With ZDNet's pod-vidcasting TestBed prototype, we look at the new AJAXy AOL Mail

Last December, I wrote about how we here at ZDNet were looking to live on the bleeding edge of media innovation. In terms of publishing content and subsequently, the availability and virality of that content, the immediacy of social networking technologies like blogging have really changed ZDNet and other media companies forever.

On an ongoing basis, the question for us has been how to fully leverage social networking technologies to take what we do to the next level. We're always looking to take what we do to the next level anyway. For example, bringing the text we've offered forever to life with still images, audio, and video and then integrating that into a single package so that audience members can get the content any way they want it. One example of this sort of packaging can be seen in my coverage of Microsoft's Office Communications Suite from earlier this year. As other social technologies like Twitter come along, we've been looking into their meaning in terms of what we do too.

As you can probably imagine, video is hardest form of content to work with. Not only does it take the longest of all the medium types to go from a blank canvas to something that's published online, there are logistics involved that simply don't come into play with text, audio, and still images. For example, how to get the product or service in front of the camera. This is one reason I've been building a video/podcasting studio in the basement of my house. It's by no means a typical studio. It's being built with the needs of technology coverage in mind. The idea is that no matter where the people or products are in the world, we can cover them from my home office.

We've already been doing this with my podcasting setup. I'm offered interviews all the time. But to do them, I'd normally have to go somewhere. It's a time killer. But since my very first podcasts, we've been offering interviewees the opportunity to do these interviews by phone instead. With something as simple as a decent mixer, a decent microphone, and a good digital hybrid device for bringing a phone line into the mix the way radio and TV stations do it, we've had a lot of success and published many podcasts with the sort of audio quality that one would expect from a talk radio station like National Public Radio.

For our next trick, we wanted to bring video of the software demonstrations into the mix. Until today, all of our software demonstrations involved someone coming to us, or us going to them. For the aforementioned Live Communications Suite review, we went to Microsoft's offices in Massachusetts -- a trip that involved productivity-killing driving time. The time it took us to drive there is time we could have used to video tape something else. The time it took for us to drive back was time we could have used to edit the video itself. It's not a very scalable model.

With today's interview/preview of AOL's brand new AJAX-driven Webmail interface, we're looking to tip the scales of multimedium editorial productivity in our favor. Using the studio in my basement (which is still only part way operational), the above video was produced using two video cameras, my podcasting rig, and WebEx.

First, because of the phone system's reliability and because of the quality we've been getting using my podcasting rig (which involves JK Audio's InnKeeper 1 Digital Hybrid), we asked AOL Mail Products vice president Roy Ben-Yoseph to call us via landline for the audio part of the software demonstration. Then, we asked him to use WebEx for the visual part of the demonstration. Lastly, we used two video cameras. One was a our high end Panasonic HVX200 that we pointed at our local "WebEx terminal." The other -- an el cheapo Sony video camera from 1999 -- was pointed at me (as it turns out, light is the critical issue for video....if you have good light, a lot of video cameras will do).

I'll be the first one to say that this first experiment isn't exactly where we'd like to be in terms of a quality software demonstration. Matt Conner, the multimedia whiz that does all the camera, audio, and publishing work behind the scenes was so unhappy with it, he didn't want to publish it. But as a statement of our direction and how we're trying to change the media space, I'm not shy about publishing what we've got so far. You do get to see AOL's new mail interface. You do get to hear the voice of the guy in charge of it and how passionate he is. You do get a sense of how, when fully operational, our modest little studio can deliver a steady stream of software demonstrations over which I can preside -- interjecting questions and criticisms and doing what we're supposed to do: delivering objective editorial to you.

As you can see, we've even taken the audio from this interview and broken it out as a stand alone podcast (in the event you just want to hear the demo). Please let me know what you think of how we're doing and what we could do better. I'm reachable at david.berlind@cnet.com.

Finally, a few parting comments on what I saw in the demo: AOL Mail's AJAXy interface is definitely more interactive than any of its predecessors. However, to the extent that it integrates email with instant messaging, I believe it should have also ushered in a single contact list instead of staying with separate ones (contact list for mail and a separate buddy list for AIM). AOL's mail is ad-supported. I think the company should offer a paid version with no ads and I was a bit put off by the way AOL is launching the product with the ability to read RSS feeds -- but just the ones AOL wants you to see and not the ones we should be able to pick. Ben-Yoseph says a more configurable version of that option is on the way.