I’ve been working at a certain television station in San Francisco for a few months now, and during those few months of work there have been a couple of times when I’ve met people and wished I had business cards to hand out.

Rather than ordering some business cards through the station, I decided to take matters into my own hands and design my own. After about an hour, the end result was this:

These are what I’m calling “Living business cards:” Simple cards that contain a quick reference or QR code in place of a logo or mugshot. When scanned, the QR code above links to http://qr.matthewkeys.net, which at the moment redirects to my main website but in the future could redirect anywhere I’d like. Eventually, I’d like to design a special landing page for mobile phones and tablets that, when scanned, contain my phone number, mailing address, email address and so on.

QR codes bring a whole new level of interactivity to business cards and other kinds of promotional material. One could place a QR code on their business card to link to their Facebook page or online resume. News organizations could start placing them on promotional index cards, where the code links to their mobile news site or links to the iTunes store for app downloads.

I built my QR code here and designed them through Zazzle.com. The total cost was around $20, which included shipping, for a box of 100 on plain white cards.

Remember the first three words of my earlier post on searching for breaking news videos on YouTube?

“Keywords are king.” That’s true for any kind of search you do regardless of which social media platform you use, including Twitter.

Twitter is pretty smart as to how it handles keyword searches: Twitter’s search engine, unlike others, will allow a person to include URLs, and portions of URLs, in its searches.

THAT makes searching for breaking news photos much easier, which I’ll demonstrate in this tutorial.

SCENARIO: There’s an explosion. Somewhere. I dunno, let’s just pretend you’ve been tasked with search for explosion photos on Twitter for whatever reason.

FIRST: Log in to Twitter, then head to http://search.twitter.com.

SECOND: Type in the keyword “explosion,” followed by the word yfrog.

Adding yfrog to the search will pull up a timeline of all photos uploaded with the popular yfrog service. You can replace yfrog with twitpic or lockerz, which are other photo services recognized by Twitter.

Sidebar: Recently, Twitter reformatted its keyword search to perform much like YouTube searches: That is, Twitter’s computer believes it knows how to conduct effective searches by showing a person relevant searches.

With that in mind, THIRD: Change the way the tweets appear in the timeline from “Top” to “All.”

This will not only show you all the tweets in a timeline, it will remove the filter that aggregates only the top tweets from people you follow. This is essential for finding breaking news photos from outside your circle of Twitter sources.

FOURTH: Clicking on the white space within a tweet should open a slide to the right of the tweet, which will reveal the piece of media. It should look something like this:

TIPS AND TRICKS:

• The above method also works if you want to search Twitter for YouTube videos, as opposed to searching YouTube for YouTube videos. Replace yfrog or twitpic with the word youtu.be or youtube. Also try searching twitvid for videos uploaded to the Twitvid service.
• Twitpic and yfrog images that are retweeted may be truncated with the t.co or ht.ly shortners. These will appear in the timelines.
• Be specific and get creative with keyword searches when browsing Twitter timelines. “Explosion” and “fire” are commonly used outside of the news sphere to describe things like desserts, etc. When searching for a fire in a particular neighborhood, searching “fire tribeca yfrog” will probably show better results for fires in the New York TriBeCa neighborhood than searching “fire yfrog” itself.
• Search Twitter hashtags associated with an event (example: damage #eqnz twitpic or #eqnz yfrog).
• Search early — usually the best time to search for photos on Twitter is within 15-30 minutes of a small- to medium-size news event and 15 minutes to an hour of a large-scale news event. After that, Twitter users may begin publishing photos they find on news websites or retweeting one piece of media multiple times, which sometimes makes it difficult to track down the original owner.
• Save your searches for faster recalls by clicking the “Save this search” button at the top of the page if the story appears as if it will develop over a larger period of time.
• If re-tweeting an image, be sure to cite the username of the person who photographed and published it.

There are also a few “Twitter search engines” for multimedia, including twipho and twicsy.  Both search engines offer the ability to customize searches for Twitter photos.

The future of journalism is filing reports straight from the field and being connected everywhere at every time, but your wireless provider could have a lot to do with how much you spend on your bill each month.

Telecommunication companies realize the strain Twitter, UStream and mobile video are putting on their networks, and rather than building new networks to accommodate the 21st Century user, some companies like AT&T and Verizon have decided to gouge customers by limiting the amount of data a person can upstream and downstream and, in some cases, severely reducing speeds once a person reaches a certain amount of data consumption in a month.

That makes being an innovative journalist difficult. One might be dissuaded to break out their mobile phone at the scene of a crime for a live stream if they’re worried they’ll be charged for going over their allotted bandwidth. But not all hope is lost, for there do exist some service providers with good data deals.

Here’s a handy breakdown of what some of the biggest companies offer in terms of data plans:

• AT&T Wireless: Formerly known as “Cingular” and “AT&T Wireless,” the mobile phone giant stopped offering unlimited data plans for its smartphone customers. Currently, data plans go for $15 for 200 MB or $25 for 2GB, with charges if you exceed that. Those who were customers during the unlimited period ($30 monthly) are grandfathered in, but may find their speeds reduced with large data consumption. Still, if you want to make a call while surfing the Internet on your iPhone, AT&T is the way to go.
• Verizon Wireless: Like AT&T, Verizon recently dropped its unlimited data package, instead offering tiered packages. 2GB of data is cheaper than AT&T’s by $5 ($20 monthly), but you won’t be able to send a tweet while calling in a breaker as Verizon’s network can’t handle data and phone calls simultaneously. Still, it’s becoming the choice (and more reliable) company for iPhone lovers. Verizon also offers the next generation in data: 4G, giving it an advantage over AT&T.
• T-Mobile: The offshoot of Deutsche Telekom takes a different approach to data. T-Mobile still has data allotments, with 2GB starting at $39, but the company won’t charge you if you go over that allotment. Instead, they slow down your speed from 4G to something significantly less than 3G. You can avoid this by opting for their 5GB or 10GB plans (at $50 and $80 respectively). You can use your 3G iPhone on T-Mobile, but only if you purchase it unlocked; better go with an Android or a MiFi hotspot device instead.
• Sprint: The only company to offer completely-unlimited data and phone calls through it’s Sprint and Nextel network. That sounds great, until you consider two things: Sprint has the smallest footprint of any of the big four mobile phone companies, and the most-advanced phones in Sprint’s lineup are their Android or Blackberry-powered devices. You can’t use an iPhone on Sprint (thuogh Sprint does offer a battery pack with built-in data technology for the iPod Touch). Still, a Sprint personal hotspot device is not a bad option for people who want unlimited connections to their iPad or other tablet.

Other good options for the budget journalist: The Virgin Mobile MiFi 2200 at $129, with no contract and plans starting at $10 and any smartphone offered by Metro PCS, with unlimited 4G connectivity starting at $60 a month.