We shot most of the interviews on our two HD camcorders, but they are a lot harder to work, especially when we had to do five interviews in one day, like we did on Wednesday. We now have a new rule: no more than three interviews on any one day. Five almost killed us, especially since two of them weren’t in the same place so we needed to take taxis across town (and after doing all that work we had a party where 500 people showed up to see me and Gary Vaynerchuk — thanks to Andrew Feinberg and Nick O’Neil and several others for helping to make that a really great event).

We did so many interviews and meetings I am having trouble remembering them all.

Let’s see if I can remember them all, and link to their videos on Qik.

1. Speaker of the House’s Private Balcony. Great views down the National Mall.
2. Senator Tom Coburn. We got that on Qik, but it’s hard to hear — we’ll get our HD version up in next couple of weeks.
3. Representative Tim Ryan. Part I on Qik. Part II. HD version coming soon. Those were shot with Andrew Feinberg’s Nokia. I also shot it, but we had a ton of trouble getting a reliable connection, so I didn’t get the whole thing. But my recordings are here: Part I (before the Interview started). Part II. Part III. I called Tim “the Twittering Congressman).
4. A tour of the Senate’s Press Room (recording devices and computers are not allowed into the press area on Senate Floor).
5. Representative John Culberson. I liked him the best, he started out by showing us how he ambushed a reporter with his Qik video camera. Then he sat down with us and we had a fun conversation. Andrew Feinberg also filmed this interview and got a different point of view on the conversation (I liked his view better, and my camera crashed so I missed some of the coolest stuff while we were walking through his office. Luckily Andrew got that).
6. Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of NCTA. Only filmed on our HD camcorders, we’ll have that up in the next couple of weeks.
7. Representative Cliff Stearns. Only filmed on our HD camcorders, we’ll have that up in the next couple of weeks.
8. Representative Ed Markey. Only filmed on our HD camcorders, we’ll have that up in the next couple of weeks.
9. FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. Here’s my view of the Interview on my cell phone. It’ll be fun to see this compared with our HD camcorders.
10. Representative Zoe Lofgren. Only filmed on our HD camcorders, we’ll have that up in the next couple of weeks.
11. Barack Obama’s Tech Advisor, Alec Ross. Not filmed, since it was just a breakfast meeting.
12. White House Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel. See below.
13. Deputy Director of Newseum, Jack Hurley gave us a tour of the Newseum. More on that in a second. See below.

We had two cancellations due to scheduling conflicts. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi and Representative George Miller. We’ll be back in DC in September, so will try again then to setup interviews with them.

The Newseum tour was split up into several parts. The Deputy Director of Newseum showed us around.

1. Lobby and 2-million-pixel screen. Shows us a news helicopter hanging in lobby and world’s largest hydraulic elevators.
2. Top of Newseum (great views of the Capitol).
3. Today’s Front Pages (every day they hang more than 600 front pages from around the world — printed out via PDFs).
4. The 9/11 Gallery where a piece of the Pentagon, the cameras of the only journalist to die, front pages from around the world on 9/12, and the top of the World Trade Center.
5. First Amendment walkway and gallery, which explain and demonstrate the freedoms Americans have due to the First Amendment.
6. Master Control where a wall of computers and screens let a group of technicians to run all the systems in the museum (which is massive).
7. Internet, TV, and Radio Gallery. Twitterer Jim Long is even featured in one of the videos on one of the walls that explain blogging).
8. Journalists Memorial, which shows the hundreds of journalists who’ve died. Also shows off an armored pickup truck that protected journalists and is riddled with flak and bullet holes. Later, at about 3 minutes into this video, we see a map of the world which shows whether or not your country has a free press.
9. Interactive newsroom gallery. Here you can create your own newscast, and play a game to test out your journalistic ethics.

