I’ve been thinking a lot about my future, which is one reason I’ve slowed down my posting, Twittering, reading, and all that. The other reason being this cute kid who keeps smiling at me which is a lot more fun than being online.

Anyway, one technology that really impressed me is Mogulus, a company that lets you do your own streaming video show from your bedroom if you want (competes with Ustream.tv and Justin.tv, but has a lot more features that serious TV stations will want). Mogulus is the company that streamed the NewTeeVee conference. Right after that conference Mogulus’ CEO, Max Haot, came to my house to show me how they did it. If you’re wanting to see the future of TV, this is it so far and Max goes into depth about the whole process and sets up a TV studio in Patrick’s (my 13-year-old son) bedroom.

Is this the future of ScobleShow? Hmmm, Chris Pirillo better watch out! :-)

Last night I met Cathy Brooks. She’s helping plan the LeWeb3 conference. I trust her opinion and she’s whip smart.

I showed her the Amazon Kindle device and asked her which book should be my first book I read on it. She recommended “Basic Black” by Cathie Black. She has been on the executive teams for a lot of publishing efforts from USA Today to Oprah’s new, and highly successful, “O” magazine.

I did something that I’ve never been able to do before. I bought the book right in front of her.

When I got home I started reading — I got about halfway through the book. I can see why Cathy recommended this book. Lots of great lessons about business and stories about the publishing industry, something I’m interested in.

Anyway, this morning I did a little video comparison to “real” books. I compared it to Blue Planet Run, a photo book that Rick Smolan just sent me (he’s a famous photographer who we’ll have on Photowalking someday if we can match our schedules up).

Hopefully this will be the last of my Kindle posts. Onto other things.

Photowalking with Thomas Hawk is grand, but today we have a real treat: a photowalk with a real professional photographer. Marc Silber. He even has the license plates to prove it! It’s long, but not boring. Just in case you don’t have the hour to spend Rocky made you a short and sweet editor’s choice for you.

Marc has written an eBook on how to take better photos, and we talk about some of the tips in the book. You’ll learn a lot on this hour walk. Plus you get to see some great scenery on a ridge above Palo Alto/Silicon Valley and hear some stories about the property because Marc used to live on the property, which is now a public park.

Oh, and I did almost the entire hour by walking backward. It’s a skill that only my parents would be proud of.

Thank you to Seagate for sponsoring my show and supporting digital photography through not only their storage devices but also by supporting my efforts to do educational photowalks like this.

If you want to buy one of those new Kindle devices from Amazon, please do so by clicking this link: Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device. Why?

Because then I’ll get a few bucks back for each one you buy. If I read my email right, Amazon is paying bloggers $40 for each one sold. That’s pretty darn cool.

The price to you doesn’t change. But, if you don’t want me to get some money, then visit Amazon’s home page by typing http://www.amazon.com into your browser window.

It’s not the only way I’ll get paid, though.

If you buy a Kindle and you buy my blog. It looks like I get 30% of that fee.

Anyway, thanks Amazon for all the cash! (I’ll need it, cause I just bought my own — it will be here tomorrow).

Seth Godin: “You won’t find me on Amazon’s new book reader.”

Rex Hammock: “I’d rather have an iPod Touchbook.”

Mathew Ingram: WTF?

Jeremy Toeman: It will fail.

My thoughts?

That Jeremy is probably right. I’m excited about the new reader to be sure. But getting geeks like me excited by a new “shiny toy” is pretty easy. Getting a large market excited? That’s a LOT harder.

Why am I excited by this? Because it brings some very real advances to devices. Is it too expensive? For many people, yes. But one thing I’ve learned is that if something in the technology industry is too expensive today just stay alive for a few years. I remember when Steve Wozniak had a color printer that cost $40,000 that today’s $70 printers are better than.

For $400 this device is pretty damn remarkable. It can be read out in bright sunlight (my $3,000 Mac can’t do that). Its battery lasts dozens of hours. It’s a joy to use for the stated purpose: reading.

I do agree with Seth and Mathew: I really wish they had found a way to give away a stack of books and other content (including blogs). I told them almost the exact same thing Seth did and, yes, my words were just as unsuccessful at hitting the mark.

That said, even if Jeff Bezos turns out to be a failure here this device will push the market simply by getting you all to consider a world where you read your books off of a screen rather than off of paper. To me that’s interesting.

One other thing I told the team? Get Google Reader onto this thing. In fact, I tried to get my link blog onto it instead of just my blog (and I pitched them to include TechMeme, Digg, and Slashdot, among others, on it). We’ll see later today what they decided, but I don’t think they got the link blog onto it.

After I shut the camera off when interviewing Yuri, the senior policy officer of the Russian Government, we started talking about how the world has changed.

I told him that if you had told me in High School that I’d someday have a friendly chat with someone from the Russian government I would have told you that you were smoking something that probably was illegal.

It was the time of the cold war. My dad worked at Lockheed. Building Star Wars satellites designed for nuclear war.

We were still preparing for the day that nuclear war could come with the Russians. In high school we all knew that the “Blue Cube” (a building near Lockheed at the corner of Mathilda and 101 where the government had its hub of communications equipment) was ground zero in Silicon Valley. Our government was spending huge amounts of resources to prepare for war with the Russians.

And yet here we were joking around about our father’s world and how remarkable it is now that we’re able to build Intel processors across our country’s borders (he told me in the interview that the software for Intel’s Centrino processors was developed in Russia).

Yuri punctuated that off-camera conversation with “the world changes.”

I wonder how the world will change in Patrick’s time? I sure hope it keeps going the direction it has. Talking with Yuri about geeky stuff is sure a lot more fun than the alternative.

