I noticed in the first round they had about 2,300 applicants. The deadline for the Round 2 submissions is Monday, December 1, 2008 and so far the total Round 2 submission are at about 100. So am guessing about 200 final entries, but that’s just a guess.

So what the heck is the Journalism Doctor Telepresence Reporting Experiment? Well get yourself over to the Knight News Challenge site to find out. When there, please be sure to rate my idea. If you like it, send your friends. It is, I do believe a very good idea, and when I explain it to videographers and people who teach video classes they love it. Now, see what you think.

1. Simple enough: just sign up for a Twitter account, go to my Twitter page, and click Follow. (For instant updates, you’ll want to make sure you set up your IM client and/or cellphone with Twitter. If you’ve done either of those, then after Twitter acknowledges that you’re Following someone, you then have to toggle the Notifications ON — otherwise you’ll only see their tweets on your web feed, not via IM or SMS.)
2. Of course, the downside to following someone solely for the purpose of knowing when they’re live streaming or doing something else interesting is that you’re potentially subject to a ton of really boring stuff, like me complaining about the papers I’m grading, or to TMI, like a couple new media friends of ours who sometimes alert us to impending whoopie. One workaround that’s emerging for that is the use of hashtags: keywords like Technorati tags prefaced with a pound sign, e.g., #livestream. Personally, I’m trying to decide whether to sacrifice 13 of my precious 140 Twitter characters to #streetteam08 to tag my news-relevant tweets, or hope that the shorter #st08 is clear enough. The # symbol is only necessary for these tweets to be aggregated and archived at Twitter-related sites like tweetchannel.com or hashtags.org. But in order to get real-time updates about my livestreaming without following the rest of my life, you could send Twitter the command, “track streetteam08;” then, so long as I remember to include that tag in every streaming announcement tweet, you will receive that message when I send it out.
3. Sorry for the mini-lecture. Hope it was all relevant.
4. Sadly, following that #streetteam08 tag will only alert any interested parties to my particular live stream on Tuesday or subsequent video updates, as I appear to be the only one of us 51 that actually uses Twitter, and I haven’t inspired any interest in joining, yet, either.

A note from Witt: Please don’t engage me in an discussion of whether the Street Team folks are real journalists, at least not here. This is just a nice Twitter lesson that Highsmith was kind enough to provide.

This is a very easy-to-use application that takes account of the demands placed on journalists in the field,” said Nic Fulton, Chief Scientist of Reuters Media. “By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene. This saves us time and benefits our audience by ensuring that they receive high quality news that is absolutely up-to-date.”

You can see the whole toolkit here and example of the Reuters reporters work can be found at Reuters Mobile Journalism. As anyone who has been watching my videos over the last few days knows, I can, actually anyone can, make these amateur videos. However, for me, every time I make one, I keep thinking I have to learn to do this better.

At ConvergeSouth 2007 Brandon Gross and Saskia Wilson-Brown from CurrentTv, were carrying a little $100 Flip Video camera with an hour’s worth of low quality video capabilities. I said I was ready to trade up, and they were saying no, these hand-helds are the future, people are accustom to watching them. Maybe, but for me I have gone through that stage. I want to shoot better videos. However, whether I, and the other amateur videographers, want to go through the learning curve is another question that is yet to be answered.  

 Thanks to Josh Catone at Read/Write Web and Sam Harrelson for the pointers.