Qik Streaming. Everyone’s a Television.
April 25th, 2008 | by Brad King |I’ve been poking around with Qik since SXSW Interactive, but I haven’t really followed anyone with it because frankly I don’t much care what people are doing with their lives.
If I did, I presume I would be with them.
Which is stupid, since I’m on the road so dang much it’s difficult for me to ever see my friends. Even Twitter friends.
Tonight, Aubrey — Digg marketer and one of the people I’ve interviewed for the book — fired up her Qik application using a flip phone while she attended a San Francisco Giants baseball game.
This in and of itself is not very interesting to most people. But it should be wildly interesting to journalists.
Here’s why.
The application let’s you stream live, listen to a conversation, embed the live stream in your page and create an archive of video. For reporters, this is really the most powerful tool that you have. Forget trying to create “pristine” video that takes years to learn how to do. Reporters should be geo-locating video on their beats, creating short videos that tell a story.
That’s the first application, but as you’ll see along the lower left side of the screen, you can also set up a live chat.
Along the right side of the screen, people who are watching the video are chatting with the folks at the game. Here, it’s Leah Culver from Pownce, Kevin Rose from Digg and Aubrey Sabala from Digg.
At the moment, they are trying to convince someone to run across the field naked.
These things happen.
There are two very easy things that every reporter could do:
- set up a Qik chat each day at a set time, discussing upcoming stories and looking for information from people. That’s pretty standard crap though and I’m not sure that I’d waste my time;
- record something every time you covered an event on your beat, geo-locate it, tied it to a story and archive it on a map.
That’s still pretty standard stuff, but it’s cheap and easy to do. Nobody can really complain because you aren’t spending any money — and much time — on training and you get what you came for.
