston to the Bay Area gave me a perfect excuse to start experimenting in this area, starting with video blogging. In today’s column—the first written from my new home base in San Francisco, and my 100th overall—I thought I’d talk a little about that experience, with an emphasis on some of the technical lessons I’m learning.
If you haven’t seen the video series, which we called “World Wide Wade Goes West,” after the title of this weekly column, you can check it out at our YouTube channel, youtube.com/xconomywest. You can also view the individual videos here at Xconomy, including the pilot/preview video; Episode I: Gloucester, MA; Episode II: Rochester, NY; Episode III: Who’s Wade?; Episode IV: Torch Lake, MI; Episode V: Minneapolis, MN; Episode VI: Wall, SD; and Episode VII: Denver, CO.
The idea for the videos was really a by-product of the decision to drive across the country, which was the most practical way to get both my car and my 13-year-old dog Rhody out to California. Once I did the driving-distance calculations and realized that it would be inadvisable to try to complete the drive in less than a week, I had to come up with a way to generate my share of content for Xconomy San Francisco while I was in transit. The trip itself seemed like perfect fodder. We knew we’d be stopping along the way in a variety of places that, to many businesspeople on the East and West Coasts, are simply “flyover country.” So it seemed like a great opportunity to bring along a video camera and get perspectives from real people in middle America about technology trends.
We figured we’d ask our interviewees about the same technologies that innovators in Boston or San Francisco are immersed in every day, but seek out the unvarnished perspectives of these technologies’ real users and consumers, rather than the inevitably myopic viewpoints of their creators. We also hoped to get a read on the conditions for business and entrepreneurship in various regions of the country.
When I say “we,” I mean myself and my co-pilot and collaborator on the trip, Graham Gordon Ramsay. One of my oldest friends in Boston, Graham is an author, educator, composer, and photographer who has been exploring videography lately as part of his teaching at MIT’s Experimental Study Group. He knows his way around a video camera, and even more important, he’s got a working knowledge of Final Cut Pro, the video editing software package made by Apple. He was the videographer and editor for all of the videos. I was the writer, interviewer, and on-air talent.
You can judge for yourself whether we succeeded in our mission to gather some fresh perspectives on high-tech trends and the state of entrepreneurship—and I’ll share a few of my own observations about that soon. But in case you’re curious about the technology behind the project itself, here’s the rundown. We used a Canon Vixia HF-R100 high-definition digital camcorder to
