For the past three months, I have been working on major projects as a special advisor to the School of Communication at American University here in Washington D.C. and as journalist-in-residence for the Knight Center for International Media within the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

Enthusiasm and dynamic, focused discussions marked last week’s Online News Association09 Conference and Awards Ceremony in San Francisco, in sharp contrast to other gatherings of journalists that I have attended this year. One might say it almost seemed like “irrational exuberance.”

NPR’s release of their NPR News iPhone app is now almost a month old.

I am a big fan of the use of direct field observations to help stimulate new product innovations; a technique embraced by firms such as Ideo.

To that end, I have recently been watching my college-bound daughter and her friends interact as they all experience the beginning of their freshman year. Their media choices and media consumption patterns are particularly relevant to me as they are harbingers of a future that will be shaped by the habits of the first generation of “digital natives.”

As I regroup after several weeks of personal and professional travel, I wanted to address an interesting question that was raised recently as I was doing a live discussion on video journalism for knowledgewebb.net.

Today, I wanted to acknowledge my multimedia colleagues at MSNBC.com marking the first decade of “The Week in Pictures”, or TWIP as it is known in the trade. MSNBC.com senior multimedia editor Meredith Birkett has put together a good behind-the-scenes look that details both the history and ambition of this presentation – a mainstay feature of their visual journalism presentation.

After attending last week’s AEJMC conference, I spent some time this week reviewing notes drawn from interesting blog posts and presentations encountered over the past year.

I was drawn back to a keynote presentation given by Jane McGonigal to the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin in March, 2008.

As we prepared for the VJ workshop at Brooks Institute I had multiple e-mail conversations with Paul Myers, a professor there. We discussed a theme for my individual talk and overall aspirations for the project.