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Free videos featuring smart people teaching you stuff!

This is cool: there's a site called Academic Earth that aggregates video lectures from big-name universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford ring a bell?) and you get to watch and follow taped lectures and courses FOR FREE.

So many journalists -- and people in other professions -- are talking about going back to school for more training or for a different career. This site might be a good way for you to peer into what academia is offering in a field, without committing thousands of bucks. Here's one video:

Waiting at a Baltimore stoplight

Pic of the day

I used to scoff at the idea of ordering from a joint, then waiting for
someone to bring the takeout bags to my car.

Until I had a baby. Now I find it a blessing. Sitting in my car
waiting for dinner to be delivered now, while baby naps in the back seat.

Northwood plaza, NE Baltimore

Biz as usual at Northwood plaza on a Monday night. Former councilman
Ken Harris was killed here in September. Since then, security has
apparently improved. (Pic taken with my iPhone)

The iPhone as Reporter Tool

I joked about buying the iPhone, over at BaltimoreSun.com's Consuming Interests blog, because I heard of one of the apps -- the iFart. For those of us who still guffaw at fart jokes, it's a fun toy.

But the phone is a powerful little pocket computer, and it -- or smartphones with equal power and web-browsing capacity -- should be required tools for reporters, bloggers and editors working in journalism today. The reality is that millions more real people -- yes, all of them potentially citizen journalists -- now have such digital, web-connected tools, in their pockets. And they're using them, in many cases, like your typical MSM "traditional" journalists would.

Here's a look at how I've used my iPhone in just one week (The photo in this post is taken from the skywalk of The Baltimore Sun building, at 501 N. Calvert St., which crosses over busy Centre Street and leads to our parking garage):

* Quick access to all my email accounts and social media sites I use, i.e. Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, I'm finding that using the iPhone-dedicated apps for email and these social media sites offer a much quicker experience for me. Some tasks still aren't desirable to do on a small screen, but it's amazing how much you can do. The previous post was a photo I took with the iPhone and uploaded to this blog via an email.

* Quick photos: I was having some trouble describing a scene to an editor, so I told her I'd just snap a photo and send it to her. Seconds later, she saw what I was seeing.

* Google search and voice search: The power of Google on the go. The voice search is incredible. For reporters on the move, you feel like you don't even have time to type. So, being able to speak a search into your iPhone, and then pull up information or a map, is huge.

* Google Maps and other navigational apps with GPS. Another fave: Say Where, which allows you to speak your map search requests. It works very well most of the time and saves me from typing.

* The weather apps: I like The Weather Channel app. For reporters who don't know what their day will bring, having the weather report in your pocket can be priceless.

* Short reports for your news org's Website: The iPhone, infamously, doesn't shoot video nor play Flash video. But the clever folks at 12Seconds.tv created a 99-cent app that allows you to string together three photos and then record audio narration. The app packages it all into a 12 second -- of course -- online slideshow. Talk about broadcasting on the go! I just started my own channel at http://www.12seconds.tv/channel/baltsungus. Note: I recommend shooting photos through the iPhone's camera, not within the app itself. But then you use the app to quickly assemble the report and upload to your channel. You can also send out a tweet to your Twitter followers everytime you upload a new 12 second report. Pretty cool.

* Digital audio recorder: I'm using a free app called iTalk, which offers very high quality audio recording. The quality is so good that it rivals, and perhaps even surpasses, the sound quality of my $90 Olympus WS-100 audio recorder. It won't replace my digital recorder, probably, but it is an excellent backup. (And you reporters out there know you need some backups with your equipment.)

* For police and crime reporters: This is SO COOL. Using the free FStream app in the App Store, you can pull in live streams of police scanner transmissions. FStream has a directory of a few dozen around the country, or you can input the URL stream you have in mind. Why is this cool? Well, a police scanner can run you a few hundred dollars, especially if your jurisdiction uses a digital trunking communications system, which typically requires a type of scanner you can't find for under $500.

But a free iPhone app gets you the transmission for free. Anywhere you may go in the city or town you're covering police in. That Rocks.

Looking for more iPhone tips and apps for journos? Check out this blog post from 10,000 Words, a blog about multimedia journalism.

Also, there are small tech companies out there that are designing apps specifically for journalistic uses, for both "professionals" and citizen-journalists. Check out http://www.celljournalist.com/customers/. If you know of other companies pushing the journalistic fold with their cutting edge apps for 21st century journalism combined with social media, leave the links in the comments below!

Or, if you're one of these companies and you're more modest, just give me a tweet at @gussent on Twitter to let me know who you are.

Cheers.

I took this photo in Fells Point yesterday, at a sad scene where a man
died after somehow being set on fire under an overhang at the Broadway
pier. Another similar photo ran on baltimoresun.com. I took it with my
iPhone.