The service makes it remarkably easy to collect and post video at breaking news or scheduled events. The Qik app uses a phone’s built-in still camera so you don’t need a phone with video capability.

Qik is free (though the app comes at a price with some service providers), works on more than 140 types of phone and provides easy upload to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Videos are automatically stored to the Qik site where you can also generate an embed code that can be dropped into blog or webpage for live-streaming.  Cover it Live, a top-notch live-blogging service (see the DNJ post), can broadcast Qik streams.

Online video is making huge gains, posting double-digit growth in the last year, according to recent research. Some 80 percent of online news users regularly watch video and the expansion in video viewers on web-only sites is up a whopping 300 percent since 2008.  Qik offers online journalists a low-budget and easy-to-produce way to get at this market.

To date, Qik does not offer editing capability. However, the Qik Video Pro app allows users to zoom and apply assorted filters to videos. It also offers enhanced audio and a selection of different upload options.

Qik is not without competition, Kyte and Flixwagon being the two closest contenders.  A comparison in mid 2008 gave Kyte the edge on video and audio quality, but rated Qik highly for usability.  Both rated better than Flixwagon.

Qik, a Silicon Valley start-up that went live in 2008, aims to be the go-to social networking site for video. It offers all the social networking standard features for  video: Storage, tagging (and geo-tagging), groups, privacy controls and integration with an address book.

In 2009 Katalyst Media, an online production company co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg, hosted 24 Hours @ Sundance, an online reality show-style competition, broadcast live from the Sundance Film Festival via Qik. To see Qik in action, check it out.

The seven-part video – an hour in total – along with the rich assortment of examples, resources and tutorials is as compelling as it is complete a road map of the way forward.  Journalists ranging from the indie blogger to those working in large corporate outlets need to learn how to present stories extracted from the unprecedented amount of  data now available. That data may be collected independently with free and easy-to-use polling tools like Polldaddy or gathered  through sites like Data.gov and Google Public Data Explorer.

Here are two examples of data visualization presented in the documentary:

The Jobless Rate for People Like You, developed by The New York Times, allows viewers to drill down and personalize unemployment data.

The Stimulus Tracker, by MSNBC.Com, allows viewers to see where stimulus package money has been spent down to the county level and weigh its effectiveness. Viewers can also track where the money was spent relative to the voting records of politicians.

The idea that information presented visually and interactively on the web is a powerful way to draw in readers isn’t all that new. Infographics and interactive illustrations of events ranging from the trajectory of a plane crash to a winning Superbowl play have been around for years.  But growth in data visualization specifically has been hampered by the prohibitive  time and cost of parsing the data, developing the code and producing the final product.

The documentary does an excellent job of addressing these issues and the many other practical realities of producing and presenting visualization in a journalistic context.

In ‘Part IV: A New Era in Infographics’ Hannah Fairfield,  Graphics Director  for the Washington Post,  points out the importance of simplicity and the need to clearly present to viewers how to navigate the visualization. It’s also important to present the information in a way that is meaningful to those represented in the data.

In ‘Part VII: Technologies and Tools’ an assortment of heavy hitters in the field discuss the variety of tools now out there or in development that allow news organizations large and small to reduce the coding involved in producing interactive data visualizations. Many Eyes,  Protovis, and Flare are examples of software that offer templates to present timetables, charts and maps among other things.

In addition to their value as news content data visualizations have a lot of design appeal. IBM researcher Marten Wattenberg acknowledges that while stream graphs like ‘The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008‘ are beautiful and effectively draw readers in, in reality they may not provide much depth of information. In the news world there is often a trade-off between design, approachability, deadlines and the actual information contained in a graphic.

In ‘Part VI: Exploring Data’ the documentary hones in on a topic that comes up throughout: the need to contextualize data and to give it narrative structure — the need to tell compelling stories with the data. Award-winning New York Times designer Amanda Cox along with others acknowledge the difficulty in striking a balance between allowing users to personalize data and draw their own conclusions while also providing the kind of narrative context that makes the information valuable journalism in the first place.

