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Scoble’s Twitter Interview Misses The Point

…but not for the reason you might think.

You see, this isn’t a post about the content of Robert Scoble’s interview with the Twitter team of Ev Williams and Biz Stone over the weekend – after all it’s a simple fact of life that the world goes round, the sky is blue, and Twitter goes down just as conversations get interesting – but more about the how the interview was recorded and the feedback he recorded.

Setting the scene is pretty important, and I’ll hand this bit over to Scoble himself:

I wasn’t expecting to do a video interview. I hadn’t had any sleep in 30 hours. I was tired and had just finished a dress rehearsal… When I arrived at Twitter Evan Williams met me at the door (I had Twittered that I was going to be there in a few minutes). We had an off-the-record conversation which wasn’t, let’s say, fun. But we both cleared the air and then the conversation started getting interesting and I asked “can I turn on my cell phone and start broadcasting this because I think a lot of people would be interested?”

You see, this wasn’t expected to be a “media opportunity” which would have seen a full HD camera there, along with super scary microphone, lights and so on. It was a fast, off-the-cuff, what have you got to hand that you can use moment. In this sense the choice of Qik was perfect, especially as the target audience were likely to be at the end of the Qik video stream able to text Scoble to ask specific questions. The commentators who we’re bemoaning Robert for not carrying a full recording team with him have it wrong. It was this or nothing – to them I’d ask would you want the Zapruda Home Video tape or nothing at all?

Where I will query is that Qik is the only option. For someone like Scoble who can gather a substantive number of live viewers to offer feedback on the Qik video so he can ask questions, that’s fine. The majority of people will not have a massive network to call on. At that point Qik looses it’s charm, and I would seriously suggest that the N95 should be either recording in 640×480 full VGA, or a small pocket HD cam (such as the Sanyo Xacti HD cameras) on a mini tripod should be there to grab footage for later archiving. Yes, capture the moment and get it out there, but o consider the best way to preserve the moment as well.

Of course, we might be glossign over the fact that Scoble, with a box the size of some kitchen matches, went out and essentially shot a live TV show with two way interaction from the audience, and gave them something relevant at that moment in time to them. There’s the revolution right there, even if the tools (and the characters) will likely change many times over the next few years.

June 3, 2008; Mobile Computing, Multimedia, Twitters;

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