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).

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.

The main goal behind publishing the e-book was to bring the columns together in one easy-to-read package. In a column published yesterday (which is also Chapter 80 in the book) I describe the process of publishing Pixel Nation in some detail. It wasn’t easy. I’m glad I did it, because I learned a lot of new stuff about text editing tools and the workings of Amazon’s digital publishing platform. But the experience definitely proved that self-publishing an e-book isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re an author interested in doing this but you’re not versed in HTML, I’d recommend hiring a digital publishing consultant, somebody like Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects. (Tallent’s book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle was an indispensable guide as I went through my project.)

To give you a sense of what’s in the book, here’s the table of contents.

Introduction
1: Reinventing Our Visual World, Pixel By Pixel
2: The Coolest Tools for Trawling & Tracking the Web
3: Google Earth Grows a New Crop of 3-D Buildings, and Other Web Morsels to Savor
4: Turn Your HDTV into a Digital Art Canvas
5: Unbuilt Boston: The Ghost Cloverleaf of Canton
6: An Elegy for the Multimedia CD-ROM Stars
7: The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Screens
8: Science Below the Surface
9: Gazing Through Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope
10: Megapixels, Shmegapixels: How to Make Great Gigapixel Images With Your Humble Digital Camera
11: You Say Staccato, I Say Sfumato: A Reply to Nicholas Carr
12: Space Needle Envy: A Bostonian’s Ode to Seattle
13: You’re Listening to Radio Lab—Or You Should Be
14: Can Evernote Make You into a Digital Leonardo?
15: Are You Ready to Give Up Cable TV for Internet Video?
16: Turn your iPhone or iPod into a Portable University
17: In Defense of the Endangered Tree Octopus, and Other Web Myths
18: Pogue on the iPhone 3G: A Product Manual You Won’t Be Able to Put Down
19: Photographing Spaces, Not Scenes, with Microsoft’s Photosynth
20: What Web Journalists Can Learn from Comics
21: ZvBox’s Unhappy Marriage of PC and HDTV
22: GPS Treasure Hunting with Your iPhone 3G
23: Boston Unblurred: Debunking the Google Maps Censorship Myth
24: Four Ways Amazon Could Make Kindle 2.0 a Best Seller
25: Playful vs. Preachy: Sizing Up TV’s New Science Dramas
26: Is Brown the New Green? Why Boston’s Ugly, Expensive Macallen Condos Shouldn’t Be a Model For Green Buildings
27: The Encyclopedia of Life: Can You Build A Wikipedia for Biology Without the Weirdos, Windbags, and Whoppers?
28: In Google Book Search Settlement, Readers Lose
29: In the World of Total Information Awareness, “The Last Enemy” Is Us
30: Attention, Startups: Move to New England. Your Gay Employees Will Thank You.
31: Springpad Wants to Be Your Online Home for the Holidays, And After
32: Speak & Spell: New Apps Turn Phones into Multimedia Search Appliances
33: Former “Daily Show” Producer Karlin is Humorist Behind WonderGlen Comedy Site
34: The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859—and How to See in Stereo on Your iPhone
35: Ditch That USB Cable: The Coolest Apps for Sending Your Photos Around Wirelessly
36: Have Xtra Fun Making Movies with Xtranormal
37: E-Book Readers on the iPhone? They’re Not Quite Kindle Slayers Yet
38: WonderGlen Comedy Portal Designed to Plumb Internet’s Unreality, Says Karlin
39: How I Declared E-Mail Bankruptcy, and Discovered the Bliss of an Empty Inbox
40: Public Radio for People Without Radios
41: Plinky: The Cure for Blank Slate Syndrome
42: Massachusetts Technology Industry Needs a New Deal, Not a New Brand
43: Three New Reasons To Put Off Buying a Kindle
44: Top 9 Tech Updates: Photosynth, Geocaching, Google Earth, and More
45: Google Voice: It’s the End of the Phone As We Know It
46: Tweets from the Edge: The Ins and Outs (and Ups and Downs) of Twitter
47: Will Hunch Help You Make Decisions? Signs Point to Yes
48: Boston Can Survive, Even Thrive, Without Today’s Globe
49: RunKeeper’s Mad Dash to the Marathon Finish
50: Cutting the Cable: It’s Easier Than You Think
51: Why Kindle 2 is the Goldilocks of E-Book Readers
52: People Doing Strange Things With Soldering Irons: A Visit to Hackerspace
53: Will Quick Hit Score Big? Behind the Scenes with Foxborough’s Newest Team
54: Are You a Victim of On Demand Disorder?
55: German Web 2.0 Clothing Retailer Spreadshirt Finds Boston Fits It to a T
56: Boston’s Digital Entertainment Economy Begins to Sense Its Own Strength
57: The Eight (Seven…Six?) Information Devices I Can’t Live Without
58: Personal Podcasting with AudioBoo, UK’s “Twitter for Voice”
59: Art Isn’t Free: The Tragedy of the Wikimedia Commons
60: Project Tuva or Bust: How Microsoft’s Spin on Feynman Could Change the Way We Learn
61: Shareaholic Becomes the Link-Sharing Tool of Choice
62: Startups Give E-mail a Big Boost on the iPhone with ReMail and GPush
63: Why It’s Crazy for Authors to Keep Their Books Off the Kindle
64: A Manifesto for Speed
65: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part One
66: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Two
67: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Three
68: Ansel Adams Meets Apple: The Camera Phone Craze in Photography
69: How to Launch a Professional-Looking Blog on a Shoestring
70: Facing Up to Facebook
71: The Kauffman Foundation: Bringing Entrepreneurship Up to Date in Kansas City
72: Sony, Google Point the Way Toward a More Open Future for E-Books
73: Is it Real or Is It High Dynamic Range?
74: Using Google’s Building Maker to Change the Face of Boston
75: Digital Magazines Emerge—But Glossy Paper Publishers Haven’t Turned the Page on the Past
76: Tablet Fever: How Apple Could Go Where No Computer Maker Has Gone Before
77: Entrepreneurship May Work Like A Clock, But It Still Needs Winding
78: The Apple Paradox: How a Company That’s So Closed Can Foster So Much Open Innovation
79: What’s So Magical About an Oversized iPhone? Plenty—And There’s More to Come
80: Kindle Conniptions: How I Published My First E-Book