This may endure as data visualizations most vexing challenge.

Tracking audio changes assume that louder scenes (explosions, musical crescendos, shouting) correspond to higher levels of drama. Rapid visual changes (quick motion across the screen, camera motion, or rapid edits) also correspond to action, a quicker tempo, and higher levels of drama. A combined index of audio and visual changes graphed over the length of the movie represents its unique fingerprint, revealing its dramatic highs and lows.

I analyzed forty noteworthy movies and collected the results in this interactive tool. Use it to explore the dramatic profiles for each movie and their corresponding scenes. Do the highest peaks in each profile match the movie’s climactic moments?

Explore the Story Analysis tool, which was used to produce the graphs. Use it to see how each movie’s audio and visuals are analyzed in real-time. You can analyze your own movies (FLV or MP4 format), output the data, and post the results for others to see.

How it was done
First, all the movies had to be converted to the correct Flash-friendly format. Each movie was converted to an MP4 (H.264 codec) file using Handbrake, a free open-source video transcoder. Then I had each movie stream into Flash with the FLVPlayer component.

Tracking the audio changes

Audio levels were analyzed with the ActionScript command, SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(). The command takes a snapshot of the current sound and stores the information as a series of numbers that can be translated visually. While my sound visualization is rather simple, there are countless creative ways to visualize sound. There have even been contests for the most creative visualizations. Since I was most interested in the variation of sound levels throughout the movie, I captured the amplitude (or volume) of the sound every 10 milliseconds and graphed it with a gray line. An average of the sound amplitude was calculated and graphed with a bold white line.

Tracking the visual changes

Every 10 milliseconds, Flash grabbed the image from the video stream with the BitmapData class. The command, getPixel(), gathered the red, green, and blue color information from each pixel. The red, green, and blue color distribution of an image is known as an RGB histogram. My goal was to track changes between histograms that would indicate major visual changes due to camera motion, edits, or subject motion. Much research has been already done on the subject of tracking shot changes for video cataloging, involving complex (and patented) algorithms. I made my calculation quite simple, determined by differences in the histogram area coupled with a dampening function to normalize the extreme values. The resulting index, which reflects visual changes, was graphed as a gray line. An average of the index was calculated and graphed as a bold white line.

Combining audio and visual changes

Combining the audio and visual indices resulted in what I termed, the “drama index”, a measure of the dramatic highs and lows in a movie. The overall shape of the profile, shown in red, can be interactively smoothed out or made more detailed by changing its resolution in the Story Analysis tool.

What does your favorite movie look like?
Analysis of forty distinguished movies–the top ten of all time, the worst ten, the ten highest grossing films, and the previous ten Best Pictures–not surprisingly reveal no common pattern, but it does provide a standard, objective way of tracking a film’s dramatic peaks and valleys–their position, duration, and intensity. This screenshot is a profile of Star Wars. Note the dramatic beginning when Princess Leia’s vessel is boarded, and the slow build-up to the three dramatic peaks at the end: the rescue from the Death Star, the duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and finally the destruction of the Death Star. The analysis works best on modern action films. There is, of course, no consideration for acting, for cinematography, or for the dramatic climaxes that may come in quieter moments (such as the sudden change that crosses an actor’s face with a revelation).

Other movie visualizations
There are many other interesting visualizations of movies. NetFlix recently ran a contest to see if the public could find a more effective way to predict which movies users would prefer based on past ratings. The results of two of the top teams can be visualized as a network of similarities between movies, or as a landscape with similar movies clustered together. (Based on these maps, if you liked Star Wars, then you probably also liked RoboCop).

One recent visualization cleverly plotted the interactions between characters. The hand-drawn map and synthesis of time and geography reminds me a little of Charles Minard’s map of Napolean’s march to Moscow, as discussed and praised by Edward Tufte as a gem of information design.

