Taking Technology to the Slopes: A Reflection on my Multimedia Excursion

My mission for my Killington trip was to create a travel story using new tools for journalists. I was looking to use live streaming video, Flickr, Twitter, an HD camcorder and this blog to cover it all nonstop.

I set up everything to work through my mobile phone. Using this one device, I could take streaming video via Qik (which would appear in my Twitter feed), send photos to my Flickr photostream (which would be forwarded to my Twitter feed) and send Tweets. My Twitter feed was embedded in this blog so all of this content could be accessed by a potential outside observer just from this page. I also brought along my pocket HD camcorder to try to capture some high quality video to be edited later on.

Here's how all these things worked out for me.

This was my first aggressive foray into Twitter and frankly I just felt like I did not have enough to say. "Eating lunch now at the lodge." "Snow is falling in Killington, 'bout time :)" "Lift lines aren't too bad today." I'm not sure what I thought I would experience at the ski resort that would be worth relaying to the entire World Wide Web. I was not out of the loop on how the thing works. I used a hash tag (#killington) to identify my posts as Killington-related and even picked up some ski-and-snowboard-enthusiast followers that way. I guess it was useful in getting my Qik videos and Flickr photos published on my blog instantly, but I feel like I sort of dropped the ball on those two things too.

I found taking video while snowboarding incredibly difficult. How I did not foresee that is beyond me. To take sweet action shots, I needed something more powerful than my Samsung BlackJack II or my Kodak Zi8. They both did fine taking landscape shots but operating them both with gloves was nearly impossible. Once my gloves were off and I was operating either my phone's camera (for Qik video) or my camcorder, my body allowed me to film for only a couple of moments before it needed gloves to be returned to my fingers. Additionally, as you will see from my edited video in the previous post, I'm not much of a cinematographer so these obstacles I have mentioned only worsened my abilities to film interesting things.

Flickr to Twitter from my mobile phone would have been the easiest thing to pull off had I concentrated on it more exclusively. My phone doesn't have a great camera but for most of the landscape shots, it isn't too hard to make things out.

I guess my conclusion from this experiment would be it is wonderful that we have all these new communication tools, but understand when each can best be used. Had I spent the trip using my phone to take photos that went to my Flickr and then my Twitter, I would have a nice photo album already by the time I got home and my friends and family could view my pictures as I took them if they were interested. I didn't encounter anything interesting enough to really use Qik video appropriately but it would be a great tool for capturing video of something important so long as one knows how to use it properly.

Then there's Twitter. If all my friends at the mountain had been using it from their mobile devices and we constantly provided updates, I suppose it could be used in lieu of phone calls or text messaging. I think it is most useful in cases of a large group of people consciously communicating through it, such as at a large techie conference where hash tags can be used to group Tweets by attendees and through constant following and updating, users could find out about the best thing going on at any given moment.

I am glad I got to play around with all these different applications on my trip and maybe I will used them again sometime to record a trip I take (though it will be a trip to somewhere warm). Twitter, Qik, Flickr and Blogs can all be immensely valuable given the right circumstance and I did not convince myself that capturing every moment of my weekend snowboarding adventure was really the best context for any of them.

P.S. Looking back through my Tweets, it looks like another drawback of my plan may have been the lack of consistent cell service on the mountain. I know I took more Qik videos than just the one that appears there of the man with the beard that just will not quit. It seems some of my mobile updates (text, video, pictures) may have never left my phone or gotten lost in the cloud. Interesting.