What makes being Slashdotted a special joy, though, is that the Slashdot community is notoriously questioning, critical, and sometimes even a little biting. So when you find out you’ve been Slashdotted, you’re simultaneously praising the gods of cyberspace and bracing for an onslaught of snark.

If a visitor from Slashdot doesn’t like the look, feel, or style of your site or your article, they won’t hesitate to let you know. One Xconomy article that got Slashdotted a while back was a multi-page piece, and all of the comments from Slashdot visitors were complaints about how annoying it was to have to hit “next page” three or four times to read the whole piece. Today, the very first comment on my Apple article from a Slashdot visitor—in fact, the comment that tipped me off that we’d been Slashdotted—focused on an (admittedly gratuitous) neologism in the first paragraph (the word was “mediasphere”) and on how amateurish the column logo looks. (I know that, but in my defense, the goofiness is partly intentional. And I’m planning on finding someone to design a better logo.)

So far the Slashdot entry about my piece has generated 526 comments on Slashdot, compared to about 20 comments on Xconomy itself. Sometimes I wish readers would stick with Xconomy’s own comment section to talk about our pieces. But on the other hand, a lot of the discussion over at Slashdot boils down to vituperative name-calling—as is the case with most online discussions involving Apple or Microsoft (not just those at Slashdot)—so it’s probably best kept within Slashdot’s walls.

I laughed at David Pogue’s lines today, in a blog post about reader response to his review of the Google Nexus One phone: “Veteran tech columnists know one thing very well indeed: If you write anything positive about an Apple product or negative about a Microsoft product, you get buried by hate mail and personal attacks. The only worse result is if you say something negative about an Apple product or positive about a Microsoft product, in which case you get exposed to the true ugliness of the human spirit (and sometimes, in fact, physical threats).” All true—and I guess I feel like I escaped today relatively unscathed.

It’s a dilemma, actually, because the HDR “look” can be peculiar, artificial, even surreal. If you lived in a world where every photograph was made this way, you’d have a constant migraine. But for now, I’m a little bit addicted to HDR (see my Flickr photoset of HDR photos of New England here). And at the risk of getting you addicted, too, I want to talk this week about how the technique works, what you can do with it, and how it can help all of us question some of the conventions and expectations we’ve built up around the art of photography, and around the related art of looking at photographs.

HDR images are unusual because they don’t represent a single moment in time, like most photos, but rather are digital fusions of several images of the same scene, taken at different exposure levels. (In photography, the longer the exposure time, the more light gets captured by a camera’s film or digital sensor, and the brighter the resulting image.) To collect raw material for an HDR image, photographers generally take at least three pictures: one that’s underexposed, one that’s overexposed, and one at a normal exposure. This is called exposure bracketing.

(This is an excerpt from the November 6, 2009 edition of World Wide Wade. To continue reading, please see the full column on Xconomy.)