Finally, the New York Times produced a fascinating look at the box-office revenues of the movies. I love seeing the periodicity in the graph reflecting the predictable huge bumps during the summer blockbuster months and holiday season before the Oscar considerations. Notice also the relatively short, squatter profiles of recent movies compared to the long tails of movies in the past.

What more can we visualize of movies, or the structure of individual stories?

Several Web sites offer – often for free – tools for managing and sharing large files (e.g. Mediafire, Megaupload, Box.net, YouSendIt, Drop.io, etc.). But, none have improved my workflow more than Dropbox. Dropbox’s seamless OS integration, advanced backup functionality (file versioning), blazingly fast upload and download speeds, and its lack of file size limits has put it at the top of a very long list of file-sharing services.

Ease of Use

Today’s journalists should welcome Dropbox’s simple interface that integrates with your Mac, Windows or Linux OS by installing a web-enabled drive that looks like any other drive on your computer. Just drag and drop files to your folder icons as you would normally in order to share and back up your files. What could be simpler than that?

File Syncing and Sharing

Once you’ve put a file of any size into a folder in your Dropbox drive, the file quickly syncs with your other connected computers that have Dropbox installed. Dropbox will only update information that has changed in your Dropbox folder, therefore minimizing the amount of time used in the syncing process. If you aren’t near your own computer, just log into Dropbox’s website to access and manage your files. Using an iPhone? Dropbox has an app for that.

So, the next time your editor asks you for that video piece you’ve been working on, “Right now!”, just give them access to a shared folder in your Dropbox.

File Versioning & Backup

Under a deadline, anyone can make a mistake. Dropbox understands this and has built-in “file versioning” – making previous versions of your files available to you. Dropbox will also let you restore any file you have deleted.

And, what use would a file storage service be without being ridiculously fast and secure? During my use here at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Dropbox has taken whatever I throw at it, without protest. I’m talking about being able to upload 1 gigabyte of files in less that 15 minutes… that fast. Of course, your mileage may vary based on your connection speed, but don’t expect Dropbox to get in your way. If you don’t want Dropbox grabbing all of your bandwidth for uploading and downloading, just manually set limits. For security, Dropbox uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to connect and transfer files to their servers. While your data lives there, it will be guarded by the “military-grade” 256-bit encrypted Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256).

For a full and complete list of Dropbox features, click here. For a video walk-through, click here.

Dropbox offers 2GB of space for free. You can upgrade to 50GB/100GB of space for $10/$20 a month.

Let us know what online storage service you use to make deadline.

Yet for all the apparent complexity of award-winning projects like The Word Train and The Documents of Aribert Heim his core philosophy of design is simple: Get out of the way of the content and create interactive graphics designed to keep viewers engaged.

Simple usability is key. For example, it wasn’t until he put the big buttons on the top right that people seemed to use Milestones: Barack Obama, a time-line of the President’s life, in significant numbers. The time-line itself was too complex to draw people in on its own. It needed a simple point-of-entry for viewers to engage, he said.

During an October 8, 2009, presentation at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, arranged by associate professor Sandeep Junnarkar, Dance talked about his own career trajectory and shared some tips and tricks he’s learned while working at the Times.

His presentation has been edited into thirteen segments, each with individual topics ranging from the need to provide context for viewers around an interactive graphic to the importance of functionality, innovation and the increasing importance of user-generated content. Below are three of the most informative. The entire collection can be viewed here.

Gabriel Dance – Part 5: Usability 2 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

Gabriel Dance – Part 11: User Generated Content from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

Gabriel Dance – Part 9: Transparency & Innovation from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

I think it’s currently a similar situation for news videos for the Web. Most video journalists are producing pieces that look no different than those that appear on TV news.

There are a few bright spots, however, and I have compiled a few of them here:

NYTimes.com: A shout at the minors
Washington Post: Crisis in Sudan
NJ Ledger: Ledger Live
Washington Post: On being
Salon.com: Let’s not pity Palin
NYTimes.com: BloggingHeads