As you can see on an earlier post here, I’ve had great fun using Videoboo on my Macbook, which gives me an incredibly easy way of interviewing people with the built-in webcam. One click to start recording, one to preview, and one to send the result straight to YouTube.

Here above is a demo of Videoboo shot on my other bit of favourite socialreporting kit, a Nokia N82 mobile phone using Qik to stream video straight to the web. You get your own Qik page, and can also embed the video in your blog post as I have here.

The slight problem with the phone is that the audio isn’t great in noisy situations, and there’s been some discussion about how to fix that with an external mic. It helps to add a tripod for stability or table top recording.

As you can see in the video here I’ve found a cradle – available online here – although I haven’t yet got the external mic connection fixed.

I think that the secret of socialreporting is finding ways to avoid ending up with loads of video that you have to edit, compress and upload.

The great advantage of both Videoboo and Qik is that once you’ve shot the video it is straight up online. With both you can keep videos private after upload until you are ready to go public.

Videoboo has an additional advantage in interviewing people – it isn’t in your face, like a camera. People are intruiged by the set up, and take control as they type in their name and then decide to record, and if they are happy, upload the result. Lloyd Davis really brought this home to me in an interview here.

More here from Mark Rock and Matt Waring of Best Before Video, who developed Videoboo.