Talking tech.

I just realized that despite the fact I work in a technology field, am a founder of a technology collective and have integrated many gadgets into my creative life – I never, ever blog about technology. I talk about it, indeed – and can trade geek jokes like the best of them – but the truth is that I don’t think about it too much unless I’m buying new gear. And I don’t get all that excited when I do. It’s just all the more software/hardware to be integrated into the routine.

A friend recently laughed at me because of my overly-large “purse” – an accessory item I never had a need for until I started wanting both my laptop and digital camera with me on a semi-regular basis. Fortunately my current bag also has room for my new Zoom device, so I can easy pack all my encased technology into one very stylish bag rather than some ratty backpack. Yup. For someone who never talks about technology, I am awfully obsessed with having the right tech at my disposal at the right time. I suppose that’s what I mean about integrated, when you have what you need and know what to use it requires less thought than access and understanding of the tools.

Two brand new tools in my life are Google Analytics and my new Zoom media device, both of which I’m delighted with and exploring for the first time.

Google Analytics came into my life a few months ago when a co-worker in Ottawa turned me onto its power for recording website statistics and mapping them in fancy charts and graphs. I finally got around to installing it on this blog a few days ago and I am just as impressed to see it in operation as I was at the demonstration. Much more accurate than the statistics software I was using before (which picked up all manner of robots and rss feeds), I am coming to realize that my actual site visits per day are much lower than I had been previously recording. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a respectable audience – but it is about a quarter of what had been recorded previously. By far the coolest feature is the map function which allows you to see the countries and cities from which people are surfing your site via a map overview. (Yes, Fhar, I even can see that I have one reader all the way over in Cairo). There is also a function for site overlay which brings up your site and shows the frequency with which your links out are clicked.

I suppose my one complaint is that because it doesn’t seem to be picking up on the rss feeds I have no way of knowing how many people read my blog offsite through an rss-aggregator. Then again it may be just that I haven’t had this running for enough days to get a complete picture of all readership either. I’m looking forward to having a month of data logged so I can get a real sense of how this blog is doing in terms of visitors. Then the question is – do I care if my readership is only 50 per day? Does it need to be more to be successful? How do you measure success when there is no profit being made anyhow? I suppose that’s fodder for another post in the future.

Which brings me to the second new toy – the Zoom H2 media device pictured above – which I purchased expressly to produce new and different content for this blog and other web forums. Again, I just received this two days ago and have had no time to really play with it – but am so far very pleased with what I have seen of it. For a $200 field recorder this comes loaded with accessories and recording options. Four microphones built-in front and back, easy to use interface, and from what I can tell so far – excellent recording quality even with the built-in mikes. It records in various WAV and MP3 qualities depending on how much room you’ve got on the SD card, and though I haven’t tried uploading any sound to my computer yet, I understand the process is quite seamless. The whole device is about the size of a pack of cards which makes it easy to tuck into the media bag or pocket on the go.

The last time I did any recording outside of a studio was about ten years ago in university where our field recorders were high-end Sony cassette decks that cost about $600 apiece with the expensive mike we used for ambient and interview recordings. (And yes, we transferred all our recordings onto reel-to-reel tape and did our editing with razorblade and patch tape). Given that it’s been such a long time I have to say that I am absolutely blown away by the ease of recording and editing with a digital device. I really did love sound design and I think learning manual editing methods were good for me, but I’m not at a point in my life where I have that kind of time. The Zoom device is a pretty easy capture and transfer device. I’m not sure how it compares with the minidisk recorders but at less than half the price I don’t really care either. (And given the rave reviews for this device I’m sure it will do everything I need for multimedia podcasting).

Anyone of you care to be interviewed? I’m going to start storyboarding some posts soon – but I might just go with a few simple podcast recordings to increase my own comfort with the device. I’ll let you all know how it goes – or you can tune in to hear all about it when I get the time to play more. Because that’s what the new tech is really about… playtime.