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.

Lots of people are asking me if I am going to next week’s Blog World Expo. No, cause I have a six-week-old baby at home. Plus, I hang around a lot of these speakers all the time anyway. That said, I’m actually pretty surprised by the quality of speakers that this new conference has been able to put together. I’m actually sad I won’t be there, even though I’m not really THAT sad.

But what really looks interesting? The Chinese Bloggercon. BlognationChina is there.

Rebecca McKinnon is too. John Kennedy is live blogging and doing an awesome job. I feel like I’m sitting in the hall. I know it’s lunch time right now on Saturday.

That stuff is all in English, but the official blog is in Chinese.

Next year I want to do a BloggerCon here at the same time and build a video bridge so we could talk about the same issues. Heck, let’s do it. Why don’t you all show up on my Kyte.tv channel. It’s open to ANYONE who wants to post some video.

Some topics that I wish were being discussed internationally:

1. How do we get great Chinese blogs translated to English (and vice versa)?
2. Who is the “Michael Arrington” of China?
3. What’s happening in the Chinese blogosphere that’s different than the English one?

From John Kennedy’s blog I already learned that there’s a Chinese knockoff of Twitter already and I already found some cool new blogs. Really great stuff.

UPDATE: There’s some photos of the BloggerCon on Flickr. Oh, and check out the Chinese Facebook knock off.

Steve Ball runs the audio team at Microsoft. Buzz and I were comparing notes the other day of all the people we’ve met at Microsoft. We both agree that Steve’s our favorite guy and the guy who we’d most like to hang out with.

I think this video explains why without even trying. He’s creative. Nice. Soft spoken. Never says a bad word about people (even when I know they’ve given him cause).

This video is NOT an interview. It’s just him playing guitar to his daughter — he’s quite an accomplished guitarist and he’s studied with some of the greats (Robert Fripp, for instance). I’ve played this dozens of times over the past few months since I recorded it and it just makes me happy. His daughter is an angel baby. Can’t wait to go to Seattle again to meet up.

Looking at the number of views on my Flickr photos this morning you can clearly see that photos of my baby son greatly outpulls photos of geniuses like Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, or Vice Presidents of Yahoo or Double Click.

What does it all mean? Just reminds me of my journalism schooling at San Jose State University. They always told us to put as many kids and animal photos in the paper as we could. Why? They sell newspapers. One teacher, I remember, told me “at least that kid’s family is gonna buy a copy that day.” Heh.

If you watch my link blog you’ll see me drop in a few photos here and there from Thomas Hawk and other photographers. Why? Cause I love great photography and it helps break up the more serious stuff.

Speaking of which, looks like there’s going to be a Photowalking on Sunday at the Rosie the Riveter National Park in Richmond, CA. I’ll try to be there with Patrick for a few hours.

At the Graphing Social Patterns conference there was a guy who said that Facebook was worth $100 billion. He was properly derided, in my view, by most of the people at the conference.

But, one of his arguments was “would you have said that Google wasn’t going to be worth $100 billion back in 1999?” Yeah, I probably would have said you were smoking good crack if you told me that back then.

Problem is that if you said that back then you would actually have been right.

Now, in eight years will Facebook be worth $100 billion?

Well, let’s go back and study the conditions that caused Google to get there.

1. They shipped a real ad platform that opened up a new kind of advertising: contextual advertising.
2. Search turned out to be one of the best ways to concentrate people with intent to do something together. Think about it. If you search for, say, baby strollers, aren’t you being concentrated into a pool of other people who are looking for baby strollers? That’s what made Google’s ad platform so potent. Does Facebook concentrate people who have intent to do something together? Not as clearly.
3. Microsoft and other major players left them alone. Ballmer admitted to the company employees in a meeting I attended that he had made a mistake by ignoring Google. His belief probably was that Google would never be a $100 million company, much less one with a $194 billion market cap.

So, will these three things happen for Facebook?

