The Pope And The Vatican Discover Qik and New Media

Look who's into New Media: The Pope and the Vatican. h2onewscrossmedia is the organization that uses the cell-phone-based live streaming online service called Qik.com. According to TechCrunch, they have more views than Ashton Kutcher!


Here's a video from their stream page:





Robert Scoble shared his thoughts with TechCrunch:

As Qik’s first user, I find the service very cool, but I find that more and more I’m moving away from it for a few reasons:

1. cell phone video is cool at first, but then you keep finding areas where it doesn’t work well and you can’t get the HD quality you can get with a newer HD camera and YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug, or Vimeo.
2. The chat room sucks in comparison to Ustream, Stickam, or Kyte.tv.
3. You can’t use your laptop’s camera, your FlipCam, or other recorded video on the service. That’s why I’ve been showing up on Kyte.tv more lately.
4. The service and/or bandwidth sometimes goes away right in the middle of doing something important (like filming a press conference) and there’s often nothing you can do about it. While on Kyte I can switch to a recording and use the service just fine when the connection comes back up.
5. I like the player on Kyte better and it’s embedable in more places.

But, Qik is better for many uses and I still use it from time to time to take videos of my family because it’s easier to use for many personal things. I hope that 2009 brings lots of upgrades to Qik so I can use it for more than just my videos of my family.

Pope Benedict XVI In Yankees Stadium - CNN TV and CNN.com

Ok, I'm watching Pope Benedict XVI hold mass in Yankees Stadium before 57,000 people and I'm glad I'm seeing it, because I was going to change the channel at first. I was about to do that because I wasn't interested in it, but then I was overcome by the fact that I'd not been to Church in a few weeks -- escaping some negative energy at Glide Memorial in SF -- and needed to see a religious event.

Plus, it's American Culture, or a part of it, and history. What's interesting is that so many people still turn out to see his holliness, which is a good thing, and a God thing too.