Sure, I would have loved to see Obama in person—as one of our contributors commented, “that guy is a rock star.” But I think our report, in the end, was probably a better reflection of our mission at Xconomy than a single journalist’s first-hand report would have been. By reaching out to the community, we were able to bring our readers a diverse (and not wholly adulatory) group of perspectives on what the President said.

At Xconomy headquarters, we ordered Thai takeout for lunch and watched the speech on the Internet. In my personal view, the speech was long on cheerleading and short on specifics. But I guess a realpolitik view would say that you can’t fight every battle at once. It may be necessary to get healthcare reform nailed down before proceeding to the details of a climate change bill.

Apart from the policy stuff—it was interesting to ponder how much the President’s visit, which was announced only about 72 hours before he showed up, altered the daily schedules of thousands of people around Boston and Cambridge. There was the frenzy of competition to get an invitation to Kresge Auditorium, of course. But as I biked to work through the MIT campus on Friday, it was amazing to see how quickly the environment had been transformed into an armed camps, hordes of police and secret service officers, and the helicopters and army trucks and police boats circling about on the Charles—a transformation that was just as quickly undone after the President departed. And to think that this goes on everywhere the President travels. As I commented in a Twitter post, it’s a good thing the President doesn’t visit Boston every day, or we’d all be exhausted.

Here’s the article, by Elisabeth Vene, followed by Google’s somewhat fractured translation. (I don’t know where the heck Google came up with the “SHEBANG” part.)

Gå i mejlkonkurs – få ett liv

Undrar du hur det känns att ha en alldeles tom inkorg? Gå i mejlkonkurs och starta ett nytt liv.

Det finns ett radikalt sätt att hantera sina mejl: kasta allihop och meddela kontakterna att man har gått i mejlkonkurs.

-?Jag kände mig lätt och fri. Fast känslan varade bara i ungefär i två minuter, innan ett nytt meddelande poppade upp på skärmen, berättar Wade Roush på den amerikanska nyhetssajten Xconomy.

Wade Roush fick rådet att göra sig av med rubbet när han var uppe i 15?000 ohanterade mejl. Han fuskade lite genom att arkivera dem i ett Gmail-konto på nätet. Men han slipper

i alla fall se dem varje dag, och han har meddelat sina kontakter vad han har hittat på.

Hädanefter tänker han följa it-experten Mark Hursts råd och tömma inboxen åtminstone en gång per arbetsdag.

Translation:

Join the email bankruptcy – get a life

Do you wonder how it feels to have a completely empty inbox? Join the email bankruptcy and start a new life.

There is a radical way to manage their email: throw them all and inform the contacts that we have been in email bankruptcy.

- ‘I felt easy and free. Real feeling only lasted for about two minutes, before a new message popped up on screen, “says Wade Roush in the American news site Xconomy.

Wade Roush was advised to discard SHEBANG when he was up at 15? 000 unmanaged email. He cheated a bit by archiving them in a Gmail account on the web. But he do not have to

in all cases to see them every day, and he has informed his contacts that he has invented.

Henceforth, he intends to follow the IT experts Mark Hurst advice and empty inbox at least once a day.

The truth is that I’ve fallen off the “empty inbox” bandwagon a bit. In fact, my inbox is back up to about 3,000 messages right now. So I’m about to archive everything and start fresh.

I think that the key to succeeding with a “zero inbox” approach is to be pretty religious about it. If you neglect to empty your inbox for even one weekday, it becomes twice as hard to do it the next day, and three times as hard the day after that, et cetera.

Well, Facebook may still be a fad, but with 300 million users and growing, it’s a remarkably enduring one. It’s probably time for me to get used to it. On top of that, I’ve had some experiences over the last couple of weeks that have started to change my attitude about the site.

It started with my iPhone. Two weeks ago, as you might remember, I wrote a column about “The Best Camera.” It’s an iPhone app created by Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis as part of a cross-media campaign promoting his message that “the best camera is the one that’s with you.” The app lets you apply some intriguing digital effects to the photos you snap with the iPhone’s built-in camera. It also lets you upload your processed images directly to Facebook, where every new shot will show up on your Wall and in your friends’ news feeds.

I’ve sent a few of my Best Camera shots to my Facebook photo albums, and a truly surprising thing has happened. People have been commenting on the photos. Not a huge crowd of people, but enough to make me realize that there are Facebook users who actually pay attention to the new stuff they see every day, and that some of them care enough to leave feedback.

This is an excerpt from the October 9, 2009, edition of World Wide Wade. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.