No. #3 definitely won’t. Already there are tons of companies jumping into Facebook’s waters.
#2? We don’t yet know if that will play out. I think it might. Many other people who are far smarter than me don’t think so.
#1? Yes, that one will definitely happen.

Translation: I agree with Henry Blodgett (damn, never thought I’d say that) that Mark Zuckerberg should take any money being offered to him at a $15 billion valuation. Yeah, the planets might align for Facebook to get to a higher valuation but there are very real risks that it won’t.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg has turned down such advice to “sell out” before and so far he’s been right. Is he still right? I wouldn’t be making that bet.

We were sitting in the hall in front of the Special Needs Nursery. Dave Winer, Patrick, and me. Dave and Patrick had their Macs open and were taking advantage of the free Wifi to blog and upload another picture (we were waiting for Milan cause Maryam and friends were visiting and we can only have a visitor or two into see him at one time).

Anyway, a group of surgeons walked by and one saw the Macs and said:

“Mac guys, I love it. Do you have the new iLife?”

Now THAT is what I call evangelism.

Dave turned to Patrick and said “that was a Silicon Valley moment.”

******

Another moment? We took off from the hospital for a little while and got lunch and then visited the Apple store. Patrick bought iWork (he already has Microsoft Office but says iWork is a lot better for his reports and such). Dave got a MacMini. At the Apple store two people recognized me. One was from New York. The other from Amsterdam. UPDATE: That’s them in the picture.

The Amsterdam visitor was Hans Veldhuizen, founder and president of Novatunes (he told us he’s building a new kind of music service that’ll be shipped later this year). He’s here to attend the TechCrunch 40 conference and saw Dave Twittering that he was in the Apple store (there’s a LOT more people Twittering than you might think). Stephanie Agresta is a consultant and told us she just joined forces with the Conversation Group. Small world, cause I know a few people involved in this new social media consultancy. Giovanni, one of the partners, is who introduced me and Podtech to Seagate. They are already doing work for SAP, so will be very interesting to watch and see how they get more companies involved in the social networks.

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A moment in Milan’s life: I’ve been looking at all the technology used inside the nursery to monitor babies and such. The coolest thing I’ve seen so far is the ABM, or Auditory Brainstem Response test. Milan was asleep during his. Two little headphones play sounds into his ears and two electrodes on his head detected responses. He passed fine. but I just thought that was the coolest piece of tech. I’d love to meet the person/team who came up with this. Milan never even woke up for the test. Imagine if you were alive 100 years ago and took a time travel machine to today. Would you recognize anything in this world? Probably not.

Today Patrick and Dave were asking themselves what kind of computer Milan will have when he’s 13 years old (Patrick is 13, so is interested in such things).

I answered it’d have 4 terrabytes of RAM and 1,000 terrabytes of hard disk space. Patrick looked amazed and said something like there’s no way that such a computer would happen so quickly.

I told him that when he was born, back in January of 1994 the Web browser had barely been invented (Netscape incorporated that year) and that Windows 95 hadn’t yet shipped. The average computer back then had something like 16 megabytes of RAM (not gigs, megs) and a 40 megabyte hard drive (really cool computers had 32 megs of RAM and an 120 meg hard drive. I didn’t think we’d have a computer in our hands that would have a lot more memory than that and would be on the Internet 24/7 to boot.

What an amazing time to be alive. If we dream for a moment about 13 years from now, what do you see?

How about a mouse that works off of your brainwaves? How about a computer 10x more powerful than an iPhone that’s embedded onto your glasses? How about a petabyte hard drive? Or a printer that you could fit in your wallet so you could hand out pictures of your kids to friends who wanted them? I’ll be honest, I’m scared by the thought of embedding a computer into my body, but we’ll definitely see those. I’ve already met people who have RFID tags in their hands, which is mighty weird today but might become commonplace over the next decade or so. Imagine buying Starbucks just by waving your hand over the counter and not needing to carry credit cards. Oh, that’s another change that’s happened since Patrick is alive. Now almost every store and restaurant takes credit cards (at least in Silicon Valley). I remember when I got nasty stares at Starbucks for trying to use a credit card instead of paying cash.