Russia has gone from a poor country to an increasingly wealthy one. Why? Oil prices. Now that oil is sitting around $100 a barrel Russia is sitting on a gold mine. Er, oil wells. And the cash is pouring in. One problem? They need to diversify and increase the number of companies that don’t have anything to do with energy. So, they are starting up a bunch of Venture Capital efforts.

I get the skinny on all this with Yuri Ammosov, a senior policy officer of the Russian Government in charge of venture capital and high tech development programs, talks with me about how Russia is flush with cash thanks to the rising energy prices (they are one of the world’s leading oil producers) and are working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to diversify its economy. We talk about some of the smart people and smart companies that are popping up in Russia and tons of other stuff too.

I like his honesty. He told me that being an entrepreneur in Russia today is like being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the 1960s (when Silicon Valley was still largely a farm town).

On Friday I met one of the San Jose Mercury News’ photojournalists, Richard Hernandez. He’s worked there 13 years and showed me a project he’s worked on for the last few weeks. I shot this video with my cell phone, I’ll have a longer, more-professional interview up with both Richard and VuVox’s CEO up later this week.

This floored me as a way for photojournalists to cover news stories and other things in a new way.

What did Richard do? An interactive photocollage for today’s newspaper. Well, it’s not in the newspaper. But it goes along with an article that was done for the newspaper on one of Silicon Valley’s famous neighborhoods, Willow Glen.

This is the kind of stuff that bloggers rarely, if ever, do. It requires too much of an investment. Richard worked for a couple of weeks making images, collecting archive photos and videos and audio clips, and putting those together using VuVox’s new unreleased photo collage software. Richard used a pre-release version of the software to create this photo collage.

So, what is it? It’s a strip of photos. You drag it back and forth with your mouse. When you see an icon or a frame on top of one of the photos you can click and play the media that’s there. Sometimes it’ll be an audio story. Sometimes it’ll be another, more detailed, picture. Sometimes it’ll be a video.

I found myself mesmerized by the ability to tell a new kind of story.

Imagine going to a fire and taking an overall image and then laying on top of that video, audio, text (links to other stories) and having a much more complete photo story there.

Or, putting up a picture of a map where something happened and then linking audio and video off of that?

Or, for me, just a new way to show you my baby pictures?

Anyway, the longer video which shows how he built this will be up later this week. Richard also said he’d love to come along on a future photowalking and teach us a few things. Can’t wait!

Will this save photojournalism? Well, I imagine that this will draw new kinds of audiences to the Mercury News’ pages. Those audiences will stick around a long time (I’ve already spent 10 minutes playing around with it this morning, and I’m not even 1/8th of the way through it all). And they’ll be likely to click on advertising experiences (none are in Richard’s work, but he showed me how he could link off to Amazon, or other eCommerce sites and get an affiliate fee. Or, advertisers could just pay to have their brand included in the photo collage.

Nice to see the San Jose Mercury News is investing in new technology. I know they are having a rough time (Richard even hinted at it in the video when he joked he still has a job) but it’s things like this that will bring audiences back to newspaper brands and will give advertisers a new thing to engage with the Mercury News’ salespeople on.

Can’t wait to try it myself.

I am finding most of the audiences I’ve spoken to lately have never seen Kyte.tv. Many have never seen Twitter. Or even know they can upload photos to Flickr from their cell phones.

But someday they will.

Zannel is another company that’s trying to make cell phone media easier. Here’s Zannel’s CEO and CTO to show us Zannel.

Why is this important? Well, how many cell phones will sell in the next year? Now let’s say that even 1% signup for Zannel. That could be a pretty sizeable audience.

Either way, these guys give us their view of the cell industry and where it’s going.

I know mobile phone stuff is important because of you. I got more email off of my Fast Company column about cell phone services than any of the other columns I’ve written for Fast Company. Thanks!

I’m sure this isn’t the only one, after all, SmugMug’s CEO told me that they had moved pretty much everything over to Amazon’s S3 a while back.

But I always assumed that companies would have at least one server keeping things up, just in case Amazon went down. Or just because.

I was wrong.

Last night Mogulus’s CEO, Max Haot, was here at my house to film something fun for my show. Mogulus is the company that, yesterday, provided the live video for Om Malik’s NewTeeVee conference. It was so good I stayed home and watched almost the whole day on the NewTeeVee channel. But more on that when we get the video up.

At one point Max seemed like he was joking around with me when he told me “we don’t own a single server.”

I asked him FOUR more times to make sure I heard him right. I even got incredulous with him at one point saying something like “what the f*** do you mean you don’t own a server?” and “you mean not a single bit of your Web site comes from servers that aren’t owned by Amazon?”

He nicely and calmly explained that, yes, every server the company owns is actually running on Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.

The world has changed. Now ANYONE can build an Internet company and get it up to scale. No more spending nights inside data centers trying to keep servers running.

Let’s go over to Mike Arrington’s CrunchBase and do some research. They pulled in $1.2 million in funding. Yet they don’t own a SINGLE server!

They have about 15,000 people already creating live video channels. They have one of the most innovative Web sites I’ve ever seen.

But they don’t own a server.

How else has the world changed? Where the hell is Microsoft in this whole business? How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank like Microsoft does, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having “monopoly” market share in operating systems.

Heheh, maybe now Amazon can use some of the new money that they’ll be earning from these startups to buy some decent PR. According to Read/Write Web Amazon needs the help in that department.

Oh, back to Max. One tip he gave us is that when using Amazon’s services you have to design your systems with the assumption that they will never be up and running. What he means by that is services are “volatile” and can go up and down without notice. So, he’s designed his systems to survive that. He told me that it meant his engineering teams had to be quite disciplined in designing their architecture.

How many other Internet companies are out there that are “serverless?”