Just yesterday I was outside a Dunkin Donuts in Lake Worth Florida with my kids and laughed when I saw the headline on the local newspaper about Twitter’s impact on the current Iranian unrest (pic below). World hangs on every tweet - front page headline Palm Beach Post June 16, 2009 Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a derisive Internet cool kid laugh, or a Twitter early adopter sneer. I was reacting as both participant and observer to the democratizing power of online publishing tools like blogs and Twitter. I was seeing my culture change before my eyes. Fast forward to this coming Friday June 19, 2009 - the iPhone 3G S arrives The iPhone 3G S with it’s high quality video recording and editing could eventually have the same kind of impact on news and communications as Twitter. Millions of people will buy the iPhone 3G S and it’s succesor due out next year. Most will buy the new iPhone with little to no interest in the video capture feature. Millions more will buy successors to the iPhone 3G S from competitors like BlackBerry, Google and Palm that have the same or better video capture and editing features. OK, well maybe not Palm. In 24 months tens of millions of people will be carrying around high quality movie making equipment in their pockets. And we’ll have the wireless infrastructure to upload and share those movies in just a few minutes. Actually, we’ll be able to livestream our video. We’ve already been doing that, it’s just that geeks were the only ones who knew how to and the phones that had the capability were few and far between. This will change because of Apple’s worldwide sales volumes and impact on smartphone competition. This will change because of the iPhone’s ease-of-use and the applications that developers for the iPhone will make in the coming months (not years). This will create a new critical mass of mobile videographers and that in turn will create big change in our media and communications. For the first year I think this change will sneak up on us. For starters, the verdict on predicted sales of the iPhone 3G S is still out. Many people feel it won’t be as big of a seller as the 3G because many of the features seem like small incremental improvements. And for 90% of the upgrades, they’d be right. Some prognosticate that next year’s iPhone model will see larger sales based on likely enhancements and upgrades. But it won’t be the specification sheets that will change things, people with access will. More specifically, when enough people have the right tools and access we can unleash amazing amounts of rich and compelling content. The kind of stuff TV producers only dream about. The kind of content that makes CNN’s news rating spike like the news from Iran that we’ll capture on our video recordings and mobile livestream video. It’s already been brewing for a while now. Internet types, bloggers, video bloggers and journo’s have been showing us the way with mobile vlogging. As we’ve seen, the video will range from the interesting and sublime and highly entertaining to the stuff we should have left in the editing trash can. Just like Twitter or blogs but with video. Surprisingly crisp video and sound clips will start showing up from people who would never consider themselves geeks and don’t even know the word videographer. We’ll see video in real time of rock concerts (good content), along with video of interesting and shocking events from all over the world (good content). Good content in good enough quality. Functional, usable quality, not the junk on all but the most exclusive of today’s mobile devices (think Nokia N97).  Business users will take snippets of keynote speeches at meetings and transmit them out to thousands of connected peers and friends on Facebook and Twitter. News will get recorded and uploaded of just crashed airplanes and street riots. This video content will make news. This video will help people learn, communicate, laugh, cry and connect. We will see the kind of visceral and emotional connection with this video content that we first saw with Television. It’ll be reality TV…but real life. That’s my prediction. What’s your take? Here’s an excerpt of engadget’s iPhone 3G S review talking about video along with a video sample. engadget review Okay — you got us. Video recording on the iPhone 3G S is really quite impressive, and there are two reasons why. For starters, the phone handles pretty fantastic looking VGA video at 30 FPS, which makes for not just passable mobile video, but usable mobile video. The size, clarity, and smoothness of the sequences we shot looked tremendous to our eyes — certainly on par if not outclassing many of the contenders in this space. In our opinion, the 3G S video quality is high enough that we’d consider this a viable stand-in for lower end camcorders or flip cams — if you want to capture your kids at the park but don’t want to come packing a ton of gear, this produces totally reasonable results. - full engadget review here

a How the iPhone 3G S Video feature will change media and news

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In episode 13 I say “Hi!” to viewers who have been with us for our first 12 episodes and “Hola” to our new YouTube viewers. First, I will catch you up on what I have been doing and then… I figured I’d name our show since I’m in it for the long haul: Local Knowledge. That’s the name! The World’s First Video Podcast dedicated to Local Internet Marketing. …and finally I discuss how our next sessions will cover the topic of web design for small business (on a shoestring budget of course). Julian Seery Gude ed, Local Na8ion http://www.localna8ion.com a Episode 13 Where in the world is Julian