A promise Philly fans probably won’t keep

God bless Charlie Manuel for winning the world championship with my beloved Phillies. But he was not the most articulate manager in the World Series. That would be the Tampa Bay Rays’ Joe Maddon. Even though his young team - the worst in baseball a year ago — didn’t win the Series, Maddon said their experience would change them forever: “The mind, once stretched, never returns to its original shape” (my paraphrase of his paraphrase of a quote attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes).

That’s been a philosophy I’ve been pursuing at the TreeHouse Media Project. I don’t expect myself or anyone visiting this site to necessarily become an expert in video, audio, podcasting, website design or search engine optimization. But once you’ve learned some of the basic skills they remain forever part of your multimedia toolkit, even if you turn to experts to execute them for you.

It was in that spirit that we launched My1stTime, a guide to the presidential race for first-time voters. Our hope was that by incorporating some fun features - pictures and video of the celebrities supporting McCain and Obama; Facebook applications such as Sarah Palin, Guardian of the Northern Frontier - we would lure young voters into reading comparisons of the candidates’ positions on energy and health care.

In the process, we hoped to learn something about shooting, editing and posting videos and promoting our content through social networking sites. On the first point the project was an unqualified success, though the videos I shot won’t win any Emmys - not even those crappy local ones.  It was my first experience using Macintosh’s iMovie, the easy-to-learn video-editing program.

We learned that you can shoot decent-looking video interviews with a simple consumer camera under the right conditions. We also learned the shortfalls of these cameras: because they have no inputs for microphones you are limited to the audio picked up by the on-camera mic. That means you will hear lots of background noise, such as the concert and speakers that threaten to drown out the subjects I interviewed at an Obama voter registration rally headlined by Bruce Springsteen.

We also learned how to use a terrific free tool called TubeMogul, which allows you to upload a video to more than a dozen video-hosting sites at once and provides statistics on viewership. We also learned that while there are many competitors out there, YouTube still generates most of the traffic - three-quarters of our nearly 500 views to date were on that channel. We also learned that if someone you don’t know says they want to “friend” you, it’s probably a porn site. (Strangely, most of the viewers on YouTube were 34-54, not the teens and 20s featured in the videos. And 70% were men. Are these just a bunch of horny middle age guys with nothing better to do than look at college coeds?)

We also learned some of the fine points of WordPress. We started with a 3-column German Newspaper template (a “Theme” in WordPress parlance) and modified it by changing typefaces and some of the layout.

On the second point, using social networking sites to publicize our content, we were decidedly less successful. First I was booted from Facebook for using a fake name, Barack McCain, for a profile I hoped to use to drive traffic to the site. Second, we didn’t launch the website until Oct. 24 - less than two weeks before the election and not enough time to build much of an audience. And by the time we did launch, I was  so exhausted from a series of 18-hour production days that I had little time or energy to promote it.

But I’m happy to have done it.

So, what are you doing to stretch your mind?

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