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Amy, what service provider and data plan are you using? Plans for live vlogging via Qik?

Thanks,
Nancy

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Amy wrote: “And I’m not dissing buggy whips — they were the best tool for their primary job for quite a while. But things change.”

LOL! I turned down an engineering job 3 years ago for a company that made high-end equipment for large broadcast TV operations. I said to my friends at the time that this company made the equivalent of high-tech carbon-fiber & titanium buggy whips.

Amy also wrote: “Journalists and other media folks — perhaps more than anyone else — need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances.”

Yes, you’re preaching to the choir on this point. But my complaint is that it’s painful when a new technology replaces an old technology before the new technology matures enough to provide all of the advantages of the old technology. [Geeky dissertation about core phone technology deleted.]

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Amy wrote: “…it’s more likely that *you’re* going to have to find new solutions to get the audio quality you want from interviews, rather than hope that the best & brightest interview subjects will continue to hang onto their landlines to keep audio snobs happy.”

Perhaps so. But in my case, the majority of folks who are experts in things outdoorsy, or who have positions in public land management agencies (the focus of my work) either live/work in places that are too rural for broadband, or are not sufficiently technical to deal with something as geeky as Skype. The expensive and slow alternative is to pay more remote field producers to go on-site to do the recordings. (Sigh!)

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I, too, am guilty of packing a $600+ cellphone (day one iPhone) but it was worth it!

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You wrote: “So I can finally ditch my landline, a needless expense these days.”

It’s getting harder and harder to find people I can interview for my podcast/radio series these days, as people ditch their land lines. The audio quality over a cell phone, even in the best of conditions, is just not intelligible enough for a professional-quality media production. I tell them to find a wired phone (not a cordless even) or I won’t interview them. Yeah, OK, I’m an audio snob.

But even when I’m talking to someone cellphone to cellphone, I often time can’t understand much of what they’re saying. The lossy compression cellphone technologies use to minimize the data bandwidth over their networks throws out many important cues for speech intelligibility.

I’ll keep my land-lines, thank you. Thank way I can actually understand the other end of the conversation without having to ask them to slow down or frequently repeat what they’re saying.

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okay, I’m headed over to Amazon — I had actually gone into a Best Buy because I wanted to fondle the phone first. I did get a fondle a friends phone.

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