In my neverending quest to make the iPhone a legitimate tool in our newsgathering arsenal, I may have found a device that finally resolves all audio concerns.

For anyone wh uses the iPhone for video, you'll know that the audio quality leaves something to be desired. For professional video newsgathering, you've got nothing without good audi

Enter the Fostex AR-4i,  a lightweight battery powered device with all the bells and whistles to take audio to the next level.

After picking up the unit several months ago, I finally got an opportunity to test it out...and WOW.

We all know sports stars are famous for their game rituals and the Winnipeg Jets are no different. We got a peek at the not-so-secret secret handshake some of the players participate in before every game.

But if you thought some of the players' handshakes were interesting, check out the ridiculously elaborate moves of the Jets' training staff as captured by photographer Mike Deal.

Oh, and it's a chin bump, not a kiss. I watched it in slow motion.//

Let me get this out of the way: Jack Motyer is my hero.

The soon-to-be 95-year-old curler has been playing out of St. Vital Curling Club since the early 80s, around the same time I was born.

It's incredible to see him curl in person. He still gets down in the hack and slides the best he can, but to watch him sweep is a sight to see. The guy puts a lot more power into his broom than my 30-something teammates on The Right Offs, my Fort Rouge foursome.

My colleague Tania Kohut and I had the pleasure of meeting Jack on Thursday and interviewing him about his love of the game and how he's managed to stay so active at his age.

The Winnipeg's Gone Wacky competition is on again this year and voters have picked the 10 finalists who will compete for the title of Winnipeg's Wackiest Amateur Comedian 2011, in front of a live audience at Essence Nightclub on November 24.

Among those ten is the kindest, sweetest and perhaps funniest 89-year-old you will ever meet.

We live-streamed an open call for contestants at the News Café back in September and right away I noticed Jean Morrison sitting near the front of the room. I wondered if she was just a spectator, coming out to support a grandchild perhaps.

But when host Big Daddy Tazz called her name and she slowly made her way to the stage, most people in the room held their breath, wondering just what this woman was doing.

Together these two names are responsible for an impressive 10% of all of our video views this year.

And this week, something happened that I never thought possible. A video knocked Maria Aragon AND a 2011 flood video from the top two positions as the number one viewed video on our website this year to date.

The video? Our fun infotainment piece on the new James A. Richardson International Airport featuring Free Press reporter Geoff Kirbyson. |

Rob Williams (@rwilliamsfreep) and I had the pleasure of meeting William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) recently while he was in town for his one man show at Centennial Concert Hall.

Rob had a great conversation with the Star Trek legend  who talked about his career, his fans and his many projects on the go.

Near the end of the 15-minute interview Rob asked where the 80-year-old gets all his energy, and you may be surprised by his answer.

My favourite part is watching Rob jot notes down, and then pause, no doubt wondering where this story was going.

The story on our website about the hacked  electronic sign in Charleswood is getting a lot of comments. People seem to generally think the signs were quite funny and perhaps even effective.

Which got me thinking, perhaps MPI and other organizations should get more creative with their use of electronic billboards?

I read a series of posts on Carnival of Journalism recently pertaining to the future of online video. The general consensus among the journalists contributing to the post is that no one knows where to go with online video journalism, and I assure you, I don't have that answer either.

I can say though, of all the talk about whether the YouTube generation cares about quality or whether we should stop covering car crashes and focus on feature-length documentaries, there's surprisingly little talk about the potential of live video.

We're always trying to find ways to get you video of a news event sooner. Well, what's sooner than as it happens?

The winnipegfreepress.com has been doing live video since early 2009 and has been the only media outlet in the city consistently live streaming events to the web. It's by no means a perfect system (like when the Jets return was announced and the cell networks were clogged), but it's worked most of the time, the quality is decent and we've steadily improved the product over the last three years, adding gear and software. It's a direction we want to keep moving in and according to the viewer numbers, the interest from you is there.

Since the release of the iPhone 4 nearly a year ago, media organizations have been spending a lot of time talking about the benefits of such a device for newsgathering. It's a vast improvement on the 3GS in terms video quality. Going from 640 x 480 pixels to 1280 x 720 instantly made video producers like myself stand up and finally take a look at the iPhone for video newsgathering.

We purchased the "4" a month ago and I wanted to put it through a battery of tests to see exactly what it could do. My colleague, photographer Mike Deal, has had one for some time and has been testing out different apps for photos, videos, FTP and so on.

There's no question the iPhone is great at capturing video, but to use it for professional news coverage, it's full of limitations. But there are also a wide variety of solid solutions. See below:

Issue: The shakes -- You have to have a steady hand in order to get good video. Otherwise it just looks like (and is) bad amateur video.

It's getting down to the wire. The Winnipeg Free Press News Café is days from opening. From inside those floor to ceiling glass walls our video team (of two) will be producing live streaming content on winnipegfreepress.com. We will have a setup in place that will allow us to go live any time that news breaks. We'll be able to do live hits from the field, over the phone interviews and Skype calls. We'll eventually be doing full fledged, multi-camera live programming.

Let me remind you, everything I've stated above isn't new. It's called TV. But our version comes with a twist. This is a full scale live streaming operation, but without the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear to make it happen.

Let me elaborate: The studio cameras have been replaced by prosumer video cameras. The control room is now neatly packaged in a little piece of software called Wirecast and (this is my favourite) those expensive teleprompters? No need when you have an iPhone, an iPad and a fancy little App called ProPrompter. Check it out:

Have you heard of this cool QR code technology the kids are talking about? It's not really that new, but it seems to be catching on with the masses these days.

We recently started putting QR codes in the pages of our newspaper to allow people on mobile devices to scan and link to a specific webpage or video on our site.

Wikipedia, the always accurate internet encyclopedia defines a QR code as this:

"…a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data."

Depending on the kind of week it's been, I sometimes try to avoid checking out our video view numbers. This is because if there has been a series of bad car crashes, without a doubt, they'll garner the biggest hits of the week. I'm not sure why that is, but I guess it's the same reason people slow down and rubberneck at an accident.

So when I pushed the button to calculate our top videos of the year, I winced just a little, but was rather pleased by what I saw. There are a good number of car crash videos, but there's also a good number of original creative content gathered by our video team here at the Free Press. Below I've compiled a list of our top 10 viewed videos by you. I've removed from that list any non-original Free Press content, which includes the videos listed at the bottom of this post.

1. No Running Water - Chapter 1

The No Running Water series was the biggest multimedia project the Free Press has ever undertaken so to see the first video in the series as our top viewed of the year brings a lot of satisfaction. This video was shot by Joe Bryksa and produced by Helen Fallding and myself.