If you haven’t seen Apple’s new iPhone it is very cool and you can watch the video below. It is scheduled for release at the end of this month. There is a lot of debate about how significant this will be in the handset market. Will Apple become the big dog in cell phones, or just a bit player? Will the phone be like the iPod, an unstoppable juggernaut, or like the Mac, a niche product for a group of loyal fans?

My initial concern is that the network is too slow to really have it work as shown. I can imagine loading and waiting. I also wonder if the touch-screen keyboard is really good for those Blackberry addicts who are more into email than media. My guess is that the real keyboard is better for that.

Regardless of how it goes the networks are getting better and handsets will become another common place for viewing media — including the videos and podcasts from nonprofit organizations. If you haven’t begun building your library of content get started now. You will need it.

You know from my previous post that I am not the video guy. I think I could become the photographer with better equipment and a class in Photoshop. For this installment of the Israel trip I decided to try a slide show. Often, for our clients, we help them create slide shows instead of videos when it makes sense and we encourage them to do more themselves. When video is too complicated or you have great stills and a good story, a slide show can work very well. It is so easy to do one it is amazing that organizations don’t do more of them.

So I wanted to see how easy it would be to do a slide show. I again used Windows Media Maker, because I wanted to keep it simple. I used a really old and slow digital camera. I copied a few photos from Flickr and the web to supplement what I had. And I narrated the slide show directly into my laptop. (One problem with this technique is the ding you hear from me getting an email.) I created a movie file from this and uploaded it to YouTube. If the sound level seems low, it’s because my family has been asleep for 3 hours and I didn’t want to wake them up. So, without further ado, here’s Israel Part II — The Slide Show

Go to Israel Trip Part I – The Video.

There are two interesting articles in today’s business section.

First, a piece about how terrestrial radio stations are moving aggressively to add video content. Huh? Yup, video content. On their websites.

Across the country, radio stations are putting up video fare on their Web sites, ranging from a simple camera in the broadcast booth to exclusive coverage of events like the Super Bowl to music videos, news clips and Web-only musical performances.

“This is no longer the age of ‘having a face for radio,’ ” said Dianna Jason, the senior director of marketing and promotions at Power 106, a Los Angeles hip-hop radio station. “This is a visual medium now.”

The funny thing about this article is that they made no mention of the exact same thing happening to the newspaper. The New York Times now puts its reporters online with video, talking about their stories and even reporting from the field. I recently watched a report from Baghdad from a Times reporter with a video camera going along with troops cleaning out buildings full of snipers. There is no such thing as a face for the newspaper any more either.

The other article of interest today was about Google losing a copyright fight in Europe over links to Google News. It is hard for me to imagine that simply finding and linking to articles would violate copyright law, but it just shows to go you that this is still very early in an emerging legal area. We are paying attention to this because of the impact on issues of fair use and copyright, as they relate to online video and our clients’ work. The only thing I can tell you for certain is that it’s a good time to be an intellectual property attorney.

Speaking of the power of video… these days we are swamped by political TV ads in the run-up to the election on November 7. By now you have probably heard about the Michael J. Fox ads on behalf of some Democrats on the issue of stem cell research. Fox has Parkinson’s disease and has been a big supporter of stem cell research. In the ads he made you can see the involuntary movements that are familiar to anyone who knows someone with Parkinson’s. It’s powerful to see it, especially after knowing Fox as an actor.

Rush Limbaugh attacked Fox on his radio show. Limbaugh says Fox was faking it or he didn’t take his medication. Now we have the video of Limbaugh saying these things. It was aired on the Keith Olbermann show on MSNBC and it certainly adds to our understanding of Limbaugh as a human being. My favorite line from Olbermann: “Should we not be deferring to Rush Limbaugh on this because he knows so much more about prescription drugs than the rest of the nation combined? In fact this maybe his only area of genuine expertise.”

Here’s the Windows Media Version and here’s the QuickTime Version.