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 gave Andrew Baron, founder of the cool video show Rocketboom, a ride to the airport today and on the way I found out he is an Apple fan. So, we pulled off the freeway and visited the mothership. Why do I say that? Well, check out this T-shirt. Short video, just to make all my “your videos are too long and boring” critics happy! Heh. You can only get this T-shirt at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

I’m also uploading a longer interview I did with Andrew too.

Yesterday I visited Hi5 and when I was there Paul Lindner, the architect, handed me a Webvan pen. He’s holding the pen in this video. We talked at length about what’s going on in social networking (they are signing up 100,000 new members a DAY, which is about half the growth rate of Facebook but still very phenomenal). Anyway, he handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype. Webvan, if you don’t remember, was a famous online grocery service that blew through millions of dollars back in the heady days of the late 1990s.

It’s a pen I’ll always treasure and it’s sitting here reminding me to look deeper at the companies I report on. My more in depth interview with Hi5’s CTO will be up next week.

Sorry I’ve been a bit absent this week. I overbooked myself. I’m speaking at Streaming Media West in a couple of hours. Plus I’ve been getting a steady stream of videos up on ScobleShow (check out TapTu there, a new mobile search engine that, in our little test, blew away Google).

And, of course, I’m still digging through lots of feeds for my link blog. I see that the Google Reader team added some new features which I’ll try out later.

Yuri Ammosov, who lives in Moscow, Russia, and works in the Russian Ministry of Economics demonstrates why Russians aren’t cool.

1. He isn’t using an iPhone.
2. He isn’t using Facebook.
3. He’s reading blogs.
4. He’s running Russian RSS-reading software.
5. He reads Engadget, B5 Media, and TechCrunch.
6. He’s running Windows Mobile.

So yesterday. So uncool.

Just kidding.

Seriously, I spent a while with Yuri today and you should watch out for him and his band of Russian entrepreneurs. They are doing very cool things and I was jealous of the feed reader and the new interface he showed me on his Windows Mobile smart phone.

Now do you understand why Google announced Open Social and Android? I sure do.

There’s a lot of Russians who are going to buy cell phones and join a social network in the next 18 months. What will THEY be running? Will they think YOU are uncool for what YOU are running?

Longer interview coming soon on ScobleShow.com.

I used my cell phone to record a very short interview with Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, and MySpace’s CEO, Chris DeWolfe, about what this announcement means today.

When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.

Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.

Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Here’s the two videos:

Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.

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.

The last couple of days have been interesting.

Thursday ended with an interesting dinner with Google’s PR team and my old boss, Vic Gundotra, who now is an executive at Google.

At the dinner he announced that Google was “gearing up” for releasing a raft of open technologies which would be gifted to Web developers. Much like Google Gears is. Dan Farber was at the dinner too and wrote up a lengthy post on the details and what this all means.

But, this post isn’t named “Micromedia” for nothing.

Here’s a bunch of short videos (since so many of you claim you like short videos) for you to watch.

Earlier this week we went to the CTIA show and met several cool companies (many more to come next week, these are just the first three).

1. Utterz. I tried to hate it at first. Do we really need something else to come along that looks like a blog but that lets you call your blog with your cell phone and leave some audio there? Do we need another Twitter competitor? Turns out we do, and I underestimated this service. Eric Rice slapped me over on Twitter several times for that. I redeemed myself by interviewing one of Utterz’ founders. I’ll call Utterz a “micromedia community service” for now until I have a chance to drink some great wine and come up with a better name. Five minutes long.
2. I get too focused on Silicon Valley’s tech hipness, but Edioma has a fun service that helps Spanish-speaking people learn English. Larry Upton, an executive there, tells me why that matters and gives me a demo. Five minutes.
3. I’m preparing to go to Paris in December with Milan and Maryam for the LeWeb3 Conference. So, anyone who shows me cool travel services will catch my attention. WorldMate is such a service and Eyran Blumberg, VP there, showed me how the service might help me out on my travels. Seven minutes long.

But those are my official “ScobleShow” things. How about over on my Kyte.tv channel?