Scott Stanzel, White House Deputy Press Secretary, shows us the Rose Garden, the outside of the Oval Office, the press area, and more. Sorry about the poor quality, I couldn’t get much bandwidth out of the Rose Garden. Later Marine One (a helicopter that holds the President) arrives, and I get told I can’t do live video while the President is outside. Even later Scott takes us into the White House Briefing Room and gives us a tour of that.

Finally, as we were checking out of our hotel we encountered a crowd of press and protesters waiting for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to show up.

Anyway, as we get more of our “pro quality” video up I’ll link those in as well.

My son and I shot hundreds of photos, I uploaded the best 30 or so to my Flickr account. But wanted to call a few out here so you could see my favorites.

TEACHING PATRICK ABOUT HISTORY

I’m so happy I got to bring my 14-year-old son along for this trip because he got a first-hand look at the history of our world. From seeing the front pages of famous newspapers in the Washington Press Club (above) to seeing what the Berlin Wall looked like at the Newseum to seeing the first machines that took us into space at the Air and Space Museum, not to mention taking him to many of the monuments and memorials that are spread throughout Washington, it all will have a profound effect on him. I still remember when my parents took me to see the Lincoln Memorial when I was a kid.

INSIDE THE HALLS OF POWER

Here we’re inside the press office of the Speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi’s office. They have a stunning view down the National Mall to the Washington Monument out their Window.

THE NEW PRESS CONFERENCE

Andrew Feinberg and I interviewed a few elected officials using our cell phones. Here’s a great picture, taken by my son, of this in action. The Congressman, John Culberson, is a social media revolutionary (his words) in that he’s taking his cell phone (a Nokia N95) onto the floor of the House of Representatives and other places (he shot NASA as they landed the Phoenix rover onto the surface of Mars).

Andrew’s video of John Culberson is here, and my video of him is here in two parts (Part I; Part II).

REMEMBERING

The WWII Memorial is right near the center of the Mall and is one not to be missed. We saw it several times, and I’d recommend seeing this one at night. It’s hard not to tear up and remember what so many gave for our freedom.

Inside the Newseum there’s a sizeable collection of 9/11 things in one huge room of the museum. The museum staff tells me that the “dwell time,” or time that each visitor spends in each collection is 45 minutes for just this one room in the museum (which is huge — the average visitor spends more than four hours there, they told us). One thing that grabbed my eye was Bill Biggart’s camera. He was the only journalist killed in 9/11.

Along one wall next to the TV antenna from the top of the World Trade Center are the front pages from all the newspapers on September 12, 2001. Patrick liked, and captured, this one, from the San Francisco Examiner, which screamed, simply: “Bastards!”

THE WHITE HOUSE

Thanks to White House Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel (I knew him from when we both worked at Microsoft) we got a great little tour of the press briefing room in the White House. Of course we had our turns at the podium and got to act like we were the President, briefing reporters. Here’s Rocky Barbanica, my producer, holding a fake news conference. Of course, if this were a real news conference Jim Long, NBC camera guy in the White House, would be in the back with his video camera. Instead he was shooting a briefing over at the Pentagon but we got to see him at our party the night before where 500 people showed up (thank you! It was an amazing party for me and Gary Vaynerchuk).

I don’t care if you don’t like his politics or not (I don’t) but seeing the President take off in Marine One is, well, simply cool.

FAMILY TREASURE

I will always treasure this photo, taken by Scott Stanzel, of my son and me. To the untrained eye it might not seem to be that remarkable. But this path is walked every morning by the President on his way to the Oval Office. Right next to the path is the famous Rose Garden. So much of history has happened here that it was very special just being here and seeing it. Thanks to Scott for giving us a tour, giving me an interview, and taking this photo.

What an interesting week, next week will be hard to make as interesting, but we’ll try.

Here’s our debriefing of our DC Trip. We’ll get more videos up over the next few weeks on FastCompany.tv — we filmed most of the interviews with our two-camera HD setup, and they take time to edit.

Themes that kept coming up this week in our interviews?

