Disruptive Conversations

Today I sent over to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson my usual weekly report into For Immediate Release. In my actual report, I said I'd post the links to the reports that I was talking about in the report. They are:

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer stops publishing print edition after 146 years and shifts to online only
  
  
• Pew Project For Excellence in Journalism: "The State of the News Media 2009", and in particular:
  • Intro
  • Major Trends
  • Key Findings
    
    
• Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
  
  
• Charlene Li: Future of Social Networks presentation
  
  
• C.C. Chapman and The Advance Guard: About Facebook Pages

Now, as to what I said about each of those.... well, you'll have to wait until Shel & Neville edit/produce FIR #432 and post it on the FIR site sometime today. :-)

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TIP: As you'll hear in the report, I recorded it in the field. I did so using the iRecorder app on my iPhone which I've used in the past. The neat thing about iRecorder is that it's trivial to get the files off the iPhone - the iRecorder app simply runs a local web server on your iPhone and you connect to that web server from another PC on your local network.

However, as I discovered today, that is the only way to get the recordings off your iPhone and so if you don't have WiFi access... or more specifically unrestricted WiFi access... you are out of luck.

Today I recorded this segment en route to my local Panera Bread where I planned to work all day offsite and mostly offline. I figured I'd just transfer the file over the free WiFi and send it off. However, this failed miserably. Both my laptop and my iPhone were able to get on Panera's free WiFi, access the web, etc. But when I put iRecorder in its "Sync" mode running a local web server and then tried to connect from my laptop, I couldn't! After a couple of attempts (and a cup of tea) I wound up returning home to do the transfer.

Blame the security folks, methinks. In trying a couple of other connections, it looks like the folks at Panera are very nicely restricting people from connecting to other computers on the free WiFi network. This is a VERY good thing! 99.9% of the time... just not when I want to do a file transfer over the local network. It's actually good to know and honestly makes me more inclined to use Panera's network, since they appear to be protecting me from scanning from other computers on the network. It was just not how I thought today would work out. Ah, well. Lesson learned.

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