1. Milan Scoble smiling at his older half brother Patrick. Hey, that brightens my day, hope it does you too.
2. Facebook, on November 6, will announce Social Ads — the AllFacebook Blog has the details. Here’s my thoughts on what those will be.
3. Last night, after I picked Patrick up in Santa Rosa (Patrick lives with his mom up in Petaluma, which is across the Golden Gate Bridge) we talked about what we were going to do on the way home: pick up our copy of Leopard.
4. Patrick celebrates getting to level 70 in World of Warcraft. I have no idea what he is saying anymore. I need a parent’s guide to WoW.
5. Here’s what it looks like inside the San Francisco Apple Store last night buying Leopard. Of course getting INTO the Apple store should have counted for hazard pay — we had to cross through thousands of bicycle riders who were doing the usual “Critical Mass” protest against cars by riding their bikes through traffic and generally causing mayhem.
6. At the Apple store last night Loic Le Meur was there too (founder of Seesmic). So I get him on video inside the Apple store.

All those videos were done using my Nokia N95 cell phone. I love that thing and Kyte.tv’s service, because I can get video to you within minutes of me filming it.

Anyway, after we got home we switched to Seesmic and installed Leopard.

1. Loading OSX Leopard. “Goodbye Tiger,” Patrick says. We also talked about how we met Lynn Fox, director of PR at Apple.
2. Leopard almost finished installing (it took Patrick about 45 minutes).
3. Patrick’s first boot into Leopard.
4. “A reflection on the freaking dock,” Patrick says in his first impression of Leopard.
5. A really cool feature is Webclips. You can highlight a piece of a Web page and then make a widget out of it. Patrick demonstrates. Milan cries. Heh.
6. @geraldb28 Twittered us last night and said “wannt do some screen sharing?” This video is what resulted.

What’s really fun is that on Seesmic, Utterz, and Kyte there’s TONS of micromedia being produced.

Will anyone watch? Wrong question: for most of this it’s about the conversation that happens and the communication we can do with each other.

I got a TV station in my pocket. What are you going to do with yours?

Last night Rocky and I went to the Showstoppers shindig at the CTIA show (mobile gadgets and services) that’s in town this week.

Got a few fun videos with my mobile phone. Interesting that out of all the press that was at this event that I was the only one that was using a cell phone to report (that I saw).

Anyway, enjoy these short videos.

1. Winplus’ Yada, phone holder and bluetooth headset for your car’s dashboard. More info on Winplus’ site.
2. Ronn Owens. Famous talk show host on KGO 810 AM (I’ve been listening to him since I was a teenager). Owens will be broadcasting from CTIA tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. He’s a real gadget freak.
3. Utterz co-founder. Really cool mobile microblogging service (you can call in audio, or send video). Try Utterz on its new site.
4. Kara Swisher, of the Wall Street Journal, talks to me about what’s cool. She videoed me for her show, too.
5. Whrrl, a new service, shipping today, lets you discover lots of stuff from your local neighborhood and social network.
6. Alan Reiter, who writes a great blog on mobile phones, shows me the phones in his pocket.

Oh, and come back at 10 a.m. where we’ll have a killer CTIA interview with BluePulse’s CEO (a unique social network that’s ONLY for mobile).

Finally, I love the “Pico Projectors” from Microvision. I’d like to see this demoed. Guess I gotta go over to the show.

So, I was standing in the middle of the lobby — I have a badge, but didn’t use it cause the hallway was so awesome. I met Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the Mouse, among many other cool things. I asked him if he’d seen anything cool. Said “no.” Then I turned on the camera and he wouldn’t answer me. Heh.

Anyway, a group of MySpace executives met me in the hallway and said they don’t limit people to 5,000 friends.

I didn’t get their names, but anyway, we talked about the new MySpace platform that’s coming soon.

They told me that their platform will show you a lot more information about each application before you install it. Unlike Facebook.

Anyway, great place to network. How often do you see Dave Winer and Doug Engelbart together?

Here’s a video I shot of SmugMug CEO, Don MacAskill, who has a shirt that shows whether there are wifi signals in the area or not. It rocks.

Here’s the lobby shot when I first got there. We also interviewed the NewsGator guys (really great feed service for enterprises — the longer video will be up in a couple of weeks).