As some of you may have read, I was planning to travel to the University of Michigan and do an interview with Prof. Juan Cole, the noted expert on the Middle East and proprietor of the blog Informed Comment (juancole.com). This was an outgrowth of an email exchange that I had with him as well as some diaries I posted on dKos and on BMT.

Well, I decided to go all out and do a video nterview. I was accompanied by fellow dKosser JessicaDrewSW, who contributed her video expertise and was the cameraperson. I have just posted, for your preview, an introductory video to the full (over 1 hour) interview at the following location:

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/61748

all you have to do is go there and, after the page loads, click on the “This media file’s URL: Link” just below my picture on the web page. Left click if you want to view the video within the browser, or right click and select “Save target as…” (or similar, bepending on your browser) to save the video as a file on your computer. It is a Quicktime file.

More after the click…
The intro is about 8 minutes long and amazingly only took about 12MB, due to the fantastic compression afforded by Quicktime. If you don’t have Quicktime then the file may play in another viewer, but if not then it is easy (and free) to download Quicktime7 from apple here:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html

I assume that you already have it if you are a mac person.

If you think what I have is promising then maybe you could recommend this diary so that the interview can get a wider audience.

Unless people tell me that the video completely sucks, I will  post the full interview in a diary on the same blogs on Friday, probably around noon as well.

Feel free to respone with comments, auggestions, questions, or whatever. Please realize that I haven’t done anything even remotely like this before, so I am climbing the learning curve. That said, let me have it 🙂

Cheers!

Markinsanfran (soon to go by the callsign “Dio”)