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A pile of gifts arrived yesterday from lots of my friends (both “real” and “online”). We really appreciate that and we’re going to make a donation in kind to help out kids less fortunate than us.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the “lottery of life” lately. Everytime I hear that damn helicopter come into the trauma center I think about the fact that someone is in a world of hurt while I’m the luckiest guy in the world.

On Wednesday, when we were in the testing center we encountered a pregnant woman who was sobbing, being consoled by her relatives. Obviously she had gotten some bad news of some kind. I can’t get her out of my mind. I’m so lucky. Patrick is such a great kid. Milan is so healthy and happy and wonderful and Maryam is just the best person I could wish for. Why did I get such a great family when she, obviously, got some really tragic news?

It’s so random, the lottery of life. A friend of mine knows an extremely rich woman up in Seattle. She has adopted a little girl from China. She told my friend “this little girl had to be abandoned to win the lottery.” I’ve been thinking about that, too. It’s so sad that there’s kids out there who aren’t loved the way Milan is being loved.

I’m thinking back to when I met Paul Singer, senior vice president and CIO at Target. He wears a pin that says “Adopt.” Great people make the kind of impression on you that last years, even though you only meet them once for a few minutes. I wish I was 1/10th the human being that Paul is.

Walking through the hospital and seeing the Packard name, along with tons of Silicon Valley famous people, on a wall remembering those who donated major money to build one of the world’s great teaching hospitals, it makes me remember what great leaders Silicon Valley has been fortunate to have pass through and there are no bigger than the Packards. They did things that make life better for all of us, both in times of need (hospitals) as well as places to take our kids (the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the world’s best, was started by their daughter).

I want to interview more of people like that: people who aren’t just out to make another dollar, but who are making the world a better place through their actions.

Do you know of someone like that in the tech industry? Give me a call or drop me an email (er, a Twitter, or a Facebook message). We need more tech industry moments like those.

I’m joining the protest against Facebook’s banning of breastfeeding photos. Hope you’re having a good weekend, but there’s nothing better for a baby than breastmilk. It’s time we removed society’s taboos in this area.

Rob Lagesse analyzed our choice of the name “Milan” for our new son.

Well, I think he nailed it. We spent more time on the name than most startups spend on their names. Patrick even playground tested it. Funny enough he said it failed. Most of his friends thought Milan sounded “too girly.”

Lots of people at Stanford said it was the first time they remember seeing a “Milan” come through there, though. One thing I wanted was a name that was unique, had a good story behind it, and easy to spell. Heck, I’ve learned a FEW lessons from Google in the past few years! :-)

One of my geek friends, Jeremy Toemans, kept raving about the birth class he and his wife took in San Francisco.

Now that I’ve been through a pretty rough birth both Maryam and I agree that the McMoyler Method kept us calm and pretty happy all the way through.

I recommend this series of classes to anyone.

Sarah McMoyler rocks. She’s my hero today and played a key role in getting Milan here.

If you are planning on having a kid I can’t recommend getting into a class like this enough.

Also, we both took her infant CPR class. I hope never to use that knowledge, but it’s sure nice to know that I could do that if needed.

Funny story, Thomas Hawk thought it was cute when I went “ssssshhhhh” to Milan to quiet him down. That’s straight out of the class. In fact, she was giving a bath to a baby boy during the class who was crying. She did that and he stopped crying immediately. She explained why that worked in the class (it sounds a lot like the white noise they hear in the womb, for one). It’s nice to have little tricks to make you look great and give you confidence in situations you might not have dealt with well before.

I can’t say enough about her and her staff.

Maryam’s been in labor since 9:30 p.m. last night. She’s doing great. I’m keeping everyone up to date over on my Twitter account.

Oh, and Maryam’s the best wife in the world. Bought me a Canon 5D last night a few hours before going into labor.

Other than Twitter postings, and hopefully a Flickr photo once our new son shows up, my posting level will probably be light for a while.