1. Our broadband access sucks in the United States. We only have the 15th best connectivity out of all the countries in the world, Representative Ed Markey told me. On the other hand, the CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association defended our broadband status, and explained why countries like South Korea are ahead (I’ll wait until we get the videos up to cover this disagreement in more depth).
2. Advertising is something that elected officials will watch and get involved in. Several talked with me about Internet advertising tracking devices: it was clear they are worried about our privacy, and FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein is worried about the effects of advertising on children. I will do more videos in the coming months on this issue, probably at Google.
3. Technology usage has a long way to go in government. I had several conversations with both congressmen and everyday government workers who told me that entire departments were still storing all their data on paper, at great waste. John Culberson told me one of his goals is to get all parts of government data onto computers so that people can watch better where their dollars are being spent.
4. Our kids aren’t being well educated. Alec Ross told me about being a high school teacher in a Baltimore school in a poor district. His kids had tattered 25-year-old text books. Several of our interviews mentioned that our eductation system needs to be rebuilt to make sure our workers are competitive with those from India and China. More scientists and technologists are needed, they told me, and we’re just falling behind other countries here.
5. Our immigration policies are screwed up. Getting the smartest people to move to the United States and getting them visas is not something we do well anymore. Ironic in the land of immigration. A couple of Congressmen said that we need reform of the H1-B system, which, they told me, builds a system of indentured servitude. Because a big company probably sponsors an immigrant’s H1-B visa, they aren’t able to leave that big company to do something more entrepreneurial, which would help our economy out more.
6. There’s a lot of concern for our kids, that probably will turn into legislation. The FCC Commissioner, for instance, talked to my son about his concerns about the porn industry. Advertising, porn, sexual attacks, and other things came up in our conversations.
7. Gas prices. The reminders were all over the Capitol (we walked what seemed like every hall) in bumper stickers stuck to doors, signs outside of Congressional Offices, and were brought up in almost every conversation. Heck, a Democrat, Tim Ryan, told me he supported Nuclear Energy and incentives to get electric cars back in usage. Now, go back to the 1970s. If he had said something like that inside a Congressional Office he would have quickly been strung up in the closest tree.
8. AT&T, Apple, and Early Adopters don’t have many friends in Congress. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA, even told me she’ll dump her iPhone as soon as Google’s Android is out because she doesn’t like AT&T and also doesn’t like the closed nature of the iPhone. Only two congressmen use Macs. Out of 435 Representatives and 100 Senators. That also demonstrates that there aren’t many early adopters in Congress. Blackberries are used everywhere, though. Many Congressmen showed me that they carried two Blackberries: one for their campaigns and one for government business. Alec Ross told me that Barack Obama has very fast thumbs and is legendary for being able to whip out notes on his Blackberry.

Some things that stick in my mind from the week?

• The newest museum in Washington DC, the Newseum is stunning. It was far better than I was expecting. They had the top of the World Trade Center there. The biggest piece of the Berlin Wall (and a guard tower). The Pulitzer Gallery there hit my soul hard. The centerpiece of the museum is a huge 2-million-pixel screen that cost more than $3 million and the world’s largest hydraulic elevators. We got a great video tour over on my Qik Channel.
• I was able to use Qik in the parts of the White House we got a tour of with two exceptions: 1. near the Oval Office (we got within a few feet of the door) and 2. while the President was outside. Even the “pro” camera guys can’t be live with the President outside. Everytime you see him on TV outside he’s tape delayed by at least 10 minutes.
• Sitting on the balcony of the Speaker of the House was just, plain, cool.
• My favorite politician that I met? A Republican. John Culberson. Not because he uses social media, either. But because he votes against his party often (more than 20 times against George Bush’s proposals) but also because he has so many interesting things in his office. Zoe Lofgren is pretty cool too. Gotta love it when the first time you meet someone they start talking to you about what you think of Google’s Android.

More later, especially as I decompress and do some more thinking about the trip and what I learned.