Anyway, it was interesting to see a little bit of natural drama unfold right on my street. My camcorder was right at hand so I grabbed it and filmed a few minutes of the action. Shortly after I stopped filming the hawk finished its meal, picked a few bits of blood and meat off its talons, cleaned its beak against the wooden pole, and flew away.

Here’s the result. Lots of unsteady shots—I definitely need some practice with the stability. Not to mention just grabbing eye-catching shots. But hey, it’s a first solo outing.

Usually I’d be paying more attention to the scenery and taking more pictures, but on this trip, there’s a very clear goal, aside from getting to San Francisco: publishing one new video on Xconomy every weekday, based on our conversations about technology and entrepreneurship with people along our route. We’re calling the video series World Wide Wade Goes West, and you can check out the whole sequence at YouTube.com/xconomywest.

My friend and co-pilot Graham Gordon Ramsay and I made a couple of test videos before we left Boston, and they came out well. But I wasn’t quite sure if it would be possible, logistically or physiologically, to do the same thing every day on the road. After all, we’re compressing the whole shooting, editing, and uploading process into a single day for each video while simultaneously covering 700 to 800 miles of highway. But we’ve managed it so far, at the cost of a certain amount of sleep.

And we’ve had a ton of fun in the process. Our interviewees have all been fantastic, offering great insights and being incredibly generous hosts and good sports on top of it all. It’s been a pleasure and an education to work with Graham, who is always full of creative ideas about how to get the shots we need under the conditions given to us at each site. And I’ve had fun learning how to be an on-camera personality. (I’m keeping the blooper reel under lock and key.)

Check out this Flickr photoset to see pictures from our trip (mostly taken by Graham.) And here are links to the whole video series:

Pilot/Preview Episode (Recorded May 8, posted June 14)
Episode I: Gloucester, MA (Recorded May 29, posted June 28; interviewee: Mark Nelson)
Episode II: Rochester, NY (Recorded June 27, posted June 29; interviewee: David Cook)
Episode III: Who’s Wade? (Recorded June 29, posted June 30; interviewee: Wade Roush)
Episode IV: Torch Lake, MI (Recorded June 29, posted July 1; interviewees: Sharon and Dean Branson)
Episode V: Minneapolis, MN (Recorded June 30, posted July 2; interviewee: Oliver Zhou)

At least two more episodes are coming next week — Wall, SD, and Denver, CO. So keep an eye on Xconomy and the YouTube channel!

A lot of people have contributed their time, effort, generosity, and counsel to this project, and I want to thank them personally:

Fan Bi
Bruce Bigelow
Dean Branson
Sharon Branson
Biyeun Buczyk
Bob Buderi
Greg Calkins
Heinrich Christensen
David Cook
Winnie Dahlgren
Bill Darmon
Richard Freierman
Maria Gentile
Bill Ghormley
Dave Hahn
Bettina Hein
Greg Huang
Erin Kutz
JL
Howard Lovy
Mark Nelson
Jon Pierce
Jules Pieri
Graham Gordon Ramsay
Lauren Ramsay
Patricia Roush
Paul Roush
Alexa Scordato
Gregg Sorensen
Luke Timmerman
Steve Woit
Rebecca Zacks
Oliver Zhou

We put the pilot for the whole series online back on June 14, the day we launched the San Francisco site, and the series will get underway in earnest starting Monday, June 28. You can watch the daily posts at www.xconomy.com/san-francisco or subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/xconomywest. I hope you’ll follow along as we wind our way through Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and of course California, stopping along the way to talk with real people about how technology figures in their lives, what the climate for entrepreneurship is like in their communities, and whether the innovators Xconomy chronicles daily are serving their real needs.

The debut of Xconomy San Francisco is a big moment for me, personally, because it represents a chance for me to move back to San Francisco after four years away from The City. I’ve loved being back in Boston since 2007; it was the ideal place for a career switch to online-only journalism. The opportunity to work with Bob, Xconomy co-founder Rebecca Zacks, and the whole Xconomy team has been amazingly fun and educational. And it’s been a huge privilege to cover the burgeoning Boston-area entrepreneurial scene, which is full of brilliant and friendly people. But as Jeanette McDonald sang in her paean to San Francisco in the archetypal 1936 disaster movie, “Other places only make me love you best / Tell me you’re the heart of all the golden west.”

Together with my colleagues—principally, Xconomy Seattle Editor and National Biotechnology Editor Luke Timmerman—I’ll be operating the San Francisco site remotely for a couple of weeks while I wrap up some final tasks here in Boston. (After all, I can’t miss the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship this Thursday!) Then I’ll be hitting the road for San Francisco—and publishing a video travelogue series along the way (details on that here, along with the pilot video in the series).

I did find the iPad version of WordPress and I am using it to write this post. So far the mechanics of the device are pretty congenial. I’m finding it much easier to touch type with all 10 fingers than I anticipated. The only downside that I see so far is that the device is surprisingly heavy. I will have to experiment with different ways of holding it and propping it up. Already I’m feeling a bit of “pinky strain” from holding the gadget in one hand, with the weight of it resting on my pinky.

I was number 20 in line at the Apple store this morning, and had a lot of fun waiting in line with the other Apple fans. You can read all about that over at Xconomy.

But as far as I know, nobody has really considered the effect our malpractice system has on the people who inevitably have to decide each case: jurors.

That’s the point of my Xconomy column from yesterday. Last Tuesday, I completed three weeks of jury service on a medical malpractice trial in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston. It was a heart-wrenching case that pitted an elderly pastor from a Boston suburb against three doctors who treated him during an infection-related crisis seven years ago. The plaintiff’s attorney argued, among other things, that the doctors failed to order the proper imaging studies that would have detected the infection that ultimately inflicted permanent damage on the pastor’s spinal cord, leaving him disabled.

Now, obviously the pastor and his family are the ones who have suffered all these years with the consequences of the episode. The burden on the 14 jurors was, by comparison, negligible. But the experience did give all of us a disturbing look inside both the medical system and the malpractice system, and forced us to make an awkward and difficult choice. In the end, what we had to decide was not whether the pastor deserved some kind of compensation for the obvious shortcomings in the care he received, but whether the three doctors named as defendants in the suit were negligent.

Ultimately, we found that the evidence did not support this claim, which meant that the pastor and his family will get no damage award. It was the black-or-white, all-or-nothing nature of the decision we had to make that bothered me and, I believe, the other jurors. It was obvious that the pastor’s various caregivers made decisions all along the line that, in retrospect, were the wrong ones. Yet it was impossible for the jury to conclude in this case that missing a diagnosis constituted malpractice, or to pin responsibility on any single individual in the chain.

In the end, “justice” was served, but fairness was not. I emerged from the trial feeling that we’d performed our duty well as jurors, given the limits within which we were forced to navigate. But I also feel a heightened cynicism about the malpractice system, which (no offense to the excellent attorneys involved in this case) seems mainly designed to prop up the incomes of lawyers. It’s too bad malpractice reform wasn’t a part of President Obama’s healthcare reform package. There might be more pressure for change if it the flaws in the system were exposed to wider view, instead of just 14 jurors at a time.

Two developments last week (the first official week of Mass Mobile Month) were especially exciting. First there was the release of the official Mass Mobile Month iPhone app, a handy portable guide to all of the mobile-related events this month and their venues. Cambridge, MA-based Swift Mobile created the app; it’s a variation on the apps they’re developing for the travel and meeting industry (see our coverage of Swift Mobile on Xconomy).

Second, I had the opportunity last week to meet Kathy Kiely, president of the Ad Club, the trade association for marketing and advertising companies in New England, and record an interview about Mass Mobile Month for The Big Orange Couch, the club’s online video series. I hate watching myself on video, but I think this one actually came out pretty well! It’s embedded below.

One of the highlights of Mass Mobile Month is Xconomy’s own Mobile Madness event on March 9. If you haven’t signed up yet, do it now—last I checked, the event was nearly sold out. Unfortunately, after spending the last few months organizing Mobile Madness, I may wind up missing some or all of it, as I’ve been seated as a juror for a trial in Boston that’s expected to last several weeks.

I want to thank all of the organizations who have joined Xconomy in promoting the Mass Mobile Month events. All of these organizations recognize that by working together, we can take Boston’s amazing cluster of talent and ideas for mobile innovation and make it into something even more remarkable